In the
years preceding the Revolutionary War, American leaders sought to sway their
fellow colonists to the cause, making their case for a break with England via speeches
or proclamations printed on single sheets of paper called Broadsides which were
sold in the streets for a penny or two.
But these
leaders soon realized that setting their ideas to meter and melody might be a
far more effective way to influence hearts and minds. They knew that the colonists
were singers. They weren’t all necessarily good singers, but group
singing had been indelibly stamped into the DNA of these people whose ancestors
had come to the New World for the freedom to worship God in their own way.
So,
revolutionary ideas were transformed into verse and reproduced on broadsides. The lyrics cranked out in this way were
not, for the most part, accompanied by printed melodies. Instead, at the top of
each broadside was the title of a tune. Most of these were of British origin and
as such were immediately recognizable by the colonists, which was the point:
the lyrics were meant to be sung. However, the ironic result of this
revolutionary singing was that Mother England was being fought with her own
melodies. The lyrics to “Free America” were set to the tune of “The British Grenadiers”;
“God Save the King” became “God Save these Thirteen States” and “The Liberty
Song” was sung to a British Navy tune called “Heart of Oak.”
However, two major songs that came out of this conflict had
a much longer shelf life than the English American amalgams noted above and became
as American as apple pie, Jazz and Country.
The original first verses of "Yankee Doodle" (out of 18 total)
describe colonial rustics involved in the French and Indian War of 1754-1763 in
which the British and Americans fought on the same side. The first of these fictious
colonists, Brother Ephraim, is introduced in the first verse and described in
less than glowing terms:
Brother Ephraim sold his cow
And bought him a commission,
And then he went to Canada
To fight for the nation
But when Ephraim he came home
He proved an arrant Coward
He wouldn’t fight the Frenchmen
there
For fear of being devoured.
A few verses later, a colonist
named Aminadab is described as a blockhead who fought up north but didn’t
understand what was going on enough to tell anyone back home about it.
When the Revolutionary War began, members of the British
army stationed in the colonies became obsessed with the song, likely relishing
its portrayal of cowardly dunderheaded Americans. They substituted it for the
Rogue’s March while drumming maladroits out of camp and played it loudly and disruptively
outside of churches on Sunday mornings.
But after Bunker Hill, when the roughhewn colonists proved their
mettle in battle, they published it themselves on numerous Broadsides, quietly omitting
the verses mentioning Ephraim the coward and Aminadab the dunce. And like any
good folk song, the tune was altered and more verses added, obviously the ones
that referenced George Washington.
Legend has it that "Yankee Doodle" was performed during the
British surrender at Yorktown by special order of the young French Marquis de
Lafayette, personal friend of George Washington and loyal ally of the rebels.
If true, this would have been the mother of all humiliations, stinging the
proud British who couldn’t even bring themselves to look at the Americans
during the surrender.
The second song to make its mark during the American
Revolution was composed by Bostonian tanner, singing instructor, and untrained
composer named William Billings.
As singing schools popped up all over New England to teach
congregants to sing from their Psalter hymnbooks with a modicum of musicality,
so did the folk art of psalmody, that is, formatting the Psalms into singable
meter and rhyme. None of these homegrown materials were considered serious art by upper-class American
colonists who fancied themselves arbiters of good taste. No American tune, in
their estimation, could possibly approximate the musical excellence of European
compositions.
That
opinion was about to be challenged. When William Billings published his first
collection of songs in 1770, titled The New England Psalm Singer, he
boldly identified himself as a native Bostonian right on the cover. And that
was just the beginning: in the book’s introduction he challenged the idea that
only training in Europe or England could qualify a composer. Natural talent, he
claimed, was far more important. He had none of the former but copious amounts
of the latter.
The frontispiece of Billings’s New
England Psalm Singer featured
seven men sitting around a table, their mouths open in song, their psalm books
before them with Billings’s lyrics—and his tune—providing the image’s frame.
Although most of the songs in The New England Psalm Singer are, of
course, psalms, the men in the picture are clearly not singing in church; they
are in a home, perhaps, or a meeting house. The image, which meant to covey
that New Englanders sang together outside of church, was created by Paul
Revere, silversmith, engraver, and Billings’s friend and fellow Bostonian.
Unlike
Revere, Billings was not one of the Sons of Liberty, but a one-verse song
included in his collection, titled, for no apparent reason, “Chester,”
perfectly distilled, in four simple lines, the perspective of the Revolutionary
leaders:
Let
tyrants shake their iron rod
And
slavery clank her galling chain
We fear
them not, we trust in God
New
England’s God forever reigns.
Foreign-trained
American musicians scoffed at The New England Psalm Singer just as the
professional, red-coated soldiers pouring into Boston to quell the rebellion
laughed at the idea of the American Yankee Doodles defeating England in battle.
But by
the time Billings had published his second collection of songs in 1778, the war
was three years old with no end in sight. While it was largely being conducted
without actual combat, the British could not defeat the Americans. Billings
celebrated this fact in his new collection with an updated version of “Chester,”
which contained four additional verses.
“Chester”
was sung everywhere: public meetings, private homes, and in military camps.
With its somewhat airbrushed military details, its unequivocal claim that the
colonists were in the right, and its stately church tune—reminding the singers of
their belief that God was on their side—“Chester,” labeled by some as the
Marseillaise of the Revolution, may very well have helped win the war
for the Americans.
For decades post-war, "Yankee Doodle" and "Chester" remained
imprinted on the collective soul of the new nation. “Yankee Doodle” was sung with a sense of
joyous hilarity at the thought that a
group of untrained rustics had defeated the era’s superpower. In the heady rush
of post-war victory, the song was often specifically requested via cat call in
musical programs that hadn’t had the foresight to include it.
"Chester" was sung too, but in a more serious way: it
enunciated the American’s conviction that someone greater than the world’s
superpower had stood with them, these Yankee Doodles, fought with them, and guaranteed
the outcome of a war that no one thought they could win.
