My speech for Oak Park's 2026 Memorial Day commemoration

 

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, radical 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. And here is "Yankee Doodle" in its earliest notated form, as you’ve never heard it before and will not likely hear again.

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.