Yankee Doodle

“Yankee Doodle” is a traditional song and nursery rhyme, the early versions of which predate the Seven Years’ War and American Revolutionary War. It is often sung patriotically in the United States today. It is the state song of the U.S. state of Connecticut. “The Macaroni. A real Character at the late Masquerade”, a 1773 mezzotint by Philip Dawe The tune of “Yankee Doodle” is thought to be much older than the lyrics, being well known across western Europe, including England, France, Netherlands, Hungary, and Spain. The melody of the song may have originated from an Irish tune “All the way to Galway” in which the second strain is identical to Yankee Doodle. There are rumors that the earliest words of “Yankee Doodle” came from a Middle Dutch harvest song which is thought to have followed the same tune, supposedly dating back as far as 15th-century Holland. It supposedly contained mostly nonsense words in English and Dutch: “Yanker, didel, doodle down, Diddle, dudel, lanther, Yanke viver, voover vown, Botermilk und tanther.” Farm laborers in Holland were paid “as much buttermilk (Botermelk) as they could drink, and a tenth (tanther) of the grain”. The term Doodle first appeared in English in the early 17th century and is thought to be derived from the Low German dudel, meaning “playing music badly”, or Dödel, meaning “fool” or “simpleton”. The Macaroni wig was an extreme fashion in the 1770s and became slang for being a fop. Dandies were men who placed particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisure hobbies. A self-made dandy was a British middle-class man who impersonated an aristocratic lifestyle. They notably wore silk strip cloth, stuck feathers in their hats, and carried two pocket watches with chains—”one to tell what time it was and the other to tell what time it was not”. The macaroni wig was an example of such Rococo dandy fashion, popular in elite circles in Western Europe and much mocked in the London press. The term macaroni was used to describe a fashionable man who dressed and spoke in an outlandishly affected and effeminate manner. The term pejoratively referred to a man who “exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion” in terms of clothes, fastidious eating, and gambling.
In British conversation, the term “Yankee doodle dandy” implied unsophisticated misappropriation of upper-class fashion, as though simply sticking a feather in one’s cap would transform the wearer into a noble. Peter McNeil, a professor of fashion studies, claims that the British were insinuating that the colonists were lower-class men who lacked masculinity, emphasizing that the American men were womanly.