Yankee Doodle Dandies

IN 1756 A call went out for volunteers to form a Yankee brigade which would be attached to British forces fighting the troublesome French and Indians in the on-going wilderness war. From the villages and farms of Connecticut, the eager young recruits straggled in to the advertised place of assembly, the Norwalk home of the group's commanding officer, Colonel Thomas Fitch, son of Connecticut Governor Thomas Fitch. As the Nutmeg irregulars finally gathered in Col. Fitch's yard prior to setting out for Fort Crailo, across the Hudson from Albany, New York, to join the British regulars, they were about as unmilitary-looking a group as had ever been seen in America.
Dressed in the clothes they wore when they left their farms, mounted on horses only recently released from plowing duty and armed with muskets designed more for shooting game than Frenchmen and Indians, the ragged little band awaited their marching orders. But before they pulled out, Elizabeth Fitch, Col. Fitch's sixteen-year-old sister, and some other young women who had come to bid them farewell, became appalled by their motley appearance. Crying, "You must have uniforms of some kind," Elizabeth led the girls into the Fitch chicken yard, where they gathered enough feathers for all hands. "Soldiers should wear plumes," insisted Elizabeth as she and her friends distributed the chicken feathers and ordered each rider to put one in his hat band.
When the curious Connecticut cavalry finally swung proudly into Gen. Abercrombie's headquarters at Fort Crailo, the British soldiers were wildly amused. Nothing seemed more ridiculous to the spit-and-polish regulars than the thought of having to fight at the side of these colonials whose only distinguishing uniform item was a chicken feather.
"Dudes! Dandies! Popinjays!" called the fine, red-coated soldiers as they gathered about the new arrivals in camp. Dr. Shuckberg, a British army surgeon, was overheard to exclaim, "Why, stab my vitals, they're macaronis!", sarcastically applying the London slang of the day for fop, or dandy, and even provincial troops from Massachusetts and Rhode Island picked up the refrain: "Macaronis! Macaronis, for certain!" As the lads from Connecticut joined in the general merriment which their arrival had created, they heard young Dr. Shuckberg begin to sing the words to a little jingle he had made up on the spot to celebrate the occasion and set to the tune of an old, familiar folk ditty called "Lucy Locket Lost Her Pocket:" Yankee Doodle came to town Riding on a pony. Stuck a feather in his hat And called it macaroni.
So much for legend. The rest, as they say, is history. The nonsense song caught on like no other in American history. It not only survived the French and Indian War, but became the rallying song for colonial troops during the Revolutionary War and Union Army forces during the Civil War. American soldiers in World Wars I and II carried it to international fame. It helped to disperse the Yankee tradition across the northern section of the nation and ultimately made the term "Yankee" synonymous with "American."
While he might overstate the case a bit, historian W. Storrs Lee has also seen "Yankee Doodle" as a peculiarly representative Connecticut contribution to the field of culture and the arts. "Yankee ingenuity," Lee concluded, "did not flow in the direction of sublime artistry.... The Connecticut creative artist was droll, whimsical, original, but he shied away from the pretty and the elegant as he would from idolatry." In other words, making a "macaroni" out of a rough farm lad with a chicken feather might not have been an act of sublime art, but it may have been a profound expression of the creative spirit of Connecticut. Perhaps some subconscious realization of this inspired the Connecticut General Assembly, after years of petty wrangling, to agree finally in 1979 to make "Yankee Doodle" the official State Song.

from Legendary Connecticut by David E. Philips / ISBN 1-880684-05-5 / $17.95

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