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We regularly construct myths when we do not have data. -Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus
The Parson Weems stories about George Washington's childhood have long been ridiculed out of our country's school books by historians in search of a more realistic, if less romantic, American past. The cherry tree and the hatchet are now part of a never-never land to be dismissed by young people as well as adults (except for advertisers of "Washington's Birthday Week Auto Sales").
There is another "Weemish" story, about music in the revolutionary era, first published in 1828, which nineteenth-century historians largely ignored, but which twentieth-century novelists, folk-song enthusiasts, and a good many professional historians have largely embraced to add an ironically dramatic fillip to their accounts of the British surrender at Yorktown on October 19,1781. Now, thanks to many serious as well as "pop" histories and novels, the story is one of the best known bits of trivia concerning the Revolution. Briefly, the story as usually told is that when the British surrendered at Yorktown, their "band" or "bands" played a march named "The World Turned Upside Down" (hereafter sometimes WTUD). A curious mistake in one standard American history has the Americans, instead of the British, playing WTUD at Yorktown.' Oddly enough, this typographical error fits the historical event rather better than the usual form of the story. If anyone was to have played WTUD at Yorktown it ought to have been the Americans.
This WTUD story is trivial, really, no more than a "sound bite." On the other hand, WTUD is the only music that professional historians have ever asked me about when they learned of my concern with music in early American history. It may well be that WTUD is the only tune name (other than "Yankee Doodle") that professional historians associate with the American Revolution. Simon Schama, a distinguished American historian of the French Revolution, recently described "The World Turned Upside Down" as "the popular anthem of the American Revolution."2
This suggests that the trivial idea of WTUD as a tune played ironically at Yorktown has transcended its triviality to become a music catch-all for some historians. In fact so many historians have repeated this story that it has thereby become a proper subject for...