"The World Turned Upside Down": A Yorktown March, or Music to Surrender By

Abstract

Parson Weems stories about George 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. 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