020 - Yankee Doodle

Inspiration

When I saw the stitchery pattern for the drummer, I immediately thought about Independence Day and Yankee Doodle.  The urge to stick "a feather in his hat" was irresistible.

Details

Yankee Doodle is embroidered using Pearl Cotton in several weights and 6 strand embroidery floss on quilting cotton with some lightweight cotton batting behind it to give it a little added dimension (and help hide the thread ends.

The drawing came from Gay's Sentimental Stitches site, as part of a Fourth of July give-away.  The original did not include the feather in his cap.

He had a vintage feel to me, so I stitched him in a simple stem stitch using colors that were a little dulled down for a 1940's feeling.

While working on this piece (the stitched area is approximately 10 inches square),  the nursery rhyme, Yankee Doodle, was stuck in my head on a repeat loop ... which lead to the question, WHY did he stick a feather in his cap and call it Macaroni ... and where did this song come from?

From Wikipedia:

Traditions place its origin in a pre-Revolutionary War song originally sung by British military officers to mock the disheveled, disorganized colonial "Yankees" with whom they served in theFrench and Indian War. 

As a term Doodle first appeared in the early seventeenth century,^[4] and is thought to derive from the Low German dudel or dödel, meaning "fool" or "simpleton". The Macaroni wig was an extreme fashion in the 1770s and became contemporary slang for foppishness.^[5] The Macaronis adopted feminine mannerisms, and the men were deemed 'effeminate.' Thus, the British were insinuating that the colonists were womanish and not very masculine^[6] 

And from the Library of Congress' Lyrical Legacy site:

As opposition to British rule in the American colonies heated up, satirical songs took on a new edge. Rebellious colonists sang songs insulting Britain’s king, George III, as a drunken tyrant, and British soldiers answered with songs ridiculing the Americans as backwoods yokels. 

One of these songs, which told the story of a poorly dressed Yankee simpleton, or "doodle", was so popular with British troops that they played it as they marched to battle on the first day of the Revolutionary War. The rebels quickly claimed the song as their own, though, and created dozens of new verses that mocked the British, praised the new Continental Army, and hailed its commander, George Washington. 

By 1781, when the British surrendered at Yorktown, being called a "Yankee Doodle" had gone from being an insult to a point of pride, and the song had become the new republic’s unofficial national anthem.

... all of which leads me to the song that's stuck in my head now, "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy ... ," from the 1942 James Cagney Film of the same name.   I'm not sure when the music on the bandstand starts at Santa Fe's July 4 tradition, Pancakes on the Plaza, but I am ready for anything that will replace the Yankee Doodle that's been playing in my head ... and to enjoy some breakfast.

Happy Independence Day!