The perky marching tune Yankee Doodle is one of the pieces of music most firmly associated with the United States and at least the first of its reputed hundreds of verses is known by most Americans, despite the fact it was originally used as in derision of Americans.

There are many stories of folk etymology to explain the origin of the work "Yankee." H.L. Menken's conclusion is the most convincing, and it is echoed by the Oxford English Dictionary. This theory derives from an old Dutch term, Jan Kees, (pronounced yon-kees), literally meaning "John Cheese," which was used in northern Germany and in Flanders as a joking nickname for a Dutchman, since Holland was well known for its cheese.

English naval sailors began to use it to refer to a Dutch freebooters (the term appearing in print in that sense as early as 1683), and the term became associated with the idea of rustics who engaged in sharp or even shady business practice. Englishmen in New York used it, and it came to be associated with peddlers from the New England states. New Englanders regarded it as a tribute to their business abilities.

In 1758, General James Wolf, commanding British and American militia forces in the French and Indian Wars (the American branch of the Seven Years' War), complained about the unruly and unreliable nature of his "Yankee" militia units. There is some acceptance that a Dr. Shuckburgh wrote the song in 1755 to make fun of such "Yankee" soldiers, but some details of the story strike this writer as a bit too pat.

At any rate, as early as 1768 the Journal of the Times of Boston noted that "the Yankee Doodle Song" was the "capital piece of band music." Its popularity obviously revived when the American Revolution commenced. It seems that both sides liked it and sang and marched or danced to it at first, but as early as 1775, the Pennsylvania Evening Post noted that General Gage's troops were beginning to drop their practice of dancing to it.

The song became popular on the American side, and remained so for some years, but as the Civil War approached, Southern audiences began to hiss it off the stage, associating it with the North and especially New England (the home of Abolitionism). When this section division became the Civil War, the entire North became associated with "Yankee," in the sense of "Yankee soldiers" versus "Rebel soldiers."

Also in the nineteenth century, British writers began to apply "Yankee" to mean an American; the phrase "Irish or German Yankees" appears in 1865 in British writing, and a year earlier, the Manchester Guardian worried in print that England was becoming "Yankee-ized."

Americans of all regions tend to accept the name "Yankee" from an overseas vantage point, but Southerners reject it on a national level. In the North, it is generally reserved to mean "New Englander."

Yankee Doodle has remained one of the most popular of all American tunes, and is immediately associated with the Revolution whenever played.

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