Contents -Volume INDEX -AUTHOR INDEX -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889

Yankee Doodle

By Revolutionary Songs and Ballads

FATHER and I went down to camp,

Along with Captain Gooding,

And there we see the men and boys,

As thick as hasty pudding.

Chorus—Yankee Doodle, keep it up,

Yankee Doodle, dandy,

Mind the music and the step,

And with the girls be handy.

And there we see a thousand men,

As rich as ’Squire David;

And what they wasted every day

I wish it could be saved.

The ’lasses they eat every day

Would keep an house a winter;

They have as much that, I’ll be bound,

They eat it when they’re a mind to.

And there we see a swamping gun,

Large as a log of maple,

Upon a deuced little cart,

A load for father’s cattle.

And every time they shoot it off,

It takes a horn of powder,

And makes a noise like father’s gun,

Only a nation louder.

I went as nigh to one myself

As Siah’s underpinning;

And father went as nigh again,

I thought the deuce was in him.

Cousin Simon grew so bold,

I thought he would have cocked it;

It scared me so, I shrinked it off,

And hung by father’s pocket.

And Captain Davis had a gun,

He kind of clapt his hand on’t,

And stuck a crooked stabbing iron

Upon the little end on’t.

And there I see a pumpkin shell

As big as mother’s bason;

And every time they touched it off,

They scampered like the nation.

I see a little barrel too,

The heads were made of leather,

They knocked upon’t with little clubs

And called the folks together.

And there was Captain Washington,

And gentlefolks about him,

They say he’s grown so tarnal proud

He will not ride without ’em.

He got him on his meeting clothes,

Upon a slapping stallion,

He set the world along in rows,

In hundreds and in millions.

The flaming ribbons in his hat,

They looked so tearing fine ah,

I wanted pockily to get,

To give to my Jemimah.

I see another snarl of men

A digging graves, they told me,

So tarnal long, so tarnal deep,

They ’tended they should hold me.

It scared me so, I hooked it off,

Nor stopped, as I remember,

Nor turned about, till I got home,

Locked up in mother’s chamber.