The Yankee Doodle Boy

"The Yankee Doodle Boy", also well known as "(I'm a) Yankee Doodle Dandy" is a patriotic song from the Broadway musical Little Johnny Jones written by George M. Cohan. The play opened at the Liberty Theater on November 7, 1904. The play concerns the trials and tribulations of a fictional American jockey, Johnny Jones (based on the real life jockey Tod Sloan), who rides a horse named Yankee Doodle in the English Derby. Cohan incorporates snippets of several popular traditional American songs into his lyrics of this song, as he often did with his songs. The song was performed by James Cagney in the 1942 film Yankee Doodle Dandy, in which he played Cohan.

In 2004, the American Film Institute placed the song at No. 71 on its AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs. A version of the song was recorded by Cohan's contemporary and fellow Irish-American Billy Murray, who sang it as indicated in the lyrics. Also a shortened lyric disco version of the song was sung by Paul Jabara on the 1977 album Shut Out and the 1983 album Greatest Hits and Misses on Casablanca Records.

Verse 1

Verse 2

Chorus

Footnotes:

¹ "All the candy" was late nineteenth century slang equivalent to "hot stuff".

² Pronounced the old-fashioned way, "mah-RYE-ah"

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