A popular anecdote maintains that, upon their defeat at Yorktown, Lord Charles Cornwallis’s British fife-and-drum regiment was instructed by General George Washington to perform the Royalist anthem “The World Turned Upside Down.” As appealing as the story is, it’s almost certainly apocryphal.

Traditionally, the losing army would have played a melody associated with the winning side, in this case either an American or French tune. But Washington, supposedly denying the British the honors of war, instructed them to perform a song of their own country. And so Cornwallis’s men supposedly played the 1646 anthem that protested Parliament’s abolition of Advent in the years after an earlier civil war had riven the English-speaking world. The first mention of this story was in the elderly veteran Alexander Garden’s 1828 Anecdotes of the American Revolution, though the author himself admitted he wasn’t present at Yorktown. Historian Henry Phelps Johnston included the claim in his 1881 book, The Yorktown Campaign and the Surrender of Cornwallis, which would later be cited by musicologist John Tasker Howard in 1931’s The Music of George Washington’s Time.