Nope, not at all like what you see coming out of Hollywood. The “Yeeee-Ha!” is not quite what was expressed in the battlefield.
And it makes sense… you don’t have time to get fancy when bullets are flying both ways.
By Miguel.GFZ
Semi-retired like Vito Corleone before the heart attack. Consiglieri to J.Kb and AWA. I lived in a Gun Control Paradise: It sucked and got people killed. I do believe that Freedom scares the political elites.
6 thoughts on “The Rebel Yell.”
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Sounds like the whooping and hollering we did as youngsters getting drunk. But as I’m a Texan, some things carry on without a need for learnin, just the doing.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScreamingWarrior relevant.
(Warning: TVTropes)
There’s a lot of debate and disagreement about the Yell. It’s not as if it was taught in Confederate Boot Camp with all recruits learning the same version. Even among the few recordings of the Yell there are several versions. It’s possible that the Missouri guerrillas would not recognize the Yell as uttered by Lee’s troops, and vice versa.
Yes, there probably are a lot of versions of the Rebel Yell, and they all sound a lot like Indian war whoops. But it does appear that “Yee Haw” isn’t one of them.
I’ve heard the same kind of falsetto whoop used in north Georgia to call hounds, and a Union writer mentioned Confederate troops giving “their weird fox-hunter’s cry”. Now imagine that coming, not from a few old men giving a cheer, but from hundreds of men in their teen and twenties who are jacked up on adrenaline to charge into your gun muzzles in a do-or-die effort. Intent and sincerity make a difference, even in non-verbal terms. ( Your dog knows when you really mean it or not)
I used that in my lesson on the Civil War today.