Was "The World Turned Upside Down" really played at the surrender?

In the musical: the phrase becomes the refrain of "Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)", as the British army lays down its arms.

The legend: according to a popular story, the British band played "The World Turned Upside Down" as Cornwallis's army marched out to surrender on 19 October 1781. No eyewitness account from 1781 mentions it. The earliest known telling appears decades later, in Alexander Garden's Anecdotes of the Revolutionary War (1828), and historians treat it as a legend.

What is documented: the terms required the British to march out with their colors cased and to play a British or German tune — a deliberate echo of the humiliating terms the British had imposed on the Americans at Charleston in 1780. So there was music, and it was British. Which tune it was, nobody recorded.

Why the legend stuck: the phrase was already old. "The World turn'd upside down" was the title of a 1646 English pamphlet mocking the "ridiculous Fashions of these distracted Times", and a ballad of the same name from the same decade protested Parliament's suppression of Christmas. By the late 18th century, London printers sold popular sheets of the world upside down: wives as soldiers, husbands nursing babies, oxen driving men to the plow, fish flying and the sun and moon lying on the ground. By around 1820 it had become a theme for children's picture books. To British and Americans alike, the image of a mighty empire surrendering to its colonies fitted the phrase perfectly — which is exactly why the story was too good not to tell.

The ballad itself: the text survives in the Thomason Tracts at the British Library, dated 8 April 1646, set "to the tune of 'When the King enjoys his own again'". It opens:

Listen to me and you shall hear, news hath not been this thousand year:
Since Herod, Caesar, and many more, you never heard the like before.
Holy-dayes are despis'd, new fashions are devis'd.
Old Christmas is kickt out of Town.
Yet let's be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn'd upside down.

And it ends with a joke that Christmas itself had died in battle:

To conclude, I'le tell you news that's right, Christmas was kil'd at Naseby fight:
Charity was slain at that same time, Jack Tell troth too, a friend of mine,
Likewise then did die, rost beef and shred pie,
Pig, Goose and Capon no quarter found.
Yet let's be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn'd upside down.

Naseby (1645) was the battle that broke the royalist army in the English Civil War. A song about a world turned upside down by rebellion against a king — no wonder later storytellers imagined it playing at Yorktown.

Fact-check verdict: a legend. The musical borrows it knowingly; it fits too well to resist.