Rebel Yell is an award-winning digital storytelling company based out of Brooklyn, NY and Los Angeles, CA. This blog chronicles the production of our cross-platform documentary, Tomorrow We Disappear. 

The Story of the Rebel Yell

During the Civil War each army developed its own battle cry to demonstrate its dominance. 

The Union marched southward using the sounds of machinery: discharging cannons and rattling chains and artillery. Their sound was that of mechanized death, of a looming 20th century.  

What the farmers and hunters of the Confederacy offered instead was the rebel yell: the sound of nature. It had been described as the wail of a dying rabbit or a shrieking banshee. Someone once said of it, “it sounds like death is very near.” 

After the war the rebel yell was thought lost to history. That was until an old wax disc of S.S. Simmons, one of the last surviving Confederate soldiers, was found.  At 93-years old he had recorded the yell, beautiful and horrifying, for an MGM Studios movie. You can listen to it here.