After a Golden Age for College Songs, Their Popularity Declined. Why?

Traditions, too, have beginnings and ends. Once, graduating classes at Princeton selected, along with a valedictorian and salutatorian, a “class prophet”: a far-seeing student whose job it was to deliver a prognostication for each of the class’s members. Once, they planted ivy at the base of Nassau Hall, marked with plaques bearing class numerals; today, Nassau Hall is thoroughly ivied and filled with plaques, so classes plant stones along the walkway. And once, graduating classes knew by heart a whole compendium of school songs: not just “Old Nassau,” which is the official school anthem and thus obligatory for alums to know, but songs like “New Jersee,” “Here’s to the Campus,” and “Going Back to Nassau Hall” — the last of which remains a standard among older classes, but not among the youngest generations of Tigers.

Why did the college song decline? In their early years, colleges like Princeton looked with suspicion on any singing that wasn’t religious, according to J. Lloyd Winstead, a historian of college singing. (The school’s strict religiosity endured for a long age. A line from a lecture in moral philosophy at Princeton, in 1858: “All men ... are possessed of redeeming characteristics, that at times will gild the black recesses of the heart, and relieve the sickening monotony of entire moral desolation.”)

Slowly, the College of New Jersey, as Princeton was then known, softened on singing enough to let students start singing clubs — moved first by a zeal for patriotic songs during the years around the Revolutionary War, then by a 19th-century vogue for German musical culture. In the 1850s, Karl Langlotz, a German immigrant who taught fencing at the College, started a singing club for students, “The Nassau Maennerchor.” (He composed the music for “Old Nassau,” which one of his students wrote.) Students formed quartets, the ancestors of campus a cappella. In 1874, students founded the Glee Club.

In 1869, Princeton played the first-ever college football game, against Rutgers. Soon, football was a major part of college life nationwide, with roaring fans breathing new life into the college song. Before, college songs often toasted revelry, with lyrics like “beams divine through the liquor shine.” Now, they cheered athletic contests with lyrics like “fight, fight, fight” and “be loyal and true” — as the songwriter Kenneth Clark 1905 later wrote in the Saturday Evening Post.

When the Nassau Literary Magazine reported on football games, it reported on the songs in the stands, too, as if they were just as important as the action on the field. They required just as much stamina, apparently; after one game, the Lit noted, “Even the rousing strains of Old Nassau have lost much of their impressiveness by the eighth or ninth repetition in a single afternoon, proceeding as they do, from croaking and exhausted throats.” Before big games students gathered around the cannon to rehearse fight songs. When Princeton played games in New York City, bars and hotels gave their pianists sheet music for Princeton songs like “Old Nassau,” hoping to lure students and alumni.

The golden age of the college song coincided not just with the rise of college football, but with the rise of our modern idea of college life. Between 1880 and 1920, many schools, including Princeton, adopted mascots, school colors, and other displays of school spirit. Singing honored that spirit. In a 1912 book about college life, the author Clayton Sedgwick Cooper argued that singing held a greater spiritual resonance for students than chapel exercises. “Dr. Henry van Dyke,” he wrote of a Princeton professor, “has said that the college man’s songs and yells are his prayers. He is not the first one who has felt this in listening to Princeton seniors on the steps of Nassau Hall singing that thrilling hymn of loyalty, ‘Old Nassau.’”

And yet a golden age is always the beginning of the end. Clark wrote his article for the Post about the triumph of the college song, but he could already tell, in 1934, that it was a fading form. He suggested several reasons why. Musical tastes were changing, with jazz and Bing Crosby-style crooning replacing peppy choruses; technology was changing, with radio and vinyl replacing live music. Campuses didn’t stand still, either. A Princeton songbook from 1890, Carmina Princetoniana, refers to all kinds of experiences that Princetonians no longer have, from smoking pipes to roaming the town at night: “Arm in arm together, boys! We’ve wandered through the night … / Ready for a serenade, a horn-spree or a fight … .” The old songs became less relatable as the times changed.

And the times kept changing. Every class that went through Princeton has its own Proustian madeleines, auditory or otherwise. Mine are from the post-9/11 years. Triangle songs with hooks riffing on current events, like “Weapons of Mass Distraction.” Maroon 5’s album Songs About Jane, which floated from dorm windows, while weekend parties on Prospect Avenue pulsed with synth-heavy hip-hop and pop songs protesting the war on terror. The aroma of Milwaukee’s Best, or “Beast,” which was, when I was a student, the cheapest beer available and therefore what flowed from the taps at eating clubs, and which, a friend of mine once said, “smells like patriotism and regret.”

But the campus also has a soundtrack that endures across the generations. Insects singing in the crowns of trees; the rustling whisper of the rare books room; the melting notes of arch sings; the dulcet tones of professorial voices floating out of the lecture hall. Will Howarth once told me that when he was a lowly assistant professor, approaching his tenure review, a senior faculty member appeared at one of his lectures and sat in the back, listening. Afterward, he came up to the nervous young professor and said simply, “You have pear-shaped tones.” Howarth never figured out what that meant, but he got tenure.

And so the singing faded, the singing endures. Those wordless hymns stay with the students — whom Ralph Adams Cram, the architect who designed Princeton’s campus, called the “College Militant” — and the alumni, the “College Triumphant.” When we gather, once a year, in the sweet hereafter of Reunions, we raise all our voices in harmony, sometimes to sing the old songs, or their best refrains — “Old Nassau” has five verses, but we find it convenient to remember just one — and sometimes just to add, once more, to the familiar din of the campus. Traditions come and go, but the place we sing about remains. As does its own kind of music.