He Wrote ‘Going Back’ But Always Looked Forward to Next Song

Traditionally, we associate music with the Greek god Dionysus: The god of beer pong, of wine, women, and song, of the revelry that once ruled Greek festivals and now rules college parties and football games. What we tend not to realize is that writing songs is the province of Apollo: the god of reason, of logic, of the laws that harmonize the music of the spheres. One must write with a cool head to sing with a hot one.

Few songwriters better exemplify this fact than Kenneth Clark 1905, a songwriter who rose from the University’s Triangle Club to writing for stadiums, concert halls, and Broadway. He also wrote songs for the University, producing wildly popular college songs and football fight songs that included “Princeton Jungle March,” “Princeton, Forward March,” and “Going Back to Nassau Hall.” He was the great theorist of college songs during their golden age, writing about their mechanics — and how those mechanics got stadiums roaring — with the loving precision an engineer would use to describe the workings of a locomotive.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Clark attended Shady Side Academy, an all-male private school known for football. As an undergraduate, he had the honor of being named the “Class Prophet,” a now-defunct tradition in which a waggish student would give a speech predicting the future of his classmates. In his prophecy, he described a dream in which he found himself on a Dinky-like train that took him to purgatory, where, he learned, all Princetonians must attend a mirror version of Princeton and learn to be the opposite kind of student they were in life. “If he learns to do this satisfactorily, he is given a certificate of admission to the graduate school presided over by St. Peter.” Touring this underworld campus, he found his classmates playing reversed roles: swells in rags, teetotalers condemned to revelry, and literary debaters forced to argue in pantomime.

After graduation, Clark joined the staff of Musical America, a music industry newsletter. During World War I, he served as a song leader at Camp Meade in Maryland. (“American song leaders stand next in popularity to the Salvation Army doughnut girls,” he later wrote.) Afterward, he held a range of positions in the music industry, including editor at Paul Pioneer Music Corp., a music publishing company associated with Tin Pan Alley. All the while, he was churning out songs like a machine. He wrote songs for Broadway shows, operettas, radio. He also published books of music — including Carmina Princetonia, a collection of Princeton songs.

In 1934, he wrote an article for The Saturday Evening Post on how songwriters produce college songs. A songwriter must know the difference between an alma mater song, a glee-club song, and a football fight song, because they work in different ways. Alma mater songs, being slower, often cabbage their melodies from old ballads — for instance, the ballad “Annie Lisle,” which provided the melody for more than a dozen alma mater songs. (“Old Nassau” was originally written to the melody of “Auld Lang Syne.”) Fight songs, meanwhile, do best if they have a “stunt” to rouse the bleachers, like chanting or spelling out the name of the college. And songwriters do well, in general, to anticipate the singers having a poor memory. When Clark wrote “Going Back,” he made every other line “exactly the same, so that, however convivial the after-the-game celebration might be, the performers would know what to sing half the time anyway.”

In his own lifetime, Clark’s most popular song wasn’t “Going Back,” but “Princeton Jungle March,” which had a stunt in the form of chanting the word wow: “Wow, wow, wow-wow-wow! Hear the Tiger roar!” Once, he met a Princeton alum who — tired of hearing it — told him, “Say, you have a lot of influence down at Princeton. I wish you’d use your influence to get ’em to stop singing that wow, wow, wow song.”

“But I wrote it,” Clark replied.