Songs of Yale -- 1701

Speranza

We can appreciate the earliest Whiffenpoof (and thus Yale at large) repertoire thru a number of vintage recordings as well as written accounts.

The 1915 recording of "The [Old] Varsity Quartet" (tho' a "glee club" unit, they were the core of "The Whiffenpoofs" of that year) is a remarkable source, not only for its age, but also for the quality of the singing and recording technology.

Digitally re-mastered selections from this recording have now been made.

Other than this recording, accounts of what whiffs  actually sang during the 'vintage' years are rare, although the whiffs' close connection with the glee club implicates a commonality of material.

As if to emphasize the strength of this connection, the glee club issued a set of 78 rpm records in 1945  that includes the full chorus singing "baa baa baa" under the direction of Marshall Bartholomew.

It was not until the 1960s that the whiffs tapped significant numbers of singers who were not also members of the glee club.

A second historical source is the remarkable two-volume collection of Whiff Songs assembled in 1948 by Bill Oler, affectionately called "The Whiff Blue Book" (its real [non-affectionate] name is other).

This collection of nearly two hundred (yes! 200!) arrangements includes all of the songs sung over the prior 15-year period, plus certain earlier selections characterized by Dudley Miller as having ‘special Yale merit.’

What then did the whiffs sing in the vintage years and under what metereological conditions?

We know from contemporary accounts that groups before the so-called "phoney" war performed songs we can classify in three broadly-defined groups.

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CLASS 1:

College songs, whether sung at Yale or having Yale as their theme.

CLASSS 2:

Songs with Negro roots.

Finally,

CLASS 3:

vaudeville, burlesque, and what we may (but then again may not) call "Tin Pan Alley" songs.

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The earliest whiff repertoire carried on the tradition of college songs, but of a more substantial kind, as the songs chosen in the 1915 recording show. They are:

"Beta Theta Pi",
"Mother of Men",
"Wake, Freshmen,Wake"
"Bright College Years".

The tradition of college songs was bolstered by the John Oxbridge Heald Prize, a competition held around the turn of the century for songs capturing what John Oxbridge Heald (who instituted the prize) called "the Yale spirit" -- as opposed to "the Yale ghost".

"Mother of Men", as a matter of Yale fact, was the first (and only) winner, in 1907.

Songs with Yale themes were augmented by traditional college songs, some with lyrics in Latin, which were, naturally, more difficult to sing -- "received pronunciation" --:

integer Vitae
gaudeamus Igitur
Amici

--- this above is NOT an Italian song!

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Songs with Yale themes were augmented as well by ballads drawn primarily from European sources. These are my favourite

 "Mavourneen"
"Shall I, Wasting In Despair"
"Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes" (from Ben Jonson, "Volopone, or the Fox -- setting by Mozart).
"Graceful and Easy"
"Annie Laurie" (_so_ beautiful -- and in lovely Scots dialect, too).

The repertoire was also augmented by assorted sea chanteys, drinking songs, and patriotic airs.

Highly popular among these songs were yodels (such as "Matin Bell") and "whistling" songs (which we whiffs call "whistlers", since they are not, strictly, sung).

These arrangements were available in song books dating back a full fifty years prior to the first modern Yale song book in 1918 (in which The Whiffenpoof Song was first published), each book claiming to include songs popular on campus that had never been previously published.

Because songs drawn from Yale song books were the standard fare of the Whiffs until a repertoire of arrangements written specifically for the group could accumulate, the Whiffenpoofs of the 1910s and 1920s could rightly be considered an extension of the Glee Club.

Basil Duke Henning, former Whiff, namesake of the Duke’s Men singing group, commented on this connection in a ‘Yale Reports’ radio broadcast  in answer to a question about whether the purpose of early singing groups was singing for fun.

Henning said:

"Oh, entirely  -- singing was for fun".

"We would meet each Monday night, rain or not rain, at a table at Mory’s and sing to amuse ourselves."

---- "(since as our mothers would say, there would hardly be any one else who would be so amused)"

"Then we would go out, if the weather was fine, and serenade (some of) the Freshmen."

"At that time we were also singing entirely, we must admit, songs out of the (rather boring -- since it's so official) Yale song book."

"We had none of the what Luigi Speranza calls the "fancier" arrangements that have come into being since."

"We would sometimes go to girls’ colleges and serenade, -- but sometimes not".

"But there again, we were singing pretty standard stuff."

"Not in the sense that New Yorkers use the expression 'standard', mind."

"And I doubt very much if my group could - it certainly didn’t - sing the kind of thing you now hear in the fifties - a song like this, for example [excerpt from Bermuda Buggy Ride], or the even more elaborate arrangement for Summertime."

Along with the college and popular songs, the repertoire relied heavily on Negro songs in arrangements that range from evocations of a peculiarly folk heritage to race parodies, which were the stock in trade of minstrel shows from the 19th century and of their successor, vaudeville.

Negro dialect played an important part in these settings and themes were often racy.

Songs like "Kentucky Babe" appear relatively innocuous, while songs like "Get You a Kitchen Mechanic, Rufus Rastus Johnson Brown", and "Tear It Down" play on racial stereotypes, alas.

Related but wholly different in spirit were Negro SPIRITUALS, sung by both the Whiffenpoofs and the Glee Club.

Marshall Bartholomew was instrumental (metaphorically speaking -- since he was a singer, too) in bringing these songs to light.

M. Bartholomew's "De Old Ark’s a Moverin’" and "Humble" were arrangements sung by the Whiffenpoofs exemplifying the most haunting essence of this musical tradition.

Two songs of a similar nature appear on the 1915 Whiff recording,

"Roll Dem Bones"

and

"When Pa", the latter an original composition by Elmore McNeill Bostwick, Glee Club president and Whiffenpoof.

In the so-called (by Luigi Speranza), 'swingin'' 1930s, the traditional college repertoire began to share the spot light with a newer, but not necessarily current, type of music: vaudeville and burlesque.

These settings exhibited a nostalgic character that harkened back to innocent times before the Great War.

The settings were cast in "barber shop" (quartette) style -- only we were far more than four --.

The lyrics concentrated on romance.

But this was romance of a quaint kind that, even in those days, must have seemed almost what Luigi Speranza would call "camp".

Examples of this type (which are seemingly obliged to begin with the word ‘Down’) include:

"Down By the Old Mill Stream", 1910 -- not the new but old, not the river but the stream.

"Down in the Old Cherry Orchard", 1907

"Down Among the Sheltering Palms", 1915; and

"Way Down in My Heart", 1904.

Not all songs sung by the early Whiffenpoofs fell into these categories, however.

One notable exception, "Velia", comes directly from operetta - a now famous work by Franz Lehar, The Merry Widow, that premiered in New York in 1907, only two years before the founding of the group.

The following letter from James Howard to Marshall Bartholomew validates the importance of this song and explains its revival for the fiftieth anniversary reunion.

Howard writes:

"I’m glad to know that this year’s Whiffenpoofs are such a good group."

"That encourages me to push a request about which I wrote to George Vaill some time ago, that the Whiffenpoofs revive, at least for the anniversary celebration, two or three of ‘the songs we love so well’ which have entirely dropped out of sight."

"Two are arrangements of mine, one made originally for the Growlers at their request."
"These are "The Sleepy Canal" from Miss Hook of Holland; and "Velia" from The Merry Widow.

Both were great favorites at Whiffenpoof gatherings in 1909.

The third is Dudley Buck’s arrangement of "Annie Laurie", which was sung by the Glee Club in 1908-09, I think, and which our quartet, who later became the Whiffenpoofs, sang the following year wherever we went.

Another song with surprising roots is "Mavourneen, Mavourneen".

Together with "Shall I,Wasting", this was one of the two songs celebrated in the 1909 Whiffenpoof Song lyrics as ‘the songs we love so well.’

The lyricists genially add, "and the rest", which is open ended. They also use the same word "rest", to rhyme with 'rest' -- which is yet another genial gesture.

Now assumed by all to be a traditional Irish ballad, "Mavourneen" is, in fact, the tag for "Barney O’Flynn" from "Babes in Toyland", written by Irishman Victor Herbert only six years earlier in 1903.

The confusion arose out of the fact that there IS an Irish ballad that comes complete with first Christian name: "Kathleen Mavourneen".

Together, "Velia" and "Mavourneen" show a different, more contemporary aspect of the Whiffenpoof repertoire, influenced by the musical theatre of the day and promptly transforming new songs into classics.

Perhaps the truest indication of the character and variety of singing that took place in the vintage years is the report given by Carl Lohmann to James Howard, who had been unable to attend the 30th anniversary party in 1939.

Here is one founding father recounting the evening’s festivities to another, drawing on a perspective informed by years of service as the Secretary to Yale.

Lohmann writes:

"The party was a good one, no speeches, and, more importantly, an abundance of sentiment and constant song."

"About 115 came."

"Thanks to Basil Henning’s skillful job as master of ceremonies, we carried on for SEVERAL HOURS singing just one song at a time."

"Many old favourites (and some new to me) come up for air."

"Tommy Hewes whistled "The Yellow Bird" in perfect pitch. The bird is NOT a canary, but Tommy whistled as if it were.

"Beebe produced a ballad in the original Icelandic - magnificent."

"I understood not one word of it."

"Later came Songs of Araby."

" Johnny Winterbotham did Joe Cawthorne’s story of capturing the Whiffenpoof in Cawthorne dialect -- which was amusing to say the least."

"Lanny Ross was on hand, there were three or four yodelers. "

"Paul Sterrett produced a symphonic ensemble from a ukulele. This was NOT a song, but it sounded like one -- "That ukulele seems to SPEAK"".

"The Howard twins played the piano -- with their four hands, with the elder Howard doing the 'basso continuo".

"Pres Bush’s quartet (Bush, Kimball, Dole, and Spofford -- I don't know why it's call "Bush's quartet if it's four) shared first honours of the evening with the present undergraduate Whiffenpoofs."

"About half past eleven we moved to Mory’s where the party was still going with a couple of quartets in each room when Hewes and Roome came home with me at about two in the morning."

"We wish you could have been there."

Although vintage Whiff groups did not perform with ukuleles, the use of whistling and yodeling is authentic and represents a tradition that carried forward past the phoney war.

There is, moreover, no mystery about how WELL the earliest Whiff groups sang.

Ironically, we can authenticate the quality of singing from the group’s founding until the late 1920s in a way that is not possible for groups from the 1930s, there being only one surviving recording of a group between 1931 and 1942.

Specifically:

1909 Bartholomew and members of the original Whiffs testify to the talents of the original singers (ie, those in the Varsity Quartet).

1913

None other than Cole Porter recalls that, unlike the Glee Club, his 1913 Whiffenpoof group was respectable.

"I was in the choir, and what a rotten choir it was, and the Glee Club."

"That was rotten too."

"Yes, I was a Whiffenpoof, and we were REASONABLY good" -- as opposed to "unreasonably" so.


1915, 1927, and 1928 -- recordings reproduced in this set demonstrate the skill of these groups.

The attention to blend is obvious, even with only four voices singing, as in their 1915 recording.

Future professional singer and radio star Lanny Ross sang in both the 1927 and 1928 groups.

These recordings are not just a valuable historical source.

They document a true ‘golden age’ that can now be appreciated with the assistance of audio technology.

In fact, the recording of The Whiffenpoof Song from 1928 rivals the performance of any of the modern groups.

Or not!