History of the Whiffenpoofs

Origins

The Reverend James Merriam Howard wrote his ‘authentic’ history of the founding of the Whiffenpoofs for the 50th Whiffenpoof anniversary to set the record straight about how the Whiffenpoofs began and how The Whiffenpoof Song was created. Howard’s recollections are more than just a factual account. He created a genuinely intimate and detailed portrait of day-to-day life at Yale that might otherwise have been unavailable to us. In fact, his brief history gives us perspective on and insight into the 1907-10 period that we have yet to find for any later period up to World War II.

As remarkable as Howard’s description of Whiffenpoof origins may be, another contemporary source, from 1906, should be considered:

…the only organized effort at singing at Yale was a large choral society, taking into its membership those who could sing at all reasonably, without being especially scrupulous that they should be good and available singers; and practicing only heavy and serious compositions. About this time it occurred to some of the undergraduates that the habit among the students of singing their college songs in on offhand way in their rooms, on the Campus, and on the street, might be utilized and developed by the formation of a small club, which should practice together in order to do the same things with more finish, add to them other light and catchy songs, and sing them for the public enjoyment. The first attempt of this kind that was substantial and successful was made when about eight voices met with some degree of regularity and learned, besides many of the old songs commonly about the Campus, a few additional pieces of the some character.

The Yale Glee and Banjo Clubs: A History (Bartholomew Archive)

The group described is not the Whiffenpoofs, but the Yale Glee Club, and the year referred to is 1867. The quotation comes from a promotional piece prepared for the Glee Club’s 1906 Christmas vacation trip. This source parallels Howard’s account, but looks back half a century to the origins of what was then considered informal singing, except that the Glee Club was then the new informal singing group.

This account reveals that the Whiffenpoofs emerged from a tradition of singing in America, epitomized by the male quartet, that was already more than fifty years old. Marshall Bartholomew ’07s, in his unpublished manuscript A History of Music at Yale, remarked “the male quartet became a regular feature of Yale Glee Club concerts soon after the Civil War.” Even before the first Yale Glee Club was formed, close harmony had made its appearance on the Yale campus, as he records:

In 1856, for example, there were informal singing groups which took fanciful titles unto themselves, as similar groups do at present [the 1950s]. We find the Beethoven Bummers – evidently poking fun at the more serious Beethoven Society; also there were the Owls and the Four Sharps.

[ image to be added ] Invitation for the First Official Dinner of The Six Little Lambs

This tradition continued into the 1880s with other groups including the Midnight Caterwaulers of 1870 (a quintet), the Singing Club of 1872 (a quartet), the Crows of 1872 (an octet), and the Offenbachanalians of 1874 (a quartet). The Beethoven Bummers lasted into the 1870s with as many as fifteen singers.

Howard’s account understandably ignores the roots of informal singing in the 19th century. Even so, it begins far too late: the Whiffenpoofs did not in fact begin with the well-known gathering of five singers in 1909, but as early as 1902, when a group of Glee Club members calling themselves the ‘The Six Little Lambs’ sang their own version of Gentlemen-Rankers, the song that would soon be transformed into The Whiffenpoof Song. Carl Lohmann recalled the group in a letter to Austin Bruff, a member listed on the invitation to The First Official Dinner of ‘The Six Little Lambs’ at Mory’s, February 7, 1902:

All my correspondence is now with Bee Van Vetchten including a menu of the first dinner held by the ‘Six Little Lambs’ at Mory’s which Buff [Kimball] loaned me… It seems to me that the ‘Six Little Lambs’ might have grown to be what the Whiffenpoofs are today only, unfortunately, it was allowed to die out instead of passing on from class to class.

Kipling’s Gentlemen-Rankers remained popular throughout the first decade of the 20th century at Yale and was known to have been sung at Class Day exercises in 1908. The following 1908 New York Herald account of the Yale Glee Club’s western trip during the Christmas holidays also shows that a lamb-inspired version of Gentlemen-Rankers was sung by Glee Club members before the song acquired its Whiffenpoof lyrics.

During this decade undergraduates with a love for harmonizing formed a cappella groups that just as quickly disbanded when their members graduated. These groups included the Growlers, who immediately preceding the Whiffenpoofs, and the CupMen and Hogans, their contemporaries, with whom the founding Whiffenpoofs freely associated musically. Although there is now a difference of opinion about the function of these groups, any excuse for good singers to gather was sufficient to generate apparently high-quality music making.

[ image to be added ] The Hogans of 1909

To appreciate the quality of the first Whiffenpoof group, it is important to set a musical context for its founding. By this time, singing at Yale had already become more than a pastime; it was then the most popular extra-curricular activity on campus. In 1909, the total undergraduate population numbered only 2,198, including Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School, a three-year institution that, notwithstanding the lower status it was accorded compared to Academic, participated fully in the musical life at Yale. Each class had an identity that was reinforced by frequent singing, generally spontaneous, at its portion of the Fence, the traditional gathering point originally on the corner of Chapel and College Streets. When Osborne Hall was built on this site, a new Fence was erected within the campus itself.

This account of Glee Club tryouts shows the popularity of singing in 1906:

At the beginning of each college year, in order to fill vacancies made by those who have graduated or those who have been adjudged not worthy of being reinstated, competitive examinations are held at which two hundred or more applicants are canvassed to fill possibly ten or fifteen vacancies… The direct result of these very exacting competitions is to induce the students to prepare for them in advance by training under good teachers, and thus the standard of the applicant is raised to a far higher point than if they were merely untutored musicians.

Marshall Bartholomew recalls Carl Lohmann’s tryout with uncharacteristic awe:

Lohmann’s voice trial remains unforgotten amid thousands of similar trials that have been since then. Asked to vocalize a few scales upward this mellow, well-modulated voice sang up to and including a robust tenor F. ‘Hmm,’ commented the director, ‘Good tenor material here.’ Then he ran the candidate downward in arpeggios. Down, down, down, down, to a good E-flat in profundo, also with good quality and volume. Here was material for a one-man quartet with range enough to sing any part and the quality of a ready-made soloist.

All the while, the Glee Club performed works in an intentionally popular vein, as documented again in the 1906 promotional history:

[In preparing for the 1906 Christmas trip] the management has decided to omit all choruses of a technically difficult and pretentious character, and fill the programme entirely with light, cheerful, jolly songs that will give each audience a genuine good time. There will be new songs of an airy, dainty character; new humorous numbers for the chorus; new solos for the individual singers; new ‘stunts’ for the funny men; but there will also be a liberal selection of the old standard songs which appeal to the Yale spirit, which call up the memory of happy days, which disclose the special character of college life and which raise anew the thrill of pride in the mother university.

These performances featured the Varsity Quartet, soon to become the Whiffenpoofs.

First, the group intended, from the start, to establish an ongoing institution, as shown by the drafting of an immutable constitution and the agreement, weather permitting, to sing publicly on a regular schedule.

Second, it had a bona-fide theme song, adapted from a popular tune and lyrics of the time, but assimilated by the group as a distinguishing feature (the song could be sung only at Mory’s).

Last, but not least, the group set a standard by the quality of their singing, amply corroborated by the reports of their contemporaries and the popularity of their weekly singing at Mory’s, that made continuing the tradition worthwhile (three of its members – Lohmann, Minnigerode, and Pomeroy – were in fact juniors).

The thread connecting this activity, then, was a shared consciousness of this enterprise’s value, not only to its current members, but also to Yale singers that they might never know.

[ image to be added ] Seniors convene at their fence

The Music and its Sources

Beginning as an outgrowth of the Glee Club, the early Whiffenpoofs generally performed songs published in Yale songbooks. In a practice that has long since gone out of date, however, they also created spontaneous four- and even five-part harmony on familiar tunes of the day. As time progressed, succeeding groups added to this repertoire a wealth of arrangements, essentially all written by the group’s own members.

In a remarkable eight-year period ending in 1950, for example, five individuals – Dudley Miller ’43, Bill Oler ’45m, Wally Collins ’47m, Ed Wolff ’50, and Fenno Heath ’50 (later to become director of the Glee Club for 40 years) – added ninety-nine new arrangements to the repertoire, forty-three in a single year.

The new Whiffenpoofs chosen each year owe surprisingly little musical allegiance to their predecessors. With the exception of The Whiffenpoof Song, the choice of repertoire is their own – sometimes closely reflecting the music sung by the groups immediately preceding them, but occasionally taking new, even controversial directions. Every group’s independence is due to a simple but extraordinary characteristic; each group’s membership is always completely new. The only exceptions were a handful of repeat members in the first few decades and in the years following World War II. Because each group starts fresh, it receives a heritage, but also the freedom to reflect its own time and create its own identity, a freedom that may even encourage challenges to accepted tradition, like the use of guitars. These experiments may go out of style or may occasionally become new traditions to be observed thereafter with reverence. But the vitality of the music-making owes a considerable debt to the autonomy of each group and the corresponding ability to discard the past and reinvent itself and its music. . . time after time.

The sources of the Whiffenpoofs’ music begin with barbershop, a particularly American type of four-part harmony that today is viewed as quaint. At the turn of the 20th century, though, barbershop was a vibrant practice with a well-developed, but often spontaneous structure. This spontaneity is underscored by the fact that vocal arrangements sung prior to World War I were generally not written down. The preface to Carmina Yalensia, an 1867 publication of songs sung at Yale, edited by Ferdinand VD Garretson ’66, describes this practice, which continued well into the 20th century:

The stranger who has been amused and entertained by the gusto with which our songs are sung, has naturally wished to procure a collection of them; but his inquiries have hitherto been in vain, as many of the tunes now, for the first time, presented to the public, had never been written or arranged, but simply sung traditionally on the jolly occasions and festivals of college life.

[ image to be added ] Book Cover: Carmina Yalensia

Nearly a century later, Marshall Bartholomew was apoplectic about the issue, entreating Fenno Heath, his successor as University Glee Club director:

You haven’t lived long enough to realize, as I do, how many of our best songs have gone into oblivion simply because nobody took the trouble to keep track of them. Even such favorites as Shall I, Wasting in Despair and The Whiffenpoof Song went for years without ever having been written down on paper and were only rescued by Frank Goodale when he was preparing material for the 1918 edition of the Yale Song Book.

A fascinating characteristic of ‘the songs we love so well’ is that many of them, far from deriving from written scores, belonged to an aural tradition passed down by the rote teaching of parts, while others featured free improvisation around a melody according to several organizing principles well understood by performers of the time. To illustrate how both of these principles operated in the music sung by the early Whiffenpoofs, it is important to view this practice not just from the historical perspective of performance practice at the time, but also by way of the music theory underlying a barbershop arrangement.

The Part-Learning Tradition

Into the history of music at turn-of-the-century Yale enters an individual with an unexpected, but crucial background. Bill Hillman was an itinerant barber and letter carrier born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1872 who made his way to New Haven in 1902. FW (Fritz) Wiggin, president of the Glee Club, later recalled his experience in 1903-04 with Hillman:

He had his own colored quartette and they indeed had power and volume. It was a treat to hear them do verse and chorus of the church anthem Jerusalem replete with close harmony…

Wiggin goes on to describe Hillman’s ‘quick true ear’ and how he taught Wiggin and other Yale students the parts of several songs that became popular:

There came from him the familiar version of June, A Youth One Day in a Garden. . .as well as other so-called coon songs which used to be rendered at concerts by what was called the University Quartet.

[Note: The term ‘coon song,’ offensive today, refers to a tradition of Black American (or black-face) song that pervaded the popular American musical culture of the time, including at Yale.]

Marshall Bartholomew personally recalls Hillman during his own undergraduate years at Yale. He corroborates Hillman’s musical talent and influence, and attributes to him the introduction to Yale of And When the Leaves, recorded by the Whiffenpoofs of 1927. Philip H Collins ’08, a member of the Growlers, recalls that ’Zekial Saw the Wheel was taught to his group by Bill Hillman and was ‘since dressed up and sung by the Glee Club or the Whiffs or both.’

In a letter to Bartholomew, Meade Minnigerod describes his contact with Hillman beginning in 1906:

My first contact with him was in Freshman Year when I was in the Apollo Glee Club, and was chosen for the Quartet. We went to Goat Fowler’s room in the Hutch on Crown St. and there was Hillman to teach us some songs. He lined us up and then in each guy’s ear, line by line of the song, he sang each part of the harmony with words. When we had one line of the song down pat he went on to the next. Naturally his rhythm and phasing of the words were exactly the same for each part, which made for excellent timing by the quartets he instructed.

Minnigerode’s recollection, hearkening back to a time several years before the founding of the Whiffenpoofs, documents the introduction of songs new to Yale. It also details a singing style characteristic of the Varsity Quartet and of the Whiffenpoofs, who sprang from that group in 1909.

Barbershop Singing

It is no surprise that close-harmony singing was the well-spring of the Whiffenpoofs’ earliest musical output. At a deeper level, however, it is important to understand how the group might have actually performed in the days before World War I, and why they might have found sufficient enjoyment in singing together to go to the trouble of founding a group that would carry their vision into the future. James L McClelland, in Of, By and For the People: A History of Barbershop Harmony, describes the popular music milieu shortly after the turn of the 20th century:

When one wanted to enjoy music, he had to provide it for himself. He, therefore, learned to play an instrument or was content to sing. It was natural for four men, all lovers of harmony, to gather and produce some self-satisfying chords. In the days before financed school bands, music teachers for every grade and a standard of living by which practically anyone with initiative can afford some kind of music lessons, the musically inclined often learned by rote, rather than note. ‘Faking,’ the ability to sing or play by ear, often without any technical knowledge, was common among professional as well as amateur musicians. Therefore, men developed a naturalness for the use of the ‘ear.’ It was not difficult for four good woodshedders to ‘hear’ their parts, as it was not difficult for a banjoist to accompany a ‘combo’ or a barber to accompany himself on a guitar.

How then does barbershop actually ‘work’? As an aural rather than a written style, barbershop is based on a simple and logical structure permitting four separate parts to combine in a coherent whole. Bartholomew comments:

Male quartet singing is a peculiarly American phenomenon. In Europe until the advent of American male quartets, as in England with its fine tradition of madrigal and later glee club singers, singing was ‘out of the book.’ I recall, for example, one summer day in Spreewald, an agricultural region north of Berlin irrigated by a network of canals. A rowboat containing four German students floated past and when it came into view I discovered that each one had his song book in front of him as he was carefully singing from the notes. Such a thing could scarcely happen in the United States. I recall also at Christmas time, 1910, when a quartet which had sung together on the Yale Glee Club as undergraduates met, partly by happenstance and partly by previous planning [the members of the quartet were: Barty, Jim Howard ’09, Carl Lohmann ’10, and Bill Cushing ’08]. In a quiet corner of a Paris restaurant, after dinner, we ventured to put our heads together and began harmonizing. It caused a sensation. Other diners listened with rapt attention and applauded enthusiastically; the proprietor offered us free drinks – on the house – and the impromptu concert continued.

The ‘faking’ referenced in McClelland’s text is not limited to barbershop singing, but is a technique found in other American aural traditions, such as bluegrass singing. In barbershop of the kind performed by the early Whiffenpoofs, it reached a sophisticated form that permitted variation each time a song was sung.

In the barbershop structure, each part fulfills a well-defined function, listed here in the logical order that the ensemble would be built, beginning with the melody:

• Melody – in the ‘lead,’ or second tenor part
• Bass Line – in the second bass, generally in root position
• Descant – in the first tenor, often paralleling the lead
• Baritone – in the first bass, filling in the missing harmony note

To this quartet, a ‘rover,’ an individual with a freer improvisatory role, was commonly added. The importance of the rover becomes even more striking when we consider the motivation the original Whiffenpoof group gave for meeting at Mory’s as a group of five, rather than four singers. Carl Lohmann provides a vital clue to the need for the added member:

Our quartet having plumbed the depths of four-part harmony decided to move on to the five-part variety. . .

Howard’s own description of the 1909 Whiffenpoofs singing at Mory’s – although difficult to imagine today – gives a tantalizing view of how this practice might actually have come to life:

Many who enjoyed listening took to dropping in for a meal or glass while we five poured forth our souls in unrehearsed and often spontaneously-altered harmony. . . Lohmann’s gorgeous bass. . . Minnigerode’s effortless tenor. . . and the inventive genius of Pomeroy, whose accurate ear and extraordinary range enabled him to fill in a fifth part in any passage which might be enriched by it, were priceless assets.

It is likely, however, that the first group’s ability to sing in five parts, born out of the close musical collaboration that these remarkable musicians discuss freely, did not continue in succeeding groups. While Minnigerode, Lohmann, and Pomeroy sang a second year in the Whiffs, graduating in 1910, it seems unlikely that the 1911 group, featuring the bibulous Edgar Montillion (Monty) Woolley, reached such heights.

Building Barbershop Harmony

We can better understand the construction of barbershop harmony in vogue at this time by analyzing, part by part, the original arrangement of Down in the Old Cherry Orchard, a song written in 1907 and a Whiffenpoof favorite for over seventy years. It is important to note here that this song was published in a piano-vocal format and therefore would most likely have been realized as a barbershop arrangement without the use of a written four-part vocal score.

PART 1: MELODY Immediately, the unique characteristic that makes barbershop recognizable even to an untrained ear becomes clear: the melody does not appear in the highest voice, but in the second tenor part. Shall I, Wasting in Despair and Mavourneen, both mentioned in the text of The Whiffenpoof Song, are good examples of this structure, as is the even better-known Aura Lee. The Whiffenpoof Song is itself a hybrid in which the melody ranges over the upper three parts.

There is a practical and an aesthetic reason for locating the melody in an internal part. If the melody were placed in the highest voice, then the range of the four parts together would become uncomfortably wide, or the melody would have to cross into the middle parts. Aesthetically, barbershop harmony does not follow a ‘melody and accompaniment’ regimen; in fact, its structure promotes greater emphasis on the contribution of other parts to a distinctive overall blend and less emphasis on the melody as a separately distinguishable line.

PART 2: BASS LINE Next, the bass line defines the harmonic context. A singer can easily extemporize this line, since most chords are sung in root position, as in hymn singing. In the present example, this amounts to only two notes, G and C, corresponding to the only two harmonies found in the first eight bars. In fact, many songs set in barbershop style exhibit a simple harmonic framework that lends itself to an uncomplicated base line. Other barbershop settings embellish these basic harmonies in inventive ways, creating the rich sound associated with straw hats and striped blazers.

PART 3: DESCANT The first tenor part adds a line with a restricted range and typically less activity than the melody.

PART 4: BARITONE The baritone line completes the quartet sound, often adding the missing note in the chord when two voices happen to sing the same note.

Because the melody line in the second tenor moves over a relatively wide range, however, the baritone performs an additional role, that of switching vocal ranges with the lead to complete the harmony. For this reason, considerable crossing of the middle two parts often occurs in barbershop arrangements. There were exceptions to the rule that baritones were relegated to filling out harmonies, however: Old Grey Bonnet, a popular four-part ballad recorded by the Whiffenpoofs as early as 1938, features the melody in the baritone part. In discussing quartet singing Bartholomew quotes a sardonic but accurate source on the role of the baritone:

When some character discovered that a well rounded fully packed chord contained four notes, the baritone entered the picture. . . Being the last one in, he was handed the missing note that nobody else could sing. . . The baritone is inspired to keep on with it only by the realization that the quartet would sound incomplete without him.

Bartholomew, who graduated two years before the founding of the Whiffenpoofs, contrasts the Glee Club practice of singing from written music with the informal a capella singing of the early Whiffenpoofs:

Meanwhile, in singing for fun at Mory’s, Heublein’s and Tuttle’s, the barbershop method ruled and the ‘close harmony’ characteristic of so-called American barbershop would be developed by experimentation, regardless of conventional rules of harmony or counterpoint.

Thus, the music sung by the early Whiffenpoofs progressed from improvisation to written arrangements in a style that continued without much change up until World War II. From that point on, complex jazz harmonies began to enrich the close harmony associated with barbershop, opening the door to a dramatically new style of arranging that Whiffenpoof arrangers gradually perfected in the following generations.

Early Repertoire

We can appreciate the earliest Whiffenpoof repertoire through a number of vintage recordings as well as written accounts. The 1915 recording of the Varsity Quartet (though 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 are included on the fourth CD of this set. Other than this recording, accounts of what Whiff groups actually sang during the first twenty years are rare, although the group’s close connection with the Glee Club implies a commonality of material. As if to emphasize the strength of this connection, the Glee Club issued a set of 78 rpm records in the mid-1940s that includes the full chorus singing The Whiffenpoof Song under the direction of Marshall Bartholomew. It was not until the 1960s that the Whiffenpoofs 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 ’45m, affectionately called the Whiff Blue Book. This collection of nearly two hundred arrangements includes all of the songs sung over the prior fifteen-year period, plus certain earlier selections characterized by Dudley Miller ’43, in his Foreword to Volume II, as having ‘special merit.’ What then did the Whiffs sing in their first twenty-five years and under what conditions? We know from contemporary accounts that groups before World War II performed songs we can classify in three broadly-defined groups:

• College songs, whether sung at Yale or having Yale as their theme
• Songs with Negro roots
• Vaudeville/Burlesque/Tin Pan Alley songs

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 – Beta Theta Pi, Mother of Men, Wake, Freshmen, Wake and 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 the Yale spirit. Mother of Men was the first and only winner, in 1907.

Songs with Yale themes were augmented by traditional college songs, some with lyrics in Latin (Integer Vitae, Gaudeamus Igitur, and Amici), as well as by ballads drawn primarily from European sources (Mavourneen, Shall I, Wasting In Despair, Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes, Graceful and Easy, and Annie Laurie), and by assorted sea chanteys, drinking songs, and patriotic airs. Highly popular among these songs were yodels (Matin Bell) and whistling songs. 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 ’32, former Whiff, professor of history at Yale, and namesake of the Duke’s Men singing group, commented on this connection in a ‘Yale Reports’ radio broadcast on March 9, 1958, in answer to a question about whether the purpose of early singing groups was singing for fun:

Oh, entirely. We would meet each Monday night at a table at Mory’s and sing to amuse ourselves, then we would go out, if the weather was fine, and serenade the Freshmen. At that time we were also singing entirely songs out of the Yale song book; we had none of the fancier arrangements that have come into being since. We would sometimes go to girls’ colleges and serenade, but there again, we were singing pretty standard stuff: And I doubt very much if my group could – it certainly didn’t – sing the kind of thing you now hear in the fifties.

Along with the college and popular songs, the repertoire relied heavily on Negro songs in arrangements that range from evocations of a peculiarly American folk heritage to race parodies that are offensive to modern sensibilities, but 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 that were commonly accepted at the time.

Related but wholly different in spirit were Negro spirituals, sung by both the Whiffenpoofs and the Glee Club. Marshall Bartholomew was instrumental in bringing these songs to light; his 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 1930s the traditional college repertoire began to share the spotlight with a newer, but not necessarily current, type of music: vaudeville and burlesque. These settings exhibited a nostalgic character that hearkened back to innocent times before World War I. The settings were cast in barbershop style and the lyrics concentrated on romance, but of a quaint kind that, even in those days, must have seemed almost camp. Examples of this type (which are seemingly obliged to begin with the word ‘Down’) include: Down By the Old Mill Stream, 1910; 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.

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 1959 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: 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. 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.’

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 Victor Herbert only six years earlier in 1903. 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 early 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 of the University.

The party was a good one, no speeches, 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 favorites (and some new to me) come up for air. Tommy Hewes whistled The Yellow Bird in perfect pitch. Beebe produced a ballad in the original Icelandic – magnificent. Later came Songs of Araby. Johnny Winterbotham did Joe Cawthorne’s story of capturing the Whiffenpoof in Cawthorne dialect. Lanny Ross was on hand, there were three or four yodelers. Paul Sterrett ’28 produced a symphonic ensemble from a ukulele; the Howard twins played the piano; Pres Bush’s quartet (Bush ’17, Kimball ’22, Dole ’23, Spofford ’24) shared first honors 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 World War II.

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.’
• 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.