When browsing an early edition of America’s first college songbook (as you do), you may start to imagine an academic environment governed by the metaphysics of musical theater, where spontaneously breaking into collective song is never not a real possibility.
The book, Songs of Yale (1855, second edition), contains some 30 tunes, which the preface says represented “nothing like completeness.” A culture of social singing had taken such deep root at Yale that recent classes of students had built, and were still building, a large repertoire of school songs, often setting their original lyrics to more widely known melodies. Compiled by a team of editors, the book’s 30 selections were curated both for literary merit and popularity among students and alumni, who, upon graduating, would carry their favorites away along with their diplomas, the former perhaps even more greatly treasured. “Almost every student,” the preface notes, “has a loose collection of Songs… which will hereafter bring his Alma Mater and all her cherished customs vividly to mind.”
One of the book’s categories, listed among “parting songs,” “boat songs” and others, very literally did so: “songs of the spoon,” which celebrated a tradition Yale had borrowed from Cambridge before quickly making it their own. Across the pond (and, at first, in New Haven), a wooden spoon was glibly ‘awarded’ to the student with the poorest grades, but by 1855, Yale’s spoon had become a true award, bestowed by the Society of the Cochleaurerati—a secret society formed for just the purpose—to the most popular junior student among their ranks. An 1856 article in The New York Times put a finer point on the popularity contest’s judging criteria, which included “powers as a wit,” “talent as a speaker” and “capacity to please the ladies.”
Yet the songs of spoon in Songs of Yale still retained some of the original tradition’s edge, on the eternal understanding that social success comes at a cost to studying. Yalensians, as they were then called, sang these words to the melody of “Auld Lang Syne”:
When first the Fresh to College hies,
His leisure time to spend,
He wears away his sleepless eyes,
High scholarship his end;
But soon he finds that few attain
That much desired boon,
And with all effort seeks to gain
The far-famed wooden spoon.
And these to the melody of “Yankee Doodle”:
Who would not place this precious boon
Above the Greek Oration?
Who would not choose the wooden spoon
Before a Dissertation? …
Most college honors vanish soon,
Alas! returning never,
But such a noble wooden spoon
Is tangible forever.
With outside help, we can almost imagine the Society and their guests singing these songs at the annual Presentation of the Wooden Spoon, a party Skulls and Keys: The Hidden History of Yale’s Secret Societies (David Alan Richards, 2017) describes as “the highlight of the college season, attracting a larger and more remarkable audience than any other event in New Haven.” The program for the 1853 occasion, digitally archived by Yale’s Beinecke Library, details a fete at the mansion of local carriage magnate James Brewster, where a 20-part program spanned socializing, speeches, literary readings, musical performances and, of course, collective singing. The 18th part was the “reception address,” which, coming directly after the “presentation address,” must have been the winner’s speech, delivered that year by Alexander H. Gunn of New York City. The 20th and final part? A “stampede” by the audience.
And if I had to guess, I’d say a school of students so socially uninhibited and synchronous that some of them would write original songs and the rest would joyfully sing them could pull together a pretty great stampede, too.
Written by Dan Mims. Image features two “songs of the spoon” as featured in Songs of Yale (1855, second edition).
