When more than 40 Pomonans marched off to war en masse in 1943, The Star-Spangled Banner may have been in their hearts, but it was The Fighting Sagehens and other College songs that were on their lips.

It didn't matter if they sang them off-key; more important was that almost everyone from the College knew the songs.

"Just about every time we were together in training camp we'd sing those songs," says Edward Malan '48. "Especially on a weekend when we couldn't get a pass, we'd gather out in a field somewhere, and there'd usually be a few beers around, and we'd talk and sing and tell stories. It was really very special. As Mac McClain has said, it was like having a home away from home." McClain '55 recalls singing not just Pomona songs but other college favorites as well, such as Yale's Whiffenpoof Song.

It may seem incongruous that such songs, often considered merely entertaining diversions, could have served as a significant social unifier among youths preparing for combat rather than for a football game, but college songs, including Pomona's, have a capacity to surprise. Some are like windows upon their times.

"Pomona has a large repertoire of its own songs, which is very unusual for a small college," says Graydon Beeks '69, professor of music, director of music programming and facilities and director of the Pomona College Band. "They fall into several categories. One is the football fight songs, sung at games and rallies. Category Two is the songs all the students would have sung at formal College functions, such as the alma mater. Category Three is songs the Glee Club would sing, most of them dating from the time when there were separate men's and women's Glee Clubs. In this group, Torchbearers has been the signature song for men, Primavera for the women, and Over the Years for mixed voices.

"A fourth category is songs arranged for the Blue and White, which was a male quartet until the '80s." Examples include A Pomona Boy and a Pomona Girl and Oh How I Hate a Class at Eight--both 1941 songwriting partnerships of Chester G. Jaeger, professor of mathematics, and William G. "Doc" Blanchard, conductor of the symphonic and marching bands and longtime College organist.

The styles of songs outlined by Beeks were popular not just at Pomona but also at other U.S. colleges and universities from the late 19th to the middle of the 20th century. In the 1950s, as growing numbers of automobiles gave students easier access to off-campus entertainment, as television began to impose an inescapable cultural influence, and as rock 'n' roll began to upset musical traditions, the way the College songs fit into campus life began to change.

"The status of the College songs might best be summed up the way Don Meredith once described football: 'It ain't what it used to be, but then again, it probably never was,'" says Beeks, noting that "what alumni from each generation remember about the College songs tends to be different from what their predecessors or successors remember."

From the 1912 Pomona College Song Book, only one song--Hail, Pomona, Hail, the alma mater--continues to be performed with any regularity today, although another, Ghost Dance, is the antecedent of Torchbearers. A number of songs written by faculty or students appeared in the 1920s and '30s, such as Push on Pomona, by Terry Koechig '29. This led the compilers of the 1943 edition of Songs We Sing at Pomona to limit its contents to the College's indigenous songs, except for the alma maters of Pomona's four athletic conference opponents. More songs were added over the next three decades, most notably those by David Douglas '48 (Tiger Song) and "the six Junior girls from the Class of '48" (Swoop Down the Field).

The most recent song to have joined the College canon, When Cecil Sagehen Chirps, was written by Band Captain Brian Holmes '68, with the aid of fellow band member Beeks. It may owe its longevity to its continuing capacity to menace opposing teams, reflected in such lines as, "We're gonna fracture the foes of Pomona's might/...We're gonna wail on their bods for the blue and white!" and "Our foes are filled with dread/Whenever Cecil Sagehen flies overhead!"

As for those Pomona songs that have endured, a key concern appears to be how often, and how well, they are performed. For many alumni, the College songs represent a tangible connection to some of the happiest and most memorable times of their lives. Understandably, they want to hear them performed by College ensembles. For the Music Department, however, and especially for the choral conductor and band director, the question is what role the College songs should play in the teaching of music.

If not enough students are interested in forming a pep band, how much time should the concert band, which includes students from all Claremont Colleges, spend on the Pomona songs? If the College's mission is to provide choral students an understanding of historically significant works with great breadth and depth, where do the College songs fit in?

"The College songs have a very important place in the institution's life, in the way they celebrate tradition and connect the dots from generation to generation," says Donna M. Di Grazia, associate professor of music and choral conductor since 1998. "But it's important that there be a balance between what we're trying to investigate, which is history and art and language in music, on the one hand, and the upholding of the College traditions and legacy on the other hand. Both are valid, but I don't think a concert program should balance them equally in terms of the number of pieces performed or the amount of time spent on them. I also think that whatever we perform, whether it's Handel's Messiah or a College song, we should perform it to the best of our artistic ability. Because they are the College songs, they should be performed in a stirring and appropriate way."

Another issue is the changing social environment. Overtly racial lyrics such as those of the Levee Song, an American folk tune (and possible progenitor to I've Been Working on the Railroad) that was not related to the College but was included in its 1912 song book, now read as an anomaly from a distant past.

Torchbearers, the song many consider to be Pomona's most beloved, also is the one with the deepest and most sensitive history.

When Frank P. Brackett, professor of astronomy, and David P. Barrows, then a student at a preparatory school affiliated with the College, observed a ceremonial dance of the Cahuilla tribe in 1890 or 1891 near present-day Idyllwild, California, in the San Jacinto Mountains, they were struck by its solemn power. After they returned to the campus, Barrows sang the dance's haunting refrain--He ne terra-toma--at a Halloween celebration, and others took it up. It was incorporated into a College song called Ghost Dance, with lyrics that Brackett later dismissed in his book, Granite and Sagebrush, as "rather silly."

Brackett described what he and Barrows had seen as "an ancient war dance," but his account conforms closely to descriptions, illustrations and photographs of the Ghost Dance movement filed in the 1890s by anthropologist James Mooney with the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology.

The Ghost Dance was a unifying religious movement that was inspired by a shaman of the Northern Paiute, cousins of the Cahuilla, and quickly spread to tribes from Southern California to South Dakota. The movement peaked in 1890, about the same time Brackett and Barrows visited the Cahuilla. The Ghost Dance prophet claimed to have received a revelation promising freedom, harmony and the restoration of old traditions to the indigenous peoples. Tribes adapted the prophecies to their own cultures, and some envisioned the earth swallowing up white settlements and restoring nature's bounty. As the movement intensified, white settlers and federal government officials became alarmed, leading to a massacre of Lakota Sioux Ghost Dance followers at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in December 1890.

In 1930, Ramsay L. Harris, a member of Pomona's English Department who wrote songs as a hobby, polished Ghost Dance and rewrote the lyrics for a Founders' Day celebration. The revised song, retaining the He ne terra-toma refrain, was renamed Torchbearers. Harris's lyrics are much more solemn and earnest in tone than the original words, and in their celebration of nature and the preservation of revered traditions, are somewhat similar to translations of several tribes' imagistic Ghost Dance songs.

Although it has been a favorite of generations of Pomonans, the College's best-known song is not immune to controversy. One recent ensemble member of Native American ethnicity was deeply offended by Torchbearers and refused to sing it.

But it is the emotional reactions produced by such songs that are also the source of their enduring hold on hearts and minds. At their best, the songs have served as a social focus, a unifying element, and a means of honoring College tradition, in much the same way the 1890 Ghost Dance served Native Americans. During and after World War II, for the soldiers from Pomona, the chance to get together and sing the College songs nurtured a sense of belonging and connection at a time when it was gravely needed.

"It kept us sane," Malan says.

--Michael Balchunas