Mattingly: Alma mater an important part of game day

The University of Tennessee’s Pride of the Southland Band performs during halftime of the Tulane game in 1967. A key part of the band’s halftime performance is the playing of the school’s alma mater, written in 1928 by Mary Fleming Meek.

The day was 79 years ago this past Friday, Oct. 26, 1928, one day before the Vols’ win over Washington & Lee on Shields-Watkins Field.

It was in the heyday of Maj. Bob Neyland’s first tenure as head coach. The Vols had knocked off Alabama the week before in Tuscaloosa, led by Gene McEver’s 98-yard return of the opening kickoff. It was obviously a kinder and simpler era; a time campus life was centered on the Hill.

The university had been seeking an “alma mater,” a song that had to be of “original and of high standard.” Prof. J.S. Meyer, head of a campus group charged with finding such a song, announced the selection at a banquet at the Farragut Hotel in downtown Knoxville.

“It is not the plan to declare this song the official alma mater hymn unless it captures the hearts of UT students and alumni,” Meyer said. The “right type” of alma mater was important.

An outside committee, composed of George B. Nevin of Easton, Pa., Harry Alan Russell of New York, and Nathaniel Irving Hyatt of Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., all apparently big in the music field, had been brought in to make the final call.

The song contest attracted wide interest from students and others across the state. A prize of $50, thought to be worth more than 10 times that today, went to the winner.

Mary Fleming Meek of Chattanooga, Mrs. John Lamar Meek as stated on the sheet music, submitted the winning entry, titled “On a Hallowed Hill.” It won out over one written by Knoxville’s Frances Johnson, by unanimous vote.

Although Mrs. Meek was not a UT grad, her husband and son were graduates, and her father had served as a university trustee.

Mrs. Meek’s great-grandfather designed of one of the Hill’s earliest buildings, Old College, razed in 1919 in preparation for the construction of Ayres Hall.

“She composed an alma mater, which is not just a custom, but a song in which every line expresses the University of Tennessee’s charm, character and strength,” Linda McHugh of the UT Daily Beacon wrote Nov. 10, 1967.

“As our alma mater is willed from generation to generation, no matter how others may dress, talk or live, they may see that there is a spirit stronger than that in jugs, the Volunteer spirit of mind and soul. Our inward spirit becomes outward when we sing the Alma Mater.”

The words and music have spanned the generations, bringing Volunteers of all stripes together under a common bond. When the chorus swells to, “So here’s to you, old Tennessee,” Vol fans wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a hot day or night in September, a crisp October afternoon or a cool November day when the shadows of the Tom Elam Press Box blanket the field. UT fans stand a taller, a little prouder, when those strains echo around Neyland Stadium.

It’s something unique, as they wanted in 1928. It’s not a variant of “Far Above Cayuga’s Waters,” Cornell’s school song that is the tune for numerous other collegiate alma maters, most notably Alabama, Georgia and Vanderbilt. Mrs. Meek’s composition is ours and no one else’s.

Mrs. Meek looked to “Torch Night” and “Aloha Oe” ceremonies on campus for inspiration and touched all the bases in composing words and melody.

“Every self-respecting student of the University has memorized the words to the Alma Mater,” wrote a student orientation publication called ”The Torch” in 1944.

No one knows the creative process that went into the writing of the Alma Mater, but the words and music live on and continue to have an impact on generation after generation of students and alums. The University of Tennessee alma mater has continued to stand the test of time.

(The chorus to “Rocky Top,” for example, came to Boudleaux Bryant in 1967 at a moment he couldn’t otherwise put pen to paper. In a break from writing, while getting coffee, here came the words, “Rocky Top, you’ll always be, home sweet home to me, Good old Rocky Top, Rocky Top, Tennessee.”)

Possessed of a majesty befitting the times, the song, a “hymn” as it was called in those days, has endured to be a positive and fitting tribute to the Tennessee Volunteer spirit.

As is the case with the “T” before the game when the orange and white clad Vols enter Shields-Watkins Field, there’s not a moment like it anywhere.

Seventy-eight years after Mrs. Meek’s passing in June 1929, her composition, played from the old-fashioned block “T” at the end of the band’s halftime show, with solo trumpet(s) and saluting drum major, stands as a much-beloved staple of college life, much as it was in the late 1920s.

Tom Mattingly is the author of “The Tennessee Football Vault: The Story of the Tennessee Volunteers, 1891-2006” (2006), to be published in second edition in 2008, and “Tennessee Football: The Peyton Manning Years” (1998). He may be reached at tjmshm@comcast.net. His News Sentinel blog is called “The Vol Historian.”

© 2007, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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