A question for Melissa Mead, the John M. and Barbara Keil University Archivist and Rochester Collections Librarian.
In your 13 years as University archivist, what’s one question that’s stumped you but that you remain determined to answer?
—Tama Miyake Lung, editor, Rochester Review
My prize for “still looking for the answer” goes to the school song, “The Genesee.” Why do we only sing two verses, when it was written with three? For me, determining when we dropped the middle verse has been the first step to the why. There are a lot of clues and some distracting anecdotes but no definitive answer yet to this admittedly low-stakes question.
A 1916 article in the student newspaper, the Campus, proclaims: “‘The Genesee’ as an Alma Mater is ideal, for it links our college to the river about which our city centers . . . its first notes are the signal for ‘on your feet’ and ‘hats off.’”
We all know the words—written in 1891 by Thomas Thackeray Swinburne (Class of 1892)—with music arranged by Herve Wilkins (Class of 1866).
“The Genesee” was embraced by students and within a decade became our alma mater. It’s the first entry in a songbook used at the Commencement Week festivities of 1893.
But Swinburne kept tinkering with it: A new version appeared in the Campus on December 14, 1898. The biggest changes were in verse three: Gone were the gathering force, the devious course, and forever loyal be, replaced by a mill-wheel, a grove, and vernal hours.
Was Swinburne more focused on improving the poem (in his view) than on lyrics? The revisions confused singers: Letters in the Campus urged upperclassmen to learn the new words so they would be in sync with the first-years. Luckily, the lyric reverted after a few years.
What evidence is there for when the switch to two verses occurred? A songbook pasted in the scrapbook of Raymond Ball (Class of 1914) may be the first printed indication, although freshman handbooks continued printing three verses.
