"The Wiffenpoof Song"

"Baa, Baa, Baa!"

Sometimes a song just fills the bill at Word & Song. And don’t fear! I’m not going to venture into children’s songs such as “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” which I’m guessing many of our readers fondly remember from their earliest school days. (If you have forgotten to sing such sweet little songs with the sweet little children in your family, I strongly urge you to drop everything and do that now!) And more than a few of our readers will recall a much-beloved song which was deeply imbedded in the national memory for most of the 20th century, so much so that it was featured in several movie scores, it was a huge hit in 1937 for the megaphone master, Rudy Vallee, it was a hit again ten years later for Bing Crosby in 1947, and was it commercially recorded by a wild assortment of entertainers from Lawrence Welk to Perry Como to Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley, the Lettermen, opera singer Robert Merrill, and the list goes on. The song figured prominently in the score of the film, 12 O’Clock High, which Tony wrote about here. It was featured in two 1952 comic films, Monkey Business and The Road to Bali. It was used in the theme for the 1970’s television show, Baa, Baa, Black Sheep (a partly biographical show about the real Black Sheep Squadron of WWII). Even the title of the classic 1953 film From Here to Eternity comes from this song. But where did the song come from?

First I suppose we need to ask what is a whiffenpoof? Well, the name came from a Broadway show seen by some Yale students, likely including a good friend of ours at Sometimes a Song, Cole Porter, who was a student at Yale from 1909 to 1913. The word whiffenpoof was coined as a name for an imaginary creature mentioned in the patter (off-the-cuff chatter) with which Vaudeville performers punctuated their songs. Glee clubs were extremely popular among students at the turn of the 20th century, and in 1909, the Yale students who saw that show decided to adopt “The Whiffenpoofs” as the name of their campus ensemble. “The Whiffenpoofs” were (and are to this day) a club made up of Yale students who devote much of their senior year to singing and performing on and off campus. The singers who chose the name thought that it captured the club’s exuberance and fanciful character. And what good is a Whiffenpoof without a whistful signature song? They went searching for a trademark Whiffenpoof Song. Cole Porter was a busy boy at Yale, where he composed around 300 songs, and he himself sand with “The Whiffenpoofs” in his senior year. But in 1909 he was a lowly freshman, and the newly-named Whiffenpoofs went looking elsewhere for their theme song.

As it happened, in 1909 a piece of sheet music was published that captured a huge audience and became the 5th most popular of the year. It was a setting to a ballad by the most popular writer among college students of the day, Rudyard Kipling. His poem, “Gentlemen-Rankers,” from a collection called “Barrack-room Ballads and Other Poems,” had been released in sheet music form set to a tune by a popular song composer named Tod Galloway, a lawyer with a love of music, who wrote over 100 tunes in the 1890’s and early 1900’s. Kipling’s poem was a serious lament; a “gentleman-ranker” was a ne’er-do-well, usually the “black sheep” of a wealthy family, who is paid off to go abroad to avoid further embarrassment to his relations. Such a fellow might choose to enlist in the military service, and if he made good, would be offered a commission, with rank, which could get him back into the good graces of his family. Everyone everywhere was singing that wistful and sad song. But two Yale Whiffenpoof singers, Meade Minnigerode and George Pomeroy, adapted those lyrics to create a lighter song suitable for college glee singing. The song’s popularity has not waned in 1930 years. And since then, The Whiffenpoof Song has been the final song sung at any of the Glee club’s performances. The Whiffenpoofs enjoy some real fame, and have sung on and off campus, all over the United States and around the world. But “The Whiffenpoof Song” is their trademark.

For today I decided to give you a recording by Bing Crosby, accompanied by Fred Waring and his Glee Singers. The song is meant to be sung a cappella, but the light guitar accompaniment is very fitting, I think. And as a bonus, you will find a recording sung by an all-soldier choir performing Irving Berlin’s own adaptation of the Whiffenpoof lyrics for his Broadway musical, “This is the Army.” In the show he hired real soldiers to sing a choral version of “The Whiffenpoof Song,” with lyrics written specifically for air cadets. I find it a very moving piece, and I hope you will too.

I’ve posted Kipling’s own Ballad at the very end of the page, so you can read his version of life as a Gentleman-Ranker in wartime: “Lord, have mercy on such as we.”

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"Gentlemen-Rankers"
From Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (Rudyard Kipling, 1892)

If the home we never write to, and the oaths we never keep,
And all we know most distant and most dear,
Across the snoring barrack-room return to break our sleep,
Can you blame us if we soak ourselves in beer?

When the drunken comrade mutters and the great guard-lantern gutters
And the horror of our fall is written plain,
Every secret, self-revealing on the aching whitewashed ceiling,
Do you wonder that we drug ourselves from pain?

We have done with Hope and Honor, we are lost to Love and Truth,
We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung,
And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth.
God help us, for we knew the worst too young!

Our shame is clean repentance for the crime that brought the sentence,
Our pride it is to know no spur of pride,
And the Curse of Reuben holds us till an alien turf enfolds us
And we die, and none can tell them where we died.

We're poor little lambs who've lost our way,
Baa! Baa! Baa!
We're little black sheep who've gone astray,
Baa—aa—aa!

Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,
Damned from here to Eternity,
God ha' mercy on such as we,
Baa! Yah! Bah!

Here is Bing Crosby’s hit version of our song, accompanied by Fred Waring and his “Glee Singers” (1947). I love the simple guitar accompaniment, which doesn’t overwhelm the tune as written for a cappella singing.

Enjoy this all-soldier chorus singing an Irving Berlin’s Army Air Force version of “The Whiffenpoof Song” from the Broadway musical, “Call Me Mister.” These guys knew what they were singing about!

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