Upidee: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

“Upidee” is first documented as a Harvard student song. Sheet music copyrighted in 1859 and issued jointly by Oliver Ditson & Co., Firth, Pond & Co. and three other publishers billed it as a college song and chorus sung by the students of Harvard College, and credited H. G. Spaulding as arranger.[1] The humor comes from a collision of moods: solo stanzas taken from Longfellow’s solemn “Excelsior,” a poem collected in his Ballads and Other Poems of 1842,[2] are each answered by a boisterous chorus of nonsense syllables.[1] It is therefore less a rewriting of the poem than a mock-serious setting of it. When Henry Randall Waite included the song in Carmina Collegensia (Boston, 1876), a headnote explained that the solos Harvard men actually sang were crowded with local names and references, so Longfellow’s familiar lines had been put in their place for general readers.[3]

Wood engraving of students in top hats and visitors crowding the yard on Class Day at Harvard

Winslow Homer, “Class Day, at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.,” wood engraving, 1858. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

The song soon traveled well beyond Cambridge. Around 1862 the New York firm of Beer & Schirmer published a piano galop by F. B. Helmsmüller titled “Upidee: Students Frolic.”[4] In the South the chorus found a new use. W. L. Fagan’s 1890 anthology Southern War Songs prints “That Bugler; or, The Upidee Song,” with words credited to A. G. Knight and music to “Armand.” In it a tireless camp bugler sounds call after call, cheating the men of meals and rest, while the nonsense refrain carries over from the college song.[5] The sources consulted here do not give a firm date for this Confederate version. In the modern Civil War music revival, Bobby Horton recorded “The Upidee Song” on his album Homespun Songs of the C.S.A., Volume 2, which streaming listings date to 1986.[6]

Find books with Upidee for sale →

Sources

  1. Baylor University Libraries, Frances G. Spencer Collection of American Popular Sheet Music: "Upidee: College Song and Chorus" (1859).
  2. Maine Historical Society, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow site: "Excelsior" (Ballads and Other Poems, 1842).
  3. Internet Archive: "Carmina Collegensia," ed. Henry Randall Waite (Boston: Oliver Ditson & Co., 1876).
  4. Internet Archive / Gaylord Music Library, Washington University in St. Louis: "Upidee: Students Frolic: Galop" by F. B. Helmsmüller (c1862).
  5. Project Gutenberg: "Southern War Songs: Camp-Fire, Patriotic and Sentimental," collected by W. L. Fagan (1890).
  6. Spotify: "The Upidee Song," Bobby Horton, Homespun Songs of the C.S.A., Volume 2 (1986).