Who You Gonna Yell For?

My experience with high school football pep rallies was that they were a group celebration of self-denial.

The students would get together on game day to much music and cheering, attempt to work themselves into a school-spirit frenzy and then demand that the game captains come up and say something rousing like, “Y’all come out and watch us beat Hattiesburg tonight.”

I actually said that at a rally, knowing full well that the only chance we had of beating Hattiesburg was if their entire first (and, to be safe, second) string were to be struck with hysterical blindness very early in the game. If not before.

Fortunately, the ineptness of our team was offset by the attractiveness of our cheerleaders and the enthusiasm of the band. And the rallies gave us all a chance to join in the singing of our shared anthem, the Moss Point High School alma mater.

“On our city’s western borders, reared against the sky,
Proudly stands our alma mater, as the years go by.”

And so on.

I’m not one of those best-years-of-my-life, Springsteen-song guys, but I do have a soft spot for high school and the friends I had there. I don’t even know what my college alma mater was (“Dixie?”) but a high school alma mater has a certain tender nostalgia. (One of the most poignant scenes in TV history is when Ange and Barn sang the Mayberry Union High alma mater after a bittersweet 20th reunion.)

And so it was with considerable distress that I learned that the Moss Point alma mater had been replaced with an entirely new version sometime after my departure.

Who did this, I wondered. And why?

I’m not arguing that the lyrics were particularly, well, lyrical. Nor were they unique; it turns out that Marshall County High School in Lewisburg, Tenn., has the same words exactly, except for the school name, of course. But that isn’t the point. The point is that an alma mater doesn’t belong to some particular group or class, it belongs to years - generations - of alumni.

And I want to find out who thought otherwise.