A Plucky Bunch

U-M’s Mandolin Club records tell the story how this unlikely instrument took the campus—and nation—by storm in the early 1900s and faded just as quickly.

By Kim Clarke

Imagine, if you will, hundreds of University of Michigan alumni crowded into a theater for a night of live music. The opening number is, of course, “The Victors”—what better way to fire up a room? Leading the audience from the stage in full harmony are members of the Glee Club. And backing them up with instrumentation are another handful of young men playing not trombones, clarinets, or tubas but rather . . . mandolins.

The scene was repeated many nights over many years at the turn of the 20th century as the Mandolin Club plucked and strummed its way around the country in tours that routinely sold out and left crowds wanting more.

The mandolin, in its many forms, was all the rage. When a group of young people known as the Figaro Spanish Students performed on bandurrias and guitars in New York City in 1880, it launched a mandolin craze that would continue for four decades in the United States.

The U-M Mandolin Club began in the 1890s with roots entwined with the Glee Club. Both groups were for male students. For a while, the College of Engineering had its own group, the Technic Mandolin Club. Women formed the Girls’ Mandolin Club in 1916.

The University of Michigan Banjo & Mandolin club circa 1895-96, from the Men’s Glee Club records.

The Mandolin Club regularly embarked on tours that took students to the West Coast, the Pacific Northwest, and the East. Tour programs, notes, and news clippings can be found at the Bentley.

Often playing before enthusiastic Michigan alums, the students wielded their mandolins to perform all manner of songs: selections from popular musicals, waltzes, ragtime, and marches. They played classical music, such as Franz von Suppé’s “Light Cavalry,” and robust marches like John Philip Sousa’s “Invincible Eagle.” The U-M standard, “Varsity,” was a given; Earl V. Moore wrote the song in 1911 while a student and, as a graduate student, directed the Mandolin Club in 1916.

Consider the three-week Pacific Coast tour of 1914: the Glee and Mandolin Club traveled in specially fitted Pullman train cars to perform in Grand Rapids, Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, Laramie, Salt Lake City, Reno, Berkeley, Pasadena, Los Angeles, Omaha, and Rockford. While in St. Louis, the boys were treated to a scrimmage of the St. Louis Browns baseball team, led by Branch Rickey, a U-M law alum who had coached the Wolverines.

“The University of Michigan Glee and Mandolin Club entertained an audience of college folks that filled the auditorium of the Victoria Theater Monday night with all sorts of nonsense, from college jokes to ragtime singing, and then to show that they possessed musical talent, played and sang several classics with exceptional ability,” wrote the St. Louis Star and Times.

In addition to mandolins, club members rounded out their performances with other string instruments—cello, zither, guitar—as well as flute, clarinet, and drums.

The men’s and women’s mandolin clubs faded by the late 1920s. The glee clubs, however, continue to perform.