The Countryman: Fill the steins to dear old Maine

9 mins read
Bob Neal
Bob Neal

As a 7-year-old, I marched with my sisters, aged 5 and 3, around the dining room to old records. The records were from the ’20 and ’30s, we were from the ’40s.

It was actually just one record that got us into step, a record we played again and again on the Victrola. The Maine Stein Song, the alma mater of the University of Maine.

You likely know the story. Rudy Vallee recorded the Stein Song, and it was No. 1 on the charts for two months, ending up the top-selling record of 1930. Vallee was born in 1901 in Island Pond, Vt., a year before the Stein Song was written, and grew up in Westbrook. He attended UMaine in 1921-22.

In 1930, our parents bought 78-rpm discs recorded on Durium, a synthetic resin that had better sound quality than the shellac used for most records then. Durium coated one side of a piece of brown paper. Yup, paper. The B side was blank.

Every Thursday, the Hit of the Week record label put a new disc on sale at newsstands. For 15 cents, which was a dime less than shellac records. A “music jury” of Eddie Cantor, Florenz Ziegfeld and Vincent Lopez selected each tune for release as the Hit of the Week.

The Great Depression put Durium on the skids as people started using their 15 cents to buy apples from broke stock brokers peddling on street corners. Just in time, too. Turned out the flimsy discs tended to curl and become unplayable. But in 1947, when three nosy kids found their parents’ stash, the Stein Song still rang out from the paper recording. In march time.

I can’t be certain that the Stein Song my sisters and I marched to was Vallee’s version, though he did record on Durium,. Other versions were pressed onto Durium by Hotel Pennsylvania Music and by the Statler Pennsylvanians, those versions being barely different.

Nearly 95 years after Vallee dropped out of UMaine, the Stein Song stirs my blood. Black Bear blue blood, that is. The Stein Song is my Maine anthem.

At UMaine women’s basketball games in Bangor, the pep band plays the Stein Song again and again. When the players come out for warmup; when they return for introduction of starters; when they return after halftime; after the game, win or not. The team sings it a cappella when players huddle before introductions. I never tire of it.

The Stein Song stands out for me as an anthem also because it is a quirky contradiction, just as Maine may seem a quirky contradiction to people in other places. It’s quirky because only UMaine and Yale (The Whiffenpoof Song: “To the tables down at Mory’s . . .) appear to have drinking songs for alma maters. The contradiction is that Maine was legally dry (1846-1933) when the song was written. The Model Ts were wearing deep ruts in the roads from Marsh Island to the coast to meet boats running rum from Canada.

The Stein Song’s lyrics — it’s odd, but I cannot memorize the lyrics though I’ve heard them a million times — hail from a time when UMaine was primarily an agriculture and engineering school, its enrollment overwhelmingly male . . . “to the girls who will love us someday.”

(UMaine was not alone in having been heavily male. Marilyn has the 1893 yearbook of the University of Kansas. In it, her grandmother and my grandmother are listed as two of 14 female students. Fourteen in all of KU.)

Still, it is as close as we have come to finding a Maine anthem that works for us.

Before settling in New Sharon, Marilyn and I had heard Tombstone Every Mile, the late Dick Curless’s tribute to a stretch of road up north in Maine that’s never, ever, ever seen a smile.

In fact, we liked the song so well that we went out of our way to drive Route 2A through the Haynesville Woods, lauded in the song as the killer forest, coming back from New Sweden. ‘Course, it was June, so the song was out of season, and the woods had been clearcut a few years earlier. But you could easily imagine those woods claiming truckers in January.

Could Tombstone Every Mile be Maine’s anthem for us? Close, and I would certainly accept it as an anthem for rural Maine. But, like it or not, Maine has become urban/suburban, and if you played Tombstone in Falmouth, folks might think it is about Alaska. Or Minnesota.

In 1937, the legislature adopted an official state song. The State of Maine Song, by Roger Vinton Snow. Have you ever heard it? I haven’t. It seems to have no more currency than the state’s official herb (wintergreen) or soil (Chesuncook soil series).

There have been other songs about Maine. The late Bob Elliott of Channel 6 felt commercial Christmas music boring and asked Con Fullam, who grew up in Sidney, to write a Christmas song with a Maine angle.

Fullam wrote the lyrics for The Maine Christmas Song in just a few days, Malinda Liberty recorded the song, actor Gary Merrill (noted for wearing sarongs as he combed the beaches of southern Maine) recorded lead-in spoken words, and the WCSH news staff sang backup. The recording came out in 1986. Sorry, but The Maine Christmas Song just never did it for me.

Neither did Tim McGraw’s complaint that his gal had done up an’ gone off to Portland, Maine, and left him alone in them thar hills down south. He didn’t write the song, but he insisted it was not about Maine. Yeah, right. That’s why the lyric says, “Portland, Maine. I don’t know where that is. I don’t wanna know.”

McGraw says the jilted guy was “not even getting up off his porch. I picture a guy laying (sic) around his house, eating Doritos, who doesn’t know what the next city down the street is.”
It was Portland, McGraw said, because, “Portland, Maine, just seems to sing really well.”

Well, he never said it was an anthem for Maine.

Whatever song you might favor as your Maine standard, you have no idea how puffy the chest gets when you’re out of state and someone strikes up the Stein Song.

And I’m not the only one for whom the Stein Song is Maine’s anthem. An alumna of UMaine and a four-year basketball star there, Liz Wood came north from Virginia for a first-rate science education and basketball. She gradudated in the Honors College with a 3.9 grade point average and a dual major (biology and chemistry) for pre-med. She is playing professional basketball in Germany and plans to enter med school when roundball is done.

On her blog, Liz calls UMaine “the college of my heart always.” And for this old Black Bear, when I nick myself, the blood is Maine blue. “Oh, fill the steins to dear old Maine . . . ”

Bob Neal marched to The Stein Song in Missouri and taught journalism at the University of Maine.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

2 Comments

  1. My parents used to ship me off for four weeks to the YMCA Camp on Cobbossecontee a L O N G time ago

    For some perverted reason that I didn’t understand then a bunch of sub /early teens singing Maine Stein Song wuz standard fare

    I was a precocious child/brat and they needed the rest!

  2. over the years, the Stein Song was played by Maine bands in many presidential inaugural parades. It was played by the Mt. Blue HS marching band (and Maine class A State champions) on January 20 1989 at that inauguration.

    The Old Crow Band plays it.

    I have seen it sung by Korean choruses on YouTube. And also as the music for the Taiwan army doing their manual of arms. Just search for Maine Stein Song Korean on YouTube and you can hear their version of it. I don’t think their translation is in accord with the English words.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.