They're happy to sing this tune
How an ambitious music teacher re-introduced McGuinness tradition
Sometime Thursday evening, after their football game against Piedmont High is done and the postgame handshakes are complete, the players from Bishop McGuinness will make their way to the marching band for the alma mater.
The band will play, and the players will sing. So will students in the stands.
That's the tradition. At least it is now.
At a high school known for its strong tradition of excellence — McGuinness has 85 state titles in all sports, including 20 in the past decade — one tradition it did not have was the singing of a school song. There were some words printed in the student handbook, but no one knew for sure if that was the alma mater. Or what tune went with it. Or even if there was a tune.
But thanks to an ambitious music teacher and an astute alum, McGuinness is once again singing its alma mater.
Julianne Annesley arrived at McGuinness five years ago. She directs the band and the orchestra, and every year, she has tried to do something new.
Playing at the freshmen welcome event and being part of the Veterans Day Assembly are some of the traditions she's started.
But from her early on at McGuinness, Annesley wondered why the school didn't have an alma mater.
She remembered loving the school song when she was a student at Edmond North, and even now, when she hears it, she has an immediate connection to her high school days.
Last winter, she enrolled in an independent study as part of her master's work in music education at Oklahoma. She wanted to use the class to write the instrumental parts for a school song with the help of Roland Barrett, the director of the OU School of Music and a renowned composer and arranger.
"Go see if there's a melody or some words," Annesley remembers Barrett telling her early on.
Annesley started asking around McGuinness, talking to alumni and longtime supporters. Did they remember ever singing a school song? Did they recall any words or the melody?
Recollections were few.
Then Sandy Cunningham, the school's director of communications, made a break in the case. After digging through archives and yearbooks, she figured out that a member of the Class of 1961 wrote the words and composed a melody for a school song. The alum's name was Loretta Neumann — and Cunningham had found her on Facebook.
Not long after, Annesley called Neumann's home in Washington, D.C., and the details behind the lost school song started falling into place.
In 1959, less than a decade after opening, Central Catholic High School decided to change its name. After the death of the school's founder, Bishop Eugene J. McGuinness, it adopted the name Bishop McGuinness High School, and with the name change came a change in school songs.
A student contest was announced.
Neumann remembers one group after another singing their entries, and even though they had unique lyrics, most had used the melodies from the alma mater at either OU or Notre Dame. It got monotonous hearing the same tune over and over.
Finally, it was time for Neumann's home room to perform. She sat down at the piano and played a brand-new melody, and her classmates sang the words to her song.
"Blew everybody away," Neumann said. "Here was a whole new song with all new words."
"Hail McGuinness!" won in a landslide, and over the next several years, it was played at graduations, baccalaureates and assemblies. But McGuinness had no band and no orchestra, and over time, the song faded away.
Annesley told Neumann that the words had been preserved in the student handbook but that no one knew the tune.
Neumann walked over to her piano, put her phone nearby and started to play.
"I played and sang as best I could," Neumann said with a chuckle.
Annesley recorded her, and even though they were more than a thousand miles apart, it was like a treasure chest had opened. Annesley began the process of writing out the melody, composing other parts around it, then scoring the whole thing.
In August, Neumann and her husband made the trip from D.C. to OKC for the re-boot of her school song at a pep assembly. She walked into the gym at McGuinness to find the band and orchestra practicing a very familiar tune — her tune.
It brought tears to her eyes.
Annesley was emotional, too.
"I felt the pressure," she said. "I wanted to do her song justice. But as soon as she came in ... she was singing all the words. She could just pick it up right there."
Slowly but surely, folks at McGuinness are picking it up, too. Big pieces of posterboard with the words printed on them are still held up during the postgame sing-along.
Building a tradition takes time.
Help, too. Annesley says that both first-year football coach Bryan Pierce and basketball coach Scott Raper have welcomed the addition of the alma mater to their postgame routines. Several students who've taken Annesley's classes have also been supportive of the tradition. One of them, Denzel Akuffo, is a football player and the student council's chair of assemblies. That means he emcees the pep rallies, and at that first one back in August, he encouraged students to get behind the resurrected school song.
Annesley isn't sure she'd have been able to such help had she tried this when she first arrived at McGuinness. Now, she's built credibility.
That helped her build a tradition.
Or bring one back. Either way, Julianne Annesley gets goosebumps when the alma mater plays. Seeing the students come together. Hearing them unite in song.
"I felt like we were missing that," she said.
They aren't anymore.