Submissions

Having attended Colgate during the peak of great music (late 60s-early '70s), it's impossible to choose just one song. The Beatles, Otis Redding, Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin and Duane Allman were all gone by my Junior year. (After an imprudent comment, I was banned from guesting on late-nite WRCU-FM.) Even today, I'm taken back to bacchanals at FIJI or post-rugby tunks at Jim & Bettys whenever I hear two songs in particular: Mott the Hooples' "All the Young Dudes": and Slade's "Cum On Feel the Noise". Both songs seemed to encapsulate my years in Hamilton. Sadly, soulless corporate rock ascended the world stage upon my graduation...(sigh)

Songs by Squeeze always bring me right back to the Colgate campus. Squeeze became hot in the early 80s, exactly when I was there.
"Tempted" in particular.

Celebration by Kool and the Gang. I DJ’d the parties in the Pub at the Student Union on Wednesday nights and I couldn’t play the song until after midnight. I had to wait for the library to close. Lol. Everyone loved that song and several people, who will remain nameless, danced on tables. Great times!

Funky Mack

You’re going to get this submission a thousand times, but every Tri Delta in Colgate’s history associates “Like A Prayer” by Madonna with Colgate and with Tri Delta in particular. I don’t know why, but that song has been the anthem of Gamma Sigma chapter since our founding (that’s true, I asked a founding member!). It’s played at every formal, semi formal, and social gathering, and it’s on every Tri Delta playlist. There are informal yet VERY strict rules when the song starts playing, which include running frantically to the dance floor with all your other sisters, belting out the words, and engaging in elaborate dance moves that mostly consist of badly pantomiming the lyrics as enthusiastically as possible. Every Tri Delta wedding must also include Like A Prayer: if the bride somehow forgets to put it on the playlist, it WILL be requested dozens of times until the poor DJ relents. Also, if you are out in the world somewhere and you hear “Like A Prayer” playing in the wild, it is pretty much mandatory that you immediately send a Snapchat of yourself singing the song to every DDD in your contacts list. The musical tradition of “Like a Prayer” is as old as time (or at least as old as Tri Delta’s founding at Colgate in 1996) and is, perhaps more than anything else, the one binding theme common to all of us, across nearly 25 generations of DDDs.

The Spin Doctors and "Two Princes," fall of '92. I was a freshman in West Stillman and a girl who would later become a friend blasted it out her window for everyone to enjoy. To me, that was college life, and I loved it. Fun music, shared experiences, hanging out between classes. It made the homesickness disappear.

My Old School - Steely Dan. General reminiscing

Emminence Fromt - The Who. Thursday nights at the old stone jug

Mary Had a Little Lamb - Stevie Ray Vaughn. Phi Delta Theta. 3 years. Co-Social chair. President 2 semesters. THE CLUB CABANA

A staple at every dance party during my junior and senior years was White Lines, by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. When I think of the song now, I get a vivid picture of Colgate's campus and of several parties - what we wore, how we talked, and what was important to us in the 1980's.