Cover of an LP (circa 1967) featuring renditions of “For Boston” and “Hail! Alma Mater!” Photograph: Courtesy of Andrew Nelson ’02

Describing the University’s “Graduating Exercises” held in College Hall on the evening of June 24, 1885, the Stylus editors recorded that, “as it approached the noon of night,” the graduates came together and sang “Farewell.” “Hurley’s voice was never sweeter, or more pathetic,” they wrote. Then, “a clasping of hands, and they were gone.”

Hurley of the spell-binding tenor was Thomas J. Hurley, or simply Tom, a Liverpool native (of “Irish parentage,” according to his Boston Globe obituary much later). No building on campus bears his name, but his legacy has united generations of Boston College students: T.J. Hurley, of the Class of 1885, composed both “Hail! Alma Mater!” and “For Boston.” So, what else do we know of this man of consequence?

His family immigrated to Boston in late 1870 or early 1871, when he was six years old; five years later, at age 11, he appeared in the College register, and he would graduate with the first of his two Boston College degrees 10 years after that. School records list Mlle. Gabrielle de la Motte as his “parent or guardian.” A formidable figure in Boston Catholic church music, she formed the first sanctuary choir at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross and once rehearsed a single composition for two years before allowing the choir to perform it publicly. Hurley sang under her direction at the cathedral and would eventually become conductor of its choir.

As an undergraduate, Hurley seemed to be everywhere: He was a member of the St. Cecilia Society, which provided music at religious services and other University functions, and of the music committee for his class. He sang in plays and at other school events. He helped organize the Boston College Athletic Club, led Company D of the Boston College Foster Cadets—a military drill unit—in battalion exercises, and took part in the prize declamation at his Commencement, receiving $30 for the best English composition.

Following graduation, Hurley read law briefly at the Boston legal firm JB Cotter & Co., but he returned to the Heights in 1886 (following a bout of typhoid) to pursue a master of arts degree, which he completed in 1887. Hurley then began working for the city of Boston as a registrar in the election department. He continued in the city’s employ for the rest of his working days—for the rest of his life, in fact—rising to be chairman of the Board of Street Commissioners, where he was “always held in the highest esteem by those under him and by all who had business with his department,” according to the Globe.

Above all, Hurley remained a loyal and active alumnus. He served as historian for the newly formed Alumni Association, was elected an honorary member of the St. Cecilia Society, and, when the Glee Club began in 1913, he became its coach. “There is probably no activity where discipline is more necessary than in a glee club,” he declared at a 1927 banquet celebrating the music clubs. He continued to sing, in church and at alumni celebrations, and to compose.

The archives of the Burns Library offer some idea of Hurley’s creativity in both popular and sacred music. In addition to “Alma Mater” and the fight song, they contain lyrics and music for seven other popular songs he composed, mostly about Boston College, including the “BC Baseball Song,” a lament on the sorry state of the school team (with a play of words on “ball” and “bawl”), and “The Lake-Street Car” about the commute from the new campus on the Heights to downtown Boston:

     Down the hill on the run we go
     To catch the Lake-street car.
     Ev’ry day it’s the same old tune
     To the “L” by the Lake street car.
     There’s seats for sixty, we fill then all,
     One hundred and twenty strong,
     And the starter whistles his little pipe
     When he hears our cheerful song: Then
     Run, run, run a little faster if you can,
     For a mile and a half isn’t far;
     And I’d rather have a seat, than be
     Riding on my feet
     To the “L” in a Lake-street car.

One non-Boston College song by Hurley, “Pat’s Proposal,” is a comic piece in Irish dialect about an offer of marriage.

The style throughout Hurley’s playful compositions is typical of popular music around 1900, with hints of barbershop-quartet harmonies and with deference extended to the waltz-based standards of the day, such as “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

At the heart of Hurley’s serious musical activities, however—whether as chorister, conductor, coach, or composer—lay sacred music. The Burns Library contains 10 different settings of the ninth-century liturgical work “Veni Creator Spiritus,” at least six settings of “O Salutaris Hostia,” and single treatments of other Latin texts. The music is simple and functional, moving in hymn-like chords and displaying some striking shifts of key to animate the text.

Both streams of music—sacred and secular—coursed through Hurley’s writing from early on. In December 1884, to honor the 300th anniversary of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin in Jesuit institutions, the undergraduate Hurley composed a hymn, “Queen of Angels.” This composition earned him the following notice in Stylus: “The greatest individual triumph was obtained by Thomas J. Hurley ’85, who had written the words, composed the music, and who then sang his hymn in that sweet and finished tenor of his that has been the gem of many a celebration in College and Church.” One alumnus, reminiscing of his compatriot, wrote in: “And Tom Hurley—well! Is there anyone who hasn’t heard of Tom?”

“Hail! Alma Mater!” was Tom’s contribution, in 1913, to the 50th anniversary of the founding of the University. (Early mentions of the song included the subtitle “Alumni Song for the Golden Jubilee 1863–1913.”) The origin of “For Boston” is less clear, though one point is certain: Its creation took longer than hoped. In fall 1885, Stylus requested submissions for “a college song or two . . . that can be adapted to some popular air”; another solicitation went out in the following spring. An 1888 Stylus competition for a song offered the winner the complete works of Thackeray in half-calf binding; that evidently failing, the editors published an article in January 1895 chiding that even Stonyhurst College (a British Jesuit preparatory school) had a school song.

“For Boston” finally appeared sometime between 1913 (when “the towers on the Heights” mentioned in line seven became a reality) and 1917 (when the song was included in the earliest known Boston College songbook, compiled by the Class of 1917). The song evidently struck a chord with the Boston College community. At the City Club on the eve of the Holy Cross game in 1927, according to the Globe, more than 1,000 students and alumni sang “For Boston” “with a rolling throb that sent thrills up and down Beacon Hill.”

Hurley died on December 11, 1931, of heart disease. A requiem Mass was held in St. Mary’s Chapel. His family continued his allegiance to Boston College. In 1951, the Heights reported that the Hurleys were the first family to have three generations attend the University.

In 1989, two decades after Boston College became fully coeducational, the alumni’s board of directors voted to revise Hurley’s original “For Boston” lyrics from “for here men are men” and “shall thy sons be found” to “for here all are one” and “shall thy heirs be found.”

Jeremiah W. McGrann is an associate professor of the practice of music at Boston College. Research assistance for this piece was provided by Shelley Barber, reference librarian at the Burns Library.