Spontaneous communal singing by groups of undergraduates may be far removed from typical college experiences today, but as J. Lloyd Winstead shows, until the mid-twentieth century, this practice had been common on American campuses for centuries. When Colleges Sang is the first comprehensive survey of singing among American college students. Winstead traces the kinds of music that college students have sung, their role in creating college songs, and the informal, curricular, and ceremonial contexts of their performances. The book's eight well-written and accessible chapters focus on the social history of music and musical performance and are built upon the premise that college singing exemplifies broader social and cultural trends. Although Winstead occasionally addresses aesthetic issues, his study is neither “a detailed history of glee clubs, nor a technical analysis of music literature” (p. 1). Winstead charts an uncomplicated chronological path from the seventeenth century (chap. one) through the eighteenth (chap. two) and nineteenth centuries (chaps. three and four) to the twentieth century (chaps. five through eight). In the first four chapters he explores how Puritan psalm singing shaped Harvard University's early ceremonial music; informal and ceremonial performances of secular and patriotic songs and instrumental music at Harvard and Yale University in the eighteenth century; the rise of college fraternities and singing societies and their employment of music; and the development of collegiate music publishing from the late eighteenth century to its expansion in the nineteenth century, when collections of student-produced songs first appeared. Winstead also considers the shift in American musical tastes, including within emerging collegiate choirs, toward more refined European repertories in the 1800s. Furthermore, as American college curricula became increasingly comprehensive, literary societies became less important, while musical societies became more so. Neither, however, could compete with the rise in the mid-1800s of the student athlete, whom college songs began to celebrate. During this period, the cultivation of song among groups of students during leisure hours reached its peak, and singing was incorporated into student protests, hazing, and, most importantly, sporting events.