MAROON! WHITE!

Tradition of the Cowbells at Mississippi State

This was written by Kyle Veazey of the Clarion-Ledger

The cowbell does not produce a particularly warm sound. It’s best described as a clank, a rattle, a clack. Put together the sound of 40,000 or so cowbells in a stadium and it sounds like millions of Tic Tacs being shaken about in a hundred yard tin.

But it’s the sweetest sound to the ears of fans of Mississippi State football, who gather on the fall Saturdays at Davis Wade Stadium at Scott Field in Starkville, many with cowbell in fist, in an eternal hope that this is the year. They’ve rung them through huge wins—the school’s only outright Southeastern Conference title, a week before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the western Division title in 1998—but they’ve seen a lot more losses. Mississippi State has lost the third-most SEC games in history, and—with all due respect to Nashville’s West End Avenue—no SEC school has more frustrated its faithful.

So they hold tight to tradition, to hope and yes, to the cowbell. You wouldn’t dare blame them, not to their face. It’s hardly a prop to be shaken at games and thrown in the backseat on the drive home. No, a Mississippi State fan’s cowbell is his rock, his badge, his prized possession, a symbol of his dedication to a team that all too often robs his hopes with little or no return on the emotional investment. Cowbells are given as graduation gifts, both high school and college; as wedding presents; as birthday gifts. Sterling silver version with wooden handles sit on the mantles of well-to-do Bulldogs boosters.

The last time the university named a new president, he rang one. When a distringuished visitor comes to campus—such as, in September 2008, former secretary of state Colin Powell—he or she is given one. (Powell rang his; the crowd gave its loudest approval of the night.) If you’re a new-to-campus Mississippi State freshman and don’t have a cowbell, a trip to the campus bookstore in the suffocating late-August humidity is a necessity. Has been for as long as most can remember.

No one can speak with authority about the origin of the cowbell, but there is a generally accepted story. With MSU facing archrival Ole Miss in a spirited battle (is there any other kind of game between the two schools?) in the 1930s, a Jersey cow wandered onto the field. Mississippi State won. The cow was captured as a good-luck charm.

Faced with the difficulty of parading a bovine to Scott Field on fall Saturdays, over time a useful bit of metonymy took place and the cowbell itself became the charm. In the 1960s, a couple of MSU professors started welding handles to the cowbells, making them much easier to give a vigorous shake—and produce a more resonant ring.

It didn’t take long for State’s opponents to take notice, which led to a 9-to-1 vote banning artificial noisemakers at SEC games. (Guess which school was the solo dissenter?) Which points to another of the cowbell’s connotations: It’s a symbol of defiance, and Mississippi State folks are just fine with that, thank you very much.

Signs at entrances to Scott Field remind fans about the ban. No problem: Just stick the cowbell somewhere a guard can’t see it (purse? back pocket?). The man with the badge isn’t going to waste much time searching for the contraband, since the man with the badge probably has a cowbell in his back pocket, too. And when the school re-visited its secondary logos last year, one of the new arrivals included a cowbell.

Mississippi is a fiercely divided two-school state, and the cowbell also serves as a symbol of the school’s heritage as—to use the derogatory term—a “cow college,” the one with the Extension Service and the farm on campus and all the dairy products from on-campus cattle being sold on campus. What better item to convey that identity than a cowbell?

The symbols at other SEC schools are unique but natural: a bluetick coonhound in Knoxville, houndstooth in Tuscaloosa, hedges in Athens.

Here, it’s four inches of bicycle handle, seven inches of metal and decades of meaning. And the good people of Starkville are just fine with that, thank you very much.

MAROON! WHITE! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! MISSISSIPPI STATE WHOOOO! YA DANG RIGHT!