At the beginning of every football game, students file into Beaver Stadium, decked out in their blue and white, preparing for the pregame rituals like the drum major's flip and chants of "We are!"

The tradition of singing the Penn State alma mater goes back longer than most students have been alive. Sometimes it seems as though few students know the song's four verses, so imagine if there were six.

Through the years, the alma mater has gone through some changes. The current one, which is sung before every football game, has four verses and is considered the official alma mater.

Fred Lewis Pattee, a former professor of American literature at Penn State, wrote the lyrics to the alma mater in the early 1900s to the tune of the hymn "Lead Me On," which used to be sung at commencement.

In April 1901, Pattee made a public offering for someone to compose a song for a Penn State alma mater.

He submitted his own suggestion, which was selected as the alma mater first sung in June 1901 at the Alumni Dinner.

The last two verses of Pattee's version were omitted, but that wasn't the only change.

In Pattee's autobiography, he said that he realized later that the words to the alma mater might be offensive to the female student body because when the song was written, Penn State had been a co-ed university for 30 years.

In 1975, the lyrics of the alma mater were changed from "at boyhood's gate" to "at childhood's gate" and from "thou didst mold us, dear old state, into men, into men" to "thou didst mold us, dear old state, dear old state."

There are other familiar Penn State songs that students might recognize such as "Victory" and "The Nittany Lion," also known as "Hail to the Lion", by James Leyden. After touchdowns, the tunes of "Fight On, State" by Joe Saunders bounce across Beaver Stadium.

"Historically, those three songs have been accepted as representatives of Penn State as school songs," said Richard Bundy, director of the Blue Band. "For about 60 years the pregame has used those three songs."

On the other hand, there are two Penn State songs that aren't as well known to students.

One is "Hail! Oh Hail!" by Ray Fortunato, who wrote the song while working on his graduate thesis at Penn State.

The glee club director at the time liked the tune and started using it in his concerts.

Fred Waring, a former Penn State student from 1919 to 1922, wrote another lesser known songs called "The Hills of Old Penn State."

"Waring was the first person to have choral music on the radio five days a week, 52 weeks a year," Peter Kiefer, retired director of the Fred Waring Collection, said. The Collection, dedicated to Waring, is located in the Pattee Library.

"Around 1940, [Waring] made an offer over the air that if colleges were interested in him to write a song for them he would," Kiefer said. "He ended up writing 130 songs for various colleges and universities. The people at Penn State petitioned him to write a song since he was a former student. Fred was an avid Penn State fan and he bled blue and white like the rest of us fanatics."

Waring's radio show eventually traveled over to TV, where it became a big success on CBS.

"Penn State Glee Club sang on The Fred Waring Show. In those days, it was like Letterman or Jay Leno," Christopher Kiver, music professor and glee club director, said.

While the Blue Band doesn't perform those two songs at football games, students can hear them performed today.

"The Glee Club, which is the oldest student organization on campus, has performed both "Hail! Oh Hail!" and "The Hill of Old Penn State" at various performances," Kiver said.

"In fact, 'Hail! Oh Hail!' was recorded on The Blue and White Album and Glee Club Gold and 'The Hills of Old Penn State' is on Glee Club Gold," he said.