Our Alma Mater is set to the music of "Annie Listle", originally written in 1857 by H.S. Thompson, a Boston minstrel-musician. "Annie Listle" is a ballad about a virtuous young lady destined for illness and tragedy - a genre related to Edgar Allen Poe's "Annabel Lee" and "Lenore." A newspaper editorial at the time observed that "Annie Listle" and similar songs swept the country like a wildfire. In 1870, this tune was further popularized and perhaps even immortalized when Archibald Croswell Weeks and Wilmont Moses Smith penned the lyrics for the Cornell University Alma Mater (Hail, Hail Cornell). Since then it has become one of the most familiar American college songs of all time.