Category: Virginia

Back in reach, 23-21 in the third quarter: “From Rugby Road to Vinegar Hill”

Well, that took a while, but what a series of plays by Virginia! And that was one time that “run it up the middle,” that old George Welsh standby, paid off for the team.

The song for this touchdown is a colorful one, and the 1947 Glee Club omits most of the colorful verses, but you can Google for some of the more fun ones. Can you imagine a student group today cutting a record with the chorus, “I think we need another drink”?

From Rugby Road to Vinegar Hill, Virginia Glee Club and the UVA Band – Download 4.6 MB MP3

Virginia gets on the board, 10-7 in the first quarter: “Hike, Virginia”

First UVA score of the game with just a few minutes left to go in the first quarter. Here’s another track from that 1947 album in honor of UVA getting on the board: “Hike, Virginia” is another fight song, and it looks like Virginia could use the encouragement.

Hike, Virginia, Virginia Glee Club and UVA Band (1947) – Download 1.5 MB MP3

Virginia vs. Virginia Tech, with a soundtrack

I need to watch the UVA–Virginia Tech game. Nice that ESPN is already giving the Cavs no respect; we’ll see how it goes. I’m afraid to make a prediction, though; I’ve been wrong too many times before this season.

In honor of the game, here’s a little team spirit from 1947. This is ripped from that LP reissue of the 1947 Virginia Glee Club/University of Virginia Band album, and it’s an MP3 of the 1912 fight song that the Glee Club was still performing when I was there. I’ll post another song each time we get some points on the board.

Yell Song, Virginia Glee Club and UVA Band (1947) – Download 1.8 MB MP3

Update: The downloads have been temporarily pulled to reduce my bandwidth consumption. Sorry, folks.

G$, author

My good college friend John “G-Money” McLaughlin has finally published his award winning novel, Run in the Fam’ly, and it’s available for purchase. I’ll be stopping by the Harvard Bookstore to pick up my copy.

I wish I could say that I published him first, in Rag & Bone, a long time ago. But John was my fiction editor at the magazine, and we had a rule (after a fairly disastrous first issue) that we didn’t sh*t where we eat—in other words, there would be no submissions from editors published in the magazine.

Surviving the Billy Goat Trail

billy goat trail

As mentioned last week, I survived a hike down the Billy Goat Trail (not a surprise given the difficulty of the trail, which was moderate, but more given my general state of fitness).

It was a great hike, made better by the brisk fall air. My calves were really sore by the end thanks to the rocky terrain—even in the “flat” sections, we were walking on the edges of boulders. But there were also points of concern, primarily with the very low level of the river. If there was any question that water is a universal concern this fall, they were erased by my stroll up the Potomac that Saturday morning.

The group as a whole was much more fit than myself, including Jim’s high school friend John Hollinger. (Of Jim’s fitness no doubt is possible.)

I also got a lot of good photos at Jim’s wedding party itself. And by “good” I mean: everyone was presentable, only a few were blurred beyond recognition, and you can’t really tell how much fun we were actually having.

Mothman is married

I had a great weekend, hanging out in DC at my good friend Jim Heaney’s wedding. Jim, known to many as the Mothman, was a fellow Suspicious Cheeselord/housemate/Glee Club alum and remains a good friend. I had a fabulous time meeting Rebecca’s family and reconnecting with friends—Doyle, Vick, Cheeselords, it was good to see all of you again.

In particular, I received the welcome news that the next Cheeselords recording, of unrecorded works of Jean Mouton, will be coming out soon. Having heard the group on Saturday, I can only say that (perhaps fortunately) it’s a completely different sound than when I was there, and I can’t wait to hear how it goes.

And, yes, all survived the hike on Saturday morning. Definitely the only wedding I’ve ever been to where the groom requested a bachelor hike in lieu of a party. Despite my fears of dropping from cardiac arrest, I had a lot of fun. Jim and Rebecca, I can’t wait to hang out with you guys again soon; you throw a heckuva party.

Missing the Glee Club … for the Glee Club

The Virginia Glee Club will be in Cambridge on November 3, singing with the Wellesley College Choir (repeating a pairing that was done back in 1991 when I was a first year). Unfortunately, I won’t be in the audience at the First Congregational Church to see the group, because (in one of those weird coincidences) another Glee Club member is getting married that day. Yep, Jim Heaney, the Mothman himself, will be tying the knot in DC, and I’ll be there doing whatever a groomsman does (it will actually be my first time participating in the ceremony from that perspective). Should be a reunion of many kinds, as the Suspicious Cheese Lords will be in attendance as well.

Etext no more

The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library, better known to myself and other alumni of the center as Etext, has gone the way of all flesh, kind of. The center’s page announces that its online contents are being migrated to the Digital Collections center of the Library, and that its functions will continue to be performed by the Scholars’ Lab.

It is, I suppose, inevitable. Once cutting edge, now the phrase “electronic text” sounds quaint. And fifteen years on, its original mission—to digitize content, to assist faculty and students with the use of computers in literary scholarship—has become mainstream. But there is something sad about its disappearance. It was there that I learned how to use the Web—we used an SGML compliant doctype for our texts that as I joined the Center were just in the process of being translated to HTML, since Mosaic had just come out. I learned about NeXT there, and Windows, and digitized a few texts along the way. In fact, I was also exposed to Starbucks there for the first time, as one of the staffers brought home some coffee (hi, Peter and Kelly!) from them in the days before their ubiquity.

More than anything, I think I was exposed to a conviction there that ubiquity of searchable access to cultural artifacts could change the world. I think that if I had encountered this attitude sooner, I might not have gone into consulting and the whole arc of my career would be different.

So, a virtual moment of silence for Etext. It served well. And here’s hoping that the appallingly slow performance on the Digital Collections site this morning is just a hiccup.

Songs of the University of Virginia: Liner Notes and Discography

Finally I have a few moments to sit down and transcribe the liner notes from the 1947 edition of the Virginia Glee Club’s album Songs of the University of Virginia.

From Rugby Road to Vinegar Hill, from Cabell Hall to Scott Stadium or Lambeth Field, and back again to the Gymnasium (Fayerweather or Memorial, depending on your vintage!), music and song have always played a lively part in the social life of men of the University of Virginia. Practiced or impromptu, spirited or merely spiritous (or both), music is a part of every Virginia man’s memories of the University. It has always been so.

“Music is the favorite passion of my soul,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, who founded the University in 1819, designed its unique buildings, and drew up its original curriculum—a curriculum which included a plan for a professor of music and reserved a room in the Rotunda for teaching it. Mr. Jefferson was himself a proficient violinist and the collector of an outstanding musical library, and from his University’s opening in 1825 instrumental music and singing were favorite student pastimes. That they were sometimes rowdy and off-key is attested by a faculty ruling of 1831 which prohibited the playing of musical instruments after two in the morning and on Sundays! As early as 1832 there was an informal band composed entirely of students, and by 1835 faculty resolutions were deploring occasional “disorderly singing” amont the young gentlemen.

But there has been all through the years much serious music, too. The Claribel Club, a serenading socety, was started in 1874 and seems to be the first formal musical organization. The Glee, Banjo, and Mandoline Club, organized in 1893, was another of the forerunners of today’s large and well-trained Glee Club and Band. The range of the Glee Club’s repertoire is wide and ambitious and the University Band does far more than furnish colorful backgrounds for athletic events, for its concert programs offer music of a high order.

These two competent and highly-trained University organizations have joined their talents in this album to offer students, alumni, and friends of the University a selection of representative Virginia songs of the present and the recent past. These versions, however, make no claim to be definitive, either in words or melodies. Students and alumni alike may prefer, from sentiment or long familiarity, other versions of some of them.

In this album the Band and the Glee Club have tried to reflect in song the essential spirit of the University in its lighter moods, to evoke again the happy memory of University days (and nights) which, despite the tide of years, still “cheers our hearts and warms our blood.”

The University of Virginia Band is directed by M. Donald MacInnis, the University Glee Club by Stephen D. Tuttle. The music has been arranged by M. D. MacInnis, J. E. Berdahl and S. D. Tuttle with the assistance of members of both organizations.

Glee Club record on 78s

Quick followup to my post about the 1947 Virginia Glee Club album Songs of the University of Virginia: yesterday I scored a copy of the original release. As I surmised, it was originally released on 3 78RPM records in an “album,” or book containing the records in three separate sleeves.

The good news is that the album has liner notes, which I will be transcribing at some point not too far from now. The bad news is that the liner notes don’t clarify either the recording release date (still estimated at 1947 based on the UVA library photo evidence) or the copyright of the record. They also muddy the waters about the origin of the Glee Club, dating it to the 1892 formation of the Glee, Banjo and Madrigal Club rather than to the formation of the original Glee Club in 1871. But it’s more information than we had before, so that’s cool.

Kickoff

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So, as I posted on my Facebook account last night, I remember when UVA used to beat other football teams 23–3, not get beaten by that amount. Sigh.

Other traditions: in times past, the first concert of the Virginia Glee Club’s season was called the Kickoff Concert, and the program featured traditional university songs as well as the Glee Club’s normal classical repertoire. Now? Apparently, the Virginia Choral Showcase is the order of the day instead. Sensible in that it makes sure that there isn’t a glut of choral concerts competing for audience, but I bet it limits the groups’ ability to perform bigger works for that first concert. It also eliminates one crucial opportunity for working with visiting choirs.

But then, maybe I’m just biased. Fifteen years ago, I was just getting started as the Vice President of the Glee Club, a position whose chief responsibility then was concert publicity, which for us largely meant posters. So I learned how to design posters. I inherited a big cardboard portfolio of posters with designs that had been used and reused for many years. Most were hand drawn; all had some level of nostalgic meaning. I thought that the posters didn’t stand out, and that they didn’t project the kind of image that director John Liepold and I thought the group should claim: professional, an important part of the University, fun. The first poster of the year was for the Kickoff Concert. So to replace the hand-drawn image in use for several years prior, I went searching in Special Collections at Alderman Library for old pictures of the football team.

And I found the shot attached to this post, an actual football kick (albeit in practice). I surrounded it with sans serif typography—Franklin Gothic Condensed, letterspaced, a favorite— in homage to a famous Elvis Presley poster of about the same vintage as the photo. It was great. We used it for two seasons while I was there. Then the group moved on to other images and eventually stopped doing Kickoff Concerts.

I found the image again recently while working on a Wikipedia article. It hit me again the same way it did back then, an immediate punch. And I thought about change, and how the immediacy of an image can fool you into thinking that things don’t change. But of course they do, and you can change with them or stay out of the way.

Songs of the University of Virginia

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My copy of Songs of the University of Virginia, the Virginia Glee Club recording made in 1947 that I bought on eBay, arrived earlier this week. Between work and a million other things, I didn’t get a chance to listen to it until Thursday night, when I ripped the record to lossless AAC using my Griffin iMic and Amadeus Pro (see my earlier note on my increasingly unlikely project to rip all my vinyl records for pointers). And it’s a little different than I expected.

First off, some new findings about its pedigree. As I posted earlier, University archives said it was recorded by RCA Victor, but the record cites “Recorded Publications Company” as the label. There is no further information other than an address in New Jersey. I did some Googling, and it seems that this was a not uncommon arrangement. RPC was kind of a vanity vinyl press for small markets like universities, and in at least one other case they published recordings that were actually made by RCA Victor engineers.

There is very little on the record itself to help with additional clues about its provenance—no liner notes or even any text on the back cover, and no date. But a few clues are possible to deduce. First, this record is not the original format that was issued in 1947. There is a scan of the record in a UVA exhibit that shows the label, with only two songs on one side, not the four or five in the current pressing. This is a simple mystery to solve, though: the university archives speak of a “three-record album”—in this case, they apparently mean album as in the original books of 78-RPM discs. This would mean that the first edition had three 78-RPM records in it, which has since been condensed to the current 33 1/3 RPM LP with nine total songs.

The performances themselves? This is a bit of a surprise. For the most part, the Glee Club sings in unison, not harmony, and the band has the harmony lines and the interesting parts of the arrangement. Apparently the a cappella part of the Glee Club’s history lay in the future. And the songs themselves are really interesting too: both verses of the “Good Old Song,” a bunch of now-obscure football songs like “Hike, Virginia”; some less obscure football songs like the “Yell Song” (which was being sung during my Glee Club years; and “Virginia, Hail, All Hail!” which the Glee Club currently pairs with the “Good Old Song” in performances. And then there are the real obscurities: a setting of “Mr. Jefferson’s Favorite Psalm,” the theme songs of Eli Banana and T.I.L.K.A., and a recording of “From Rugby Road to Vinegar Hill” which omits the, um, most colorful verse. Full tracklisting below; as on the record label, the years denote classes of graduation where applicable:

  1. “Cavalier Song” (Lee 1924/Lewis 1925)
  2. “Good Old Song” (Craighill 1895)
  3. “Hike, Virginia” (McVeigh 1907/Crenshaw 1908)
  4. “Psalm Fifteen” (arr. Daniel Purcell)
  5. “Yell Song” (Lehman 1915)
  6. Ribbon Society Songs: “Eli Banana The Starry Banner”
  7. Ribbon Society Songs: “Come Fill Your Glasses Up for T.I.L.K.A.”
  8. “From Rugby Road to Vinegar Hill-Glory, Glory to Virginia-Fill Up Your Old Silver Goblet”
  9. “Virginia, Hail, All Hail” (Morrow 1921)

The next task for this particular Glee Club alum is tracing the copyright of the recording. I can’t help but think that some alums of Mr. Jefferson’s University would be interested in checking out these recordings as CDs or downloads—and if that means that we could help make some extra dough for the group, all the better.

It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights…

…It’s time to wait for the Cavaliers to blow it in the fourth quarter, on NCAA football (tomorrow) night.

Speaking of the Hoos, a UVA undergrad on Facebook told me that the South Lawn project (building new academic buildings over Jefferson Park Avenue and into the parking lot across from New Cabell) has claimed the life of the Glee Club House Annex, also known as Acme Acres (former phone number: AXE-ARCH). Moment of silence. I crashed on scary futons in that house on more than one occasion and designed a fair amount of Glee Club paraphernelia on Tyler’s computer there. I was also exposed to the horrors of Paul Stancil on a sugar high, and Jack Van Impe telling us that the Bible says that the Antichrist is coming from Spain, so watch who the UN puts on the Security Council. Plus “This rotund marmot is not amused.” Sigh.

Virginiabilia

recording engineer at recording of Songs of the University of Virginia, 1947, courtesy Special Collections, UVA

I got a nice score for a collection of Glee Club memorabilia today: I purchased an LP on eBay called Songs of the University of Virginia that was recorded in the late 1940s with the Virginia Glee Club and a University band. I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of the record, as much to clear up the discography as anything else. While the eBay listing gave the record number as RPC 81952 (a listing that doesn’t turn up any other Google hits), an exhibit at the UVA Library cites the record as an RCA Victor recording.

There is a surprising amount of documentary evidence about this session, including the picture to the right (from the University of Virginia Visual History Collection in the Special Collections department of the UVA Library). From the notes on these photos, we know that the disc was recorded under the direction of Donald MacInnis and Stephen Tuttle, and that it was to be released on RCA Victor in 1947. But even here there is some confusion. Another 1947 photo shows the Glee Club with Harry Pratt, who was apparently also a director of the group. So the chronology of directors is a little confused.

This is why I have currently only completed the history of the group through 1915. The documentary evidence for subsequent years, up until the time when the group split off from the Music Department in 1989, is scanty—at least online. I know other records (concert programs and posters, University newspapers) will help to fill in the blanks; since I only get to Charlottesville every four years or so, I may have to get some help to piece the rest of the evidence together.