Virginia – Page 6 – Jarrett House North

That strange fragile feeling

This has been a winter of illness, unusually so for me. Between Thanksgiving and New Years I was down for almost six weeks with a hacking cough that started with a week of fever and was so hard-pressed to clear stuff from my lungs that I ended up fracturing (or at least pulling) a rib. And now at the end of the winter or beginning of spring I was laid low for several days with another fever + upper respiratory condition, just in time for Easter.

And man, I had forgotten how logy I get when I have a fever. I’m three days on from the last fever and still tired around the edges.

It reminds me of the summer after my third year at the University of Virginia. I had just finished my first summer away from home, doing a lab internship, and I headed back to my family home and slept. For like a day. That in itself was not so unusual, but the fever was. The doctor confirmed that I had finally contracted mono. My third year roommate had had a bad case of it before we went home for break, so apparently it incubated over the summer and then started out slowly.

The end result was brutal. I had enough energy to do a few things, if I forced myself, but then had to sleep for hours. I pulled myself together well enough to get back to the University of Virginia, where the truly painful part of the sickness revealed itself: I was going to have to tough it out without air conditioning, since I was living that fall in a Lawn room in Mr. Jefferson’s original part of the University Grounds. So there were a great many afternoons spent exhausted, sweating, sleepless. And, reinforcing the ambience, I was reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The General In His Labyrinth, about Simón Bolívar’s dying journey down the Magdalena River. Languishing in the August (and September) Charlottesville heat, I felt as the Liberator must have felt.

I still feel little echoes of that day any time I spend more than a few days sick, as though I’m preparing to return to that sweat-dampened bed with barely enough energy to stand. At this point in my life I know that one day, I hope many years from now, it’ll be a return for good. These illnesses, inconsequential as they are, are just brief glimpses of that ultimate end.

—And that’s why men have a reputation for being bad patients.

Fossils on the bench

As I celebrate the appointment of a fellow Glee Club alum to the bench of the fifth judicial district in Virginia, I thought it would be fun to take a look at the company he joins of fossils who’ve been judges.

John W.G. Blackstone (1879–1880 season). Blackstone (1858–1911) was one of the more notable politicians of the 1879–1880 class (Wilson aside), serving in the Virginia State Senate from 1884 to 1896 when he was appointed the county judge for Accomac and serving as a judge on the Eighth and Eleventh Judicial Circuits until his retirement in 1908.

Oliver Whitehead Catchings (1891–1892 season). At Virginia, he was a law student, captain and quarterback of the football team, member of Phi Kappa Psi, the Z Society and Eli Banana, and editor of both Corks and Curls and College Topics. He completed law school at Virginia and practiced law in Washington, DC while his father, Thomas Clendinen Catchings, was in Congress, then returned with his father to Vicksburg to establish the practice of Catchings & Catchings. He was appointed judge of the 9th Mississippi District in 1905, and died unexpectedly of heart disease in 1916.

Duncan Lawrence Groner (between 1894 and 1896). As Wikipedia records, Groner served as a judge of the Eastern District of Virginia and as chief justice for the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, as well as serving six years in the United States Senate for Virginia.

George Latham Fletcher (seasons between 1895 and 1898, music director 1897–1898). A member of the Z Society and Eli Banana, he practiced law, served as judge of the 28th Judicial Circuit of Virginia in Warrenton, and served two terms as a state senator. Possibly the most memorable case over which he presided as judge was the divorce of future Duchess of Windsor Wallis Simpson from her first husband, in 1927.

Frederick Garner Duval (1905–1906 season). A member of T.I.L.K.A. and the dramatic troupe the Arcadians while at Virginia, Duval was an attorney in Alexandria and later became civil police justice there.

Sheffey Lewis Devier (1917–1918 season). Devier practiced law in Harrisonburg, and served as both a justice of the peace and judge of the juvenile and domestic relations court for Rockingham County. He later served a term as mayor of Harrisonburg.

Absalom Nelson Waller (from 1922 to 1925). Vice president of the Glee Club, he served as a county judge in Spotsylvania County for 32 years.

Robert Fitzgerald (1939–1940 season). An engineering student at Virginia, he served in the US Marine Corps during World War II at the Pacific front and and was discharged a second lieutenant. He practiced law in Falls Church, was appointed a trial judge in Fairfax County, and was later elected to the Virginia Senate.

Charles Stevens Russell (from 1945 to 1948). A Raven, he was appointed to the Seventeenth Judicial Court of Virginia in 1962, and served there until he joined the Virginia Supreme Court in 1982, retiring in 1991.

Edward Earle Zehmer (from 1949 to 1951). Another Marine, Zehmer practiced law for 23 years before his appointment to the First District Court of Appeal in Florida in 1983.

There are probably other still-living Glee Club fossils who sit on the bench, but those are the ones we know of for now. So my friend is in very good company!

The fabric of the University

Members and alumni of the Virginia Glee Club have contributed many things to the University, from musical theater to classical performances to “The Good Old Song.” But until this weekend I didn’t know that they had also contributed a piece of the University’s facilities.

I read through the 1905 edition of Corks and Curls in the San Francisco airport Friday morning. (I know, I know: the high life.) I found a page on the 1904-1905 Glee Club that I had previously missed. It listed two Humes, Howard and John, as among the officers of the combined Glee and Mandolin Clubs. Over the weekend I did some research on them.

Howard Hume, it turns out, was quite the adventurer. A physician, he got an officers’ commission in the Army Reserves in 1913 and went to Europe as a surgeon attached to the British Army during World War I. He was head of surgery and later head of the hospital at a series of camps, forts and other army posts for the next few years, even spending a few years on Corregidor in the 1930s. He continued to serve in Army hospitals across the American south in his early 60s during World War II.

His brother John Edmund Norris Hume worked as an engineer for GE. We know less about his background, except for one sentence in the finding note for the archives of the president of the University, John Newcomb: “J.E.N. Hume-Memorial Fountain.”

John and Howard were the sons of Frank Hume, Civil War veteran and noted producer of whiskey in Alexandria at the turn of the century. And apparently John was the major donor for the fountain and wall—the Hume Memorial Fountain, with its whispering wall—that once sat in front of Monroe Hall and now is at the end of Newcomb Plaza.

So Glee Club alumni have contributed not only song, but also physical monuments to the University.

Virginia secret societies and North Korea

On Sunday, details emerged in the case of Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia student being detained in North Korea after an arrest two months ago as he prepared to depart the country. In a televised press conference, Warmbier confessed to attempting to steal a banner bearing a North Korean revolutionary slogan. He apologized for his “severe” crime and said that he was encouraged to commit the crime by the Friendship United Methodist Church, the Z Society, and the CIA. He begged for mercy, saying, “I beg that you see how I was used and manipulated. My reward for my crime was so much smaller than the rewards that the Z Society and the Friendship United Methodist Church get from the United States administration.”

Let me be clear: I’m very worried for Warmbier and don’t mean to make fun of his captivity, and hope he is returned soon. But to be honest, were the stakes not so high, this would read like world class trolling. For one thing, it’s pretty unlikely that the UMC is involved in funding petty theft of the sort practiced by university students with road signs on their walls all over the world. But what is the likelihood that the Z Society is involved?

Answer: pretty low. While you can choose to accept or not the Z Society’s denial of contact with Warmbier, the likelihood of their encouraging international hooliganism is quite low. The Z Society has always been the most staid of the University’s semi-secret societies, especially when compared with Eli Banana and their tradition of public processions with a huge bass drum, or the IMPs and their devil costumes and pyromania (not to mention their predecessors’ fun with taxidermy).

So: I think Warmbier is being forced to confess to his crime by a North Korean government that employs scriptwriters with overactive imaginations and inadequate research. If you’re going to frame an undergraduate for espionage, at least blame the right secret society.

Hot Feet: Lewis D. Crenshaw

Lewis Dabney Crenshaw, Paris 1918, courtesy UVA Special Collections.

On an airplane flight yesterday that had (extremely slow) WiFi, I did a little research and came across some more information about Lewis D. Crenshaw, the UVa alum who co-authored the football song “Hike, Virginia” and put together the first modern UVa reunions in 1914.

I remain awed by his tireless energy as UVA Alumni Association Secretary, particularly by his work as the director of the University’s European Bureau during World War I. But I hadn’t fully appreciated his student involvement. In a career that included a law degree, he was at one time or another a member of Delta Tau Delta, Phi Delta Phi, Lambda Pi, the O.W.L., P.K., the Raven Society, vice-president of the Arcadians, on the board of the Athletic Association, and King of the Hot Feet.

If that last one doesn’t resonate with you, the Hot Feet were the predecessor group of the University’s IMP Society, given to elaborate rituals and a certain degree of hooliganism. According to University historian Virginius Dabney, they were apparently disbanded after a 1911 prank:

One of their more raucous nighttime performances consisted of removing the stuffed animals, snakes, and other varmints from the Cabell Hall basement, where they were stored, and stationing them behind the professors’ classroom desks and in front of their residences on the Lawn. This assemblage, which included a kangaroo, a tiger, an ostrich, a moose, boa constrictor, threetoed emu, and other animals, fowls, and reptiles, greeted the dumbfounded citizenry on Easter Sunday morning. On top of this, some well-lubricated Hot Feet bulled their way into a student’s room, roughed him up, and carried off a beer stein.

But at the time of Crenshaw’s Kingship, the Hot Feet were known mostly for their elaborate public coronations, costumes, and their public singing. Bringing it back to the Glee Club, the tune of their “Hot Feet Song” is the tune to the football song “Hike, Virginia”—unsurprising, given that both Crenshaw and his co-author Charles S. McVeigh were Hot Feet!

I close with an image of Crenshaw in full “King of the Hot Feet” regalia, presumably dating from long after his Kingship. I will say this: whatever the mischief that the Hot Feet got into, it looks like they had a hell of a lot of fun.

The first Glee Club reunion

Virginia Glee Club presidents at the 140th anniversary alumni sing (2011) — photo courtesy Jeff Slutzky

We’re in the run-up to the Virginia Glee Club 145th Anniversary Reunion, and that has me thinking about the history of Glee Club reunions.

The earliest record of Glee Club involvement in a reunion activity predates both the Glee Club as a well-established organization and formal reunions at the University of Virginia. In an article published in the Virginia University Magazine in October 1882 describing the final exercises of the previous June, this description occurs:

In the afternoon came the Alumni dinner whereat many of the young initiates forgot themselves and waxed uproarious–especially to be noticed was a sober minded one who insisted on drinking to the health of the “Glee Club” after every song in which performances his stentorian lungs did effective service.

So before there were Glee Club reunions, there were alumni at University functions who were involved with the Glee Club.

The next reunion was likely the 50th Anniversary concert in 1936. I say “likely” because we don’t have a record of an actual reunion event, but we do have evidence that there was going to be, thanks to the listing of the Glee Club’s Alumni Advisory Board in the 1935 Annual Concert program.

After that the record is murky. The next one for which we have a record is the 125th Anniversary in 1996 (in between these two we changed the founding date from 1886 to 1871 based on better evidence). This established the format for future reunions: a Glee Club performance, an alumni sing, a banquet.

Regular five year reunions began in 2006 with the establishment of the Virginia Glee Club Alumni and Friends Association and the 135th anniversary. Reunions have followed at five year intervals since then. If you haven’t done so, it’s fun to check out the photos, video, and audio from the 140th.

“In the evening, by the moonlight”

1938-virginiaspectator-1 — Cover to the April 1938 issue of the *Virginia Spectator*

I had a lucky eBay find last week: a copy of the April 1938 issue of the Virginia Spectator, the successor to the University of Virginia Magazine and the original University of Virginia literary mag. These magazines aren’t especially valuable, though they only turn up infrequently. What made this one stand out was an article by a Virginia Glee Club member, Daniel Jenkins, about the state of song at the University.

Jenkins is an alum I’ve known about for some time. When I was an undergrad, he sent us a letter about his experience as a Glee Club member in the 1930s. I subsequently discovered that he had been a member of the Tin Can Quartet (which I wrote about a while ago) He is, I believe, still with us and still supporting the Glee Club’s endeavors, though I don’t know much about his whereabouts.

This article provides one of the earliest existing descriptions of Glee Club alumni singing:

On Saturday nights of Finals, however, a minor miracle took place. Gathered in and around a certain room on East Lawn were a goodly number of dark conspirators; six members of the class of 1912 had slipped away from their comrades, bearing with them a huge Mason jar containing a mint julep, and were on their way to join the group lurking in the shadows of East Lawn. Three members of the Tin Can Quartet, a dozen members of the Glee Club, past and present, and an odd assortment of dates waited expectantly as the six alumni approached. And then, a short five minutes later—ah, shades of the mighty Caruso!—it had been a long year—the soft, harmonious tones of “Sweet Adeline” once again rolled up and down the Lawn. The same moon shimmered through the trees and the same purple shadows mingled with the ghostly figures that stood grouped beneath a stately oak. A prominent and dignified New York attorney gazed up at the stars and hit notes of which he had never before believed himself capable. A notorious “big business man” drowned the sorrows of a troubled world in his Mason jar and gazed down at the green sod beneath his feet, rumbling a potent bass that seemed to mingle with the very roots of the mighty oak which towered above him.

For three hours the singing continued. They sang every song that ever graced a barbershop of old. Juleps were plentiful and so were first tenors—happy coincidence. But finally, at four o’clock in the morning, and when voices were so hoarse that anything above a whisper was an effort, the small crowd began to break up. The six alumni, their eyes tired but shining, stumbled wearily across the Lawn, speaking in reverent tones of the song-fests that used to be so common and now are so rare. The others, lingering for a brief moment over the dregs, said good-night and went their separate ways. The Lawn was once again cloaked in silence.

I was unsurprised, but a little disappointed, to find that even this memory carried the taint of the South’s original sin, though, with the inclusion of the minstrel show song “In the Evening, By the Moonlight.” Again, a reminder that the Glee Club was like every Southern cultural institution and carried the seeds of slavery’s past with it into the twentieth century.

But the article gives me hope, too, that the power of song can still bridge generations and tap deeper reserves of humanity in the singer and the listener. It’s a timely reminder, given the Glee Club’s upcoming 145th Reunion celebration in April. I hope the juleps are plentiful then too.

Glee Club history: Edward Addison Craighill Jr.

E.A. Craighill, 1893 Corks and Curls — E.A. Craighill, 1893 *Corks and Curls*

I’ve written a few times about one of the Virginia Glee Club’s more notable alumni, Edward Addison Craighill, Jr., who is principally credited with the authorship of the “Good Old Song,” the de facto alma mater song of the University of Virginia. But I thought it might be worth looking at his life beyond this song.

Craighill was born in 1873 in Lynchburg, Virginia. His namesake, his uncle, surgeon Edward Addison Craighill, had been at age 17 the youngest doctor to serve in the Medical Department of the Confederate Army, and wrote a memoir of his experiences. Craighill entered the University of Virginia to study law in 1892, and was there to greet the football team in the fall of 1893 as they returned triumphant from a victory. Out of the crowd came what is now the first verse of “The Good Old Song.” Craighill subsequently wrote a second and, for an alumni banquet in 1910, a third verse for the song. But in a 1922 article in the University of Virginia Magazine, he disclaimed authorship of the first stanza, noting that “no one man should be credited with the authorship.” During his time at Virginia he was a member of the Virginia Glee Club and participated in the 1894 tour.

Craighill graduated in 1895 from the Academic Department and finished his law degree in 1896, gaining employment as a writer for a law encyclopedia before joining the firm of Fletcher, McCutcheon and Brown in New York. He died in 1948.

I think there’s something touching about Craighill’s insistence, 30 years after the debut of the song, that he deserved no credit for the “Good Old Song.” It’s not clear that, after the 1922 article, he was included in alumni outreach. He’s not mentioned in a 1935 “Alumni Advisory Board” that included other past presidents and luminaries of the group, for instance. But his name remains one of the most cited in Glee Club programs, and I believe he deserves more credit than he gave himself for the song. After all, in the drunken crowd that came up with “it cheers our hearts and warms our blood to hear them shout and roar,” someone had to remember the words well enough to write them down.

Winter Song

Speaking of eight years in, I missed a day of posting yesterday due to the Veracode sales kickoff, so I’m going to do a two-fer today to make up.

With the past weekend’s killer storm in DC and Charlottesville (as well as most of the rest of the mid-Atlantic), I couldn’t help but thinking about ice gnomes. One of the great fun songs of my Virginia Glee Club days was singing “The Winter Song,” an odd little tune that… well, look at the lyrics:

Ho, a song by the fire;
Pass the pipes, pass the bowl.
Ho, a song by the fire
With a skoal, with a skoal.
Ho, a song by the fire;
Pass the pipes with a skoal,

For the wolf-wind is wailing at the doorways,
And the snow drifts deep along the road,
And the ice gnomes are marching from their Norways,
And the great white cold walks abroad.

But, here by the fire, we defy frost and storm;
Ha, ha we are warm, and we have our heart’s desire.
For here, we’re good fellows, and the beechwood and the bellows;
And the cup is at the lip in the pledge of fellowship.

I had always wondered about the tune, so did a little research. Turns out “The Winter Song” is a collegiate song, but it originally comes from Dartmouth, not Virginia. The poetry collection Dartmouth Lyrics prints the poem “Hanover Winter Song” by Richard Hovey, who in 1898 convinced his college friend Frederic Field Bullard to write the music.

The tune lived on in Dartmouth fraternity singing, until that tradition died away, and in Dartmouth singing groups such as the Aires. But it took John Liepold to bring it to the University of Virginia, where it’s become a favorite of the Glee Club.

The Grass-Hopper Cantata

Every now and then, in the course of researching the Virginia Glee Club’s history, I find myself following up loose threads that take me to some unusual places. This week I paged through old issues of the Madison Hall Notes, the weekly journal of the University of Virginia YMCA. The journal was published from around 1905 through about the start of the first World War, at the height of the Y’s influence over the student body, and contain a wealth of information about student life—including the Glee Club.

During this period, the Glee Club ebbed and flowed, but during three of its most active years (1905-06, 1910-11, and 1915-16) it was closely associated with the YMCA, and actually rehearsed in Madison Hall. As a result, its rehearsals and performances were listed in the Madison Hall Notes. I learned about a few concerts in Lynchburg and at Sweet Briar and Hollins… and about the Grass-Hopper Cantata.

Seems that in April 1911 the Glee Club did a joint benefit for the King’s Daughters (a hospital charity) and the UVA General Athletic Association, and performed the “Grass-Hopper Cantata.” What the heck is that? Apparently an 1878 takeoff on Italian opera by Innes Randolph, which was still being performed thirty years later… There’s a copy in the University of Virginia Library for those who feel inclined to dig deeper; I am just amazed to learn such a thing existed.

The machinery of slavery

Out of the Box: Virginia Untold: Certificates of Importation. Out of the Box, the blog of the archives of the Library of Virginia, has consistently been one of my favorite reads for the windows it offers into the state – er, commonwealth – of my birth. And, honestly, into the past of our nation. Today’s post, by Greg Crawford, is a good illustration of why.

What is both fascinating and revolting about the history of slavery (and its descendants, white supremacy and institutionalized racism) is the level of legal, statutory, bureaucratic, and judicial machinery required to keep the enslavement of human beings “orderly” and “civil.” The example in this post, certificates of importation, were a bureaucratic invention that sought to ensure compliance with the law barring importation of slaves for sale into Virginia. Said law was enacted in 1778, not for humanitarian reasons, but apparently to ensure that England and British ships would not profit from the slave trade during the Revolutionary War.

(It’s worth noting that the original draft of the bill would have explicitly linked the barring of importation of slaves to the suppression of slavery more broadly. The final language of the bill contained no such linkage.)

An exception in the 1778 law permitted slave owners permanently relocating to Virginia to import their slaves to the commonwealth, provided they swore an oath that they did not intend to sell any of them. The oath became part of a legal document, the certificate of importation, that provided names, ages, and physical descriptions of the slaves, where they were acquired, and from where they were being relocated. The certificate was filed in court. (The Library of Virginia is in the process of digitizing these court documents, and they’ve made a spreadsheet of the digitized records.) If a slave was illegally brought into the commonwealth, they could sue for their freedom; the presence of the certificate of importation was a closed door to a slave seeking to escape an unfair master, but failure to file the paperwork gave the slave grounds to file a freedom suit.

To summarize: slaves imported into Virginia had to have paperwork documented by a local magistrate containing an oath from their owner and filed in their county courthouse so that they were in compliance with a Revolutionary War era law preventing British profiteering, and the absence of such paperwork allowed a slave to sue for freedom. The amount of bureaucracy devoted to the peculiar institution, of which this is only a small piece, must have been completely mindboggling. And it gives me a renewed appreciation for the artifacts of history.

“The Business Manager … arranged a tour…”

"The Virginia Boys," Atlanta Constitution, January 28, 1894, p. 24. — “The Virginia Boys,” Atlanta Constitution, January 28, 1894, p. 24.

It was a busy fall. I gave my first public speech about the history of the Virginia Glee Club at last fall’s Glee Club banquet, and in the process did a little new research. I wanted to share a few notes from the background of that talk (slides here), which focused on the Glee Club’s tours beginning with its first off-Grounds concerts in the 1890s.

To do that, I’m including a short excerpt from a book I’ve been writing off and on on the history of the Glee Club. I’d love any feedback on the content below. The question I tried to answer was: given the Club’s spotty history for the first 20 years of its existence, why did it come roaring back in the late 1880s and early 1890s, going from virtual quiescence to mounting extensive tours? Here’s an excerpt that gives some of the background.

That the Glee Club’s early history should be bound to the Grounds of the University is unsurprising, if one considers both the fragile civil life and convalescing infrastructure of post-Reconstruction Virginia. That just 22 years after its founding it would be touring major Southern cities in four states staggers the mind until one thinks about one aspect of that badly injured infrastructure: the railroad.

Prior to the Civil War, the railroad did not enjoy the same rise to prominence in the South as in the North. In Virginia particularly, the spread of the railroad was hampered by the political power of the planters, who were suspicious of transportation initiatives that did not directly help get their goods to market faster, and of the elite in Richmond, who, starting with George Washington, had championed river transportation for goods, with an eye to keeping commerce in Virginia ports rather than sending it down the Mississippi to the port of New Orleans (under Spanish control until the Louisiana Purchase). In this spirit, the canal building enterprise that created the still-visible Chesapeake and Ohio Canal between Georgetown and Cumberland, MD and the James River and Kanawha Canal in Richmond sought to create water links from major plantations to ports. When railroads first started to be built in a significant way in Virginia, they were likewise viewed as ways to market for the planters; there was no vision of a network of rails that could assist with transit of goods over land and across state lines, much less comparable carriage of passengers.

After the Civil War, this began to change. The railroad company eventually known as the Chesapeake and Ohio bought smaller rail companies and began to connect the lines to out of state networks, beginning in the Reconstruction years. Following Reconstruction, the C&O was purchased by Northern rail barons and expanded still further.

And passenger trains became more widely available. In 1885, the Charlottesville Union Station, a passenger depot serving the C&O, the Virginia Midland Railway, and the Charlottesville and Rapidan Railroad opened on West Main Street in Charlottesville, where it still sits (serving Amtrak) today. Before this point, distance travel relied on horse power; afterwards, students could – and did – ride the rails.

So it was that the Glee Clubs of 1889–90, 1891–92 and 1892–93 mounted their first performances outside Charlottesville – albeit in the relatively close-to-hand locales of Staunton, Norfolk, Richmond and Petersburg. As we have seen, the Glee Club of 1889–90 had held a concert in the Public Hall in the Rotunda Annex, on April 11, 1890, and followed it that same weekend with performances in Lynchburg and Staunton. Two years later the Glee Club returned to the Public Hall on December 17, 1891, with a program that featured song in less than half the performance’s 15 numbers, the balance being devoted to banjo, guitar and mandolin works; the following night found them in Staunton, and a performance in Norfolk followed on April 20. The 1892–93 Club broadened its horizons still further, with a performance in “town” in the Levy Opera House in January, and a three city tour with appearances in the Richmond Theatre, the Norfolk Opera House, and the Academy of Music in Petersburg in February.…

After 1892–93, the group decided to travel much more ambitiously. Led by Bernard W. Moore and with help from a few graduating alumni, including George Ainslie, the group mounted its first major tour outside the state of Virginia. The 1894 Corks and Curls dramatically illustrates the growth of the group’s accomplishments, with the modest touring of 1891 through 1893 together taking up less than the space allotted to 1894.

Even before the tour proper, the Glee Club held performances in the Levy Opera House and the Staunton Opera House in mid-January 1894. The tour proper kicked off with a performance in Fayerweather Gymnasium on Tuesday, January 30, and was off to the Mozart Academy in Richmond the next day. Thursday saw the group in the Lexington (Kentucky) Opera House, and they continued in Kentucky with an engagement in the Louisville Masonic Temple on Friday. Saturday was the Grand Opera House in Nashville. The group took a day off for travel (and the Sabbath) but performed in DeGive’s Grand Opera House in Atlanta on Monday, February 5. Turning north again, they were in Chattanooga’s New Opera House Tuesday to conclude the tour on February 6. A performance in the Lynchburg Opera House on March 29 concluded the season.

How was such an elaborate and lengthy tour possible? Again, the railroad not only facilitated but was the only conceivable way to travel the miles from state to state so rapidly. Here the group had the assistance of the general passenger agent of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, John D. Potts. Apparently having no UVa connection, Potts nevertheless worked closely with the group through the 1890s, to the point of being named business manager of the group in 1895–96.

On not forgetting

As a fourth year undergrad student, I entered Julian Bond’s course on the history of the Civil Rights movement in the fall of 1993 not knowing what was going to happen to me. I didn’t really realize how much the class was changing me until I worked on my class project, which ended up being a paper on Virginia’s Massive Resistance laws.

Learning that my home state had, not fifteen years before my birth, decided that closing public schools was preferable to having to integrate them was mindboggling. Learning that a superintendent who still has an elementary school named after him in my home town could cite the small number of black applicants to a school as a reason not to desegregate it was shameful. Understanding the perfectly legal mechanisms that were used by segregationists and racists to avoid, subvert, and delay the implementation of the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board decision made me aware that there were more dimensions of evil than just cartoonish Klansmen.

In that context, it’s easy to understand why university students would want to remove the name of slaveowners from buildings. And why there have been calls to tear down monuments to Confederate soldiers. I find myself looking on such calls with mixed emotions, however.

As the historian of the Virginia Glee Club, I’ve had to grapple with the University’s mixed legacy on slavery and race. I learned about the Movement there, and the Glee Club was integrating truck stops on tours during the 1960s, but many of the Lawn buildings were probably built with slave labor, and as late as Faulkner’s first year as writer in residence, his proposal (in “A Word to Virginians“) of going along with integration met with an outcry there.

One cannot change history by removing names, and one cannot remove the stain of slavery’s original sin from the United States by removing monuments. Until one understands that one’s parents or grandparents felt no shame in putting out an issue of the student magazine with a triumphant Lee standing over Grant in front of the stars and bars (see above), one can’t understand the forces that shaped the culture that exists today.

“A musical entertainment in the Town Hall”

It’s been some time since I’ve posted any narrative about my work researching the history of the Virginia Glee Club. That’s honestly because a lot of it has been fairly uninspiring heavy lifting: looking up death dates of alumni from the 1930s, transcribing rosters from bad photocopies of Corks and Curls, and so on. But this week, as I tried to put some narrative around the first decade of the Glee Club’s history (which for this purpose we’ll describe as 1871 to 1880), I ran into another one of those interesting corners that pops up from time to time.

This time the question that I found myself asking was: what were all the musical students at the University of Virginia doing between the demise of the Claribel Club in 1875 and the coming of Woodrow Wilson’s incarnation of Glee Club in 1879?

Turns out, they were putting on minstrel shows.

To summarize: between 1876 and 1878, the Virginia University Magazine published notes about three different minstrel performances. The first note, published in October 1876, noted that some students intended to form a “negro minstrel troup” to perform for the local audience and also for the “young ladies, orphans and lunatics” of Staunton, Virginia. The following year, we are told that a “repetition with slight variations of the long-to-be remembered minstrel performance of last year” will be held in the Town Hall, for the benefit of the Rives Boat Club. (The Town Hall, later known as the Levy Opera House, would be the site of a Glee Club performance in 1894; the Rives Boat Club was in existence at least through 1889 and appears to be the distant forerunner of UVa’s crew team.) In 1878, the performance returned and once again benefited the Rives, though the Magazine noted that attendance had fallen off the previous year. There is no mention of a show in the years following, during which the Glee Club returned, though there is evidence, in the form of a program, that a troupe re-formed and performed in 1886 or 1887.

This isn’t the first time we’ve bumped up against minstrel traditions in researching the history of the Glee Club, and it likely won’t be the last. But it’s fascinating to me to see how the threads intertwine, and see the Glee Club in a larger context. That 1886 program lists Glee Club president Sterling Galt as one of the performers in the minstrel program, along with J.R.A. Hobson and W.P. Brickell.

I’ve looked for minstrel troupe programs in the library catalog; while the 1886 program is there, there’s no record of the 1870s performances—they may have been lost in the Rotunda fire. But I hope to find more information about the performances some day. The dividing line between outright minstrelry and the banjo and mandolin performances—and membership—of the Glee Club appears to be pretty faint. Understanding the complexity of the interplay between Southern culture, race, and music in the formation of the early group provides a fascinating glimpse into student life in the dawn of the Glee Club’s years.

A dream of Christmas: the Glee Club Christmas Concert’s first ten years

Oldest known Glee Club Christmas Concert program, from 1943

This year marked the 74th annual Christmas concerts of the Virginia Glee Club. Started during wartime in 1941 by Glee Club conductor Harry Rogers Pratt and continued through to the present day without interruption, this concert series has been the longest running musical tradition at the University of Virginia. I thought I’d look back and see what we know about these concerts and their evolution.

The first Glee Club Christmas concert was held in 1941 under the direction of Harry Rogers Pratt. We don’t have any documentary evidence of this concert; somehow no one associated with the University saved the program, at least not that we’ve found. But we have a College Topics (forerunner of the Cavalier Daily) article documenting the existence of the second concert, in 1942. The concert was to include a procession down the Lawn, “several Wassail songs,” and an audience singalong.

The 1942 concert was Pratt’s last performance as Glee Club director; he resigned the following spring to focus on war efforts. His successor, Stephen Tuttle, continued the tradition during wartime and arguably made the Glee Club Christmas concert what it is today, with a mix of audience carols, familiar and new holiday music, and interesting collaborations. We have the program from the 1943 concert, and it’s interesting reading. Arguably a little heavy on Holst and Bach, there are a few jewels among the items chosen, including a Tuttle arrangement of the Spanish carol “Hasten, Shepherds” that would show up performed by the Virginia Gentlemen in the 1967 Christmas performances. While composer and music department head Randall Thompson was accompanist for the performances, none of his works were programmed; that would change in years to come.

The other noteworthy thing about the 1943 performance is the inclusion of the Madrigal Group. Comprised of women associated with the University community, this group of thirteen women appears to have been UVa’s first women’s chorus! (I previously wrote about the Madrigal Group in 2011; sadly nothing came of my appeal for information.)

We don’t have a program from 1944, but the performance is attested in College Topics, including a roster of the Madrigal Group (which included a few members who had sung in 1943). 1945 continues in much the same vein, including a performance of Randall Thompson’s Alleluia (first performed by the Glee Club in its fall concerts that year).

The postwar years saw a massive swell of membership in the Glee Club, but the Christmas Concert formula remained remarkably stable, albeit with one major change, the departure of the Madrigal Group — there’s no attestation of the group’s existence after Christmas 1945 (save for a brief revival of the name in 1957). Over time, as Tuttle’s tenure in the directorship lengthened, his influence on the repertoire increased, with Renaissance composers like Orlando di Lasso and Josquin appearing alongside the customary Bach in 1947. This concert was also the oldest for which a recording survives, according to the UVA Special Collections library.

In 1948, during Tuttle’s Harvard sabbatical, Henry Morgan stepped in and delivered a fine entry in the canon, with a program that differed in specifics (a new Peter Warlock carol, a new carol by Morgan himself) but overall fit the general formula that was by now well established. I don’t have the 1949 program in the Glee Club archives, but 1950 continued along the same track, with new carols (“How Still and Tiny,” a Polish carol, makes its first appearance this year) joining the well established English and French numbers.

In the first ten years, the formula for the Virginia Glee Club Christmas Concert was well established: audience carols, familiar and unfamiliar tunes, larger works, guest groups, and lots of reflective holiday works. That you could take any of these programs from the first ten years and perform them without modification today suggests the longevity of the formula, and helps to drive home why these concerts became an annual tradition.