Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

My copy of the Virginia Glee Club’s 1972 record, A Shadow’s On the Sundial, arrived today. I haven’t listened to much of it yet, but a quick scan of the first few tracks on the first side and a review of the liner notes (transcribed) provide the following observations:

This is a completely different group than [...]

Editor’s note: The Virginia Glee Club’s 1972 record A Shadow’s on the Sundial was recorded to commemorate the group’s 100th anniversary and to raise funds for its 1972 European tour. The credits and liner notes are below. Judging from the notes, the album may have originally been called Songs of the University of Virginia, after [...]

Continuing this week’s back to school theme (hey, in the fall I get a little nostalgic for UVA), I did a little more spelunking through the broken Cavalier Daily archives and turned up a review of the Glee Club’s 1972 European tour. Check out Around the Western World in Eighteen Days: A Glee Club Diary, [...]

Editor’s note: This article, originally published in the May 12, 1972 issue of the Cavalier Daily, gives a summary of the Virginia Glee Club’s 1972 European Tour. The original source was extracted from the raw XML file of the issue in the UVA library’s electronic archive.
Around The Western World In Eighteen Days: A Glee Club [...]

Having sung the title work, I’ve always been curious about the Glee Club’s 1972 recording A Shadow’s on the Sundial, not least because it financed their 1972 concert tour. I hadn’t been able to find any references about it other than a newspaper ad and a passing mention in Virginius Dabney’s history of the 1920s [...]

I got a little pleasant news in the mail over the weekend. Somehow I had missed the announcement that the Virginia Glee Club won a Jefferson Trust grant back in April to record a followup to Songs of the University of Virginia. I had previously been contacted by a current Glee Club member who asked [...]

I had a bit of driving to do this weekend; I traveled from one Arlington to the other, from Massachusetts to Virginia, so that I could help Craig Fennell celebrate his impending nuptials. It was a great time, quite mellow as these things go. Lars Bjorn and his wife Erin were great hosts, and I [...]

Interesting choice of campaign destination for Hillary Clinton on Monday: she spent an hour with Larry Sabato’s PLAP 101 class at the University of Virginia (via the Tin Man). It appears, from last night’s election returns, that it didn’t help, since Obama swept Virginia (and Maryland, and DC) by a healthy margin.
What surprises me a [...]

Funny what you find when you dig through University archives. I was going through some old Virginia Glee Club photos tonight when I decided it would be a good idea to actually read the lists of names at the bottom. Some familiar names popped out (Ernest Mead, Harry Rogers Pratt), and then one (in an [...]

While doing some Wikipedia related research last night, I stumbled across something interesting. The record album Songs of the University of Virginia, which I’ve long thought was recorded in 1947 based on photographic evidence from the University archives, was apparently not released until 1951. How do I know this? From a 1951 Washington Post article, [...]

I’ve been expanding my Wikipedia footprint over the past few months. Starting on the Virginia Glee Club page, my contributions now span articles on a few University presidents, the Raven Society, the Virginia Gentlemen, and even the Seven Society. Yes, editing articles on Wikipedia is a gateway drug.
So I made it formal the other day [...]

Now that’s a way to start to run up the score—a record-setting run in the Gator Bowl. I might have to start burning some bandwidth and post some Glee Club MP3s—I had to take the ones down that I posted during the VA Tech game because the downloads burned too much bandwidth.

Courtesy fellow VMHLB the Tin Man, the other version of the Twelve Days of Christmas, the audience participation version performed by the Virginia Glee Club. Some of the traditions seem to have gone away: there is no “Hens Suck Eggs” chant from the Four Calling Birds, for instance, and the traditional bum-rush of the conductor [...]

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 [...]

On a couple of nice plays, the score goes 14–13 as Virginia takes the lead. This is the lead off song from the LP reissue of the Songs of the University of Virginia album:
Cavalier Song, Virginia Glee Club and UVA Band (1947) - Download 3.7 MB MP3