The elephant in the room
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The toll for this unnecessary, dishonest war is too high.
Glee Club history: from “The Cavalier Song” to McCarthy
Fulton Lewis, Jr. with Joe McCarthy (source: Life Magazine)
Today’s odd moment in Virginia Glee Club history comes by way of that “other” official Virginia song, “The Cavalier Song.” While most alums today are familiar only with “The Good Old Song,” that collectively authored song-about-a-song set to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” by Glee Club alum E.A. Craighill and sung by swaying Hoos at every touchdown, that song was never an official song of the University, though it has been the de facto alma mater since its introduction in 1895.
Instead, the University’s two official songs were chosen through a contest sponsored by College Topics (now The Cavalier Daily) in 1923. Seeking official University songs, the contest netted “Virginia, Hail, All Hail!“, by Glee Club alum John Albert Morrow, and “The Cavalier Song,” by English instructor Lawrence Lee and Glee Club alum Fulton Lewis, Jr. While most alums are familiar with “Virginia, Hail, All Hail!” only, if at all, through Glee Club performances, “The Cavalier Song” has been played at Virginia sports events by the various bands (University Band, Pep Band, Cavalier Marching Band) during the school’s history since its introduction. Because it’s typically performed as an instrumental, its lyrics have faded into obscurity, meaning that it is Fulton Lewis Jr.’s tune that we know best about the song.
It’s perhaps ironic that Lewis’s contribution to the University has been so long lasting, since many of his other contributions to history were decidedly less cheery. Described as “an indifferent student,” he left the University without a degree after three years and sought his fortune as a journalist, becoming a reporter and editor at the Washington Herald. After helping to unmask spy for Japan “Agent K” as Naval officer John Semer Farnsworth, he rose to fame as a conservative radio commentator, where at his peak he was syndicated on over 500 stations. As a commentator, he staked out a series of positions on the wrong side of history: against the New Deal and FDR, against America’s entry into World War II, and in support of Barry Goldwater and Joe McCarthy–backing the latter even after his nationwide disgrace.
Lewis’s ongoing support of McCarthy cost him his national audience, though he continued on the air until his death in 1966. He left behind him a noxious legacy and a reputation for subjective partisanship: the New Republic noted that his “wild charges were part of his campaign over many years to smear in every way possible the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and everybody not in accord with the most reactionary political beliefs”; the Washington Post memorialized him in 1987 as “one of the most unprincipled journalists ever to practice the trade”; and a profile on Salon calls him “a master of the partisan smear.” He called moderate Republicans, like Casper Weinberger, Communists. In many ways, then, he was ahead of his time.
Who redistributes the wealth?
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The cries of "wealth distribution" from people who have made their fortunes redistributing wealth are disingenuous at best.
Grab bag: Seduction of the innocent edition
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Dr. Wertham has become a special sort of villain in the minds of comics aficionados. It will be interesting to hear what sorts of things surface from these papers.
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Indeed. Proponents of jailbreaking don’t seem to realize that what they call “jailbreaks” others call “exploitable security vulnerabilities” that make it trivial for a hostile attacker to pwn the device.
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In Defense of Links, Part One: Nick Carr, hypertext and delinkification — Scott Rosenberg’s WordyardNot all hyperlinks are created equal. Critiquing the written web by the standards of hypertextual fiction is misleading.
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Interesting discussion of the intersection between IT, privacy and the honor system.
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No wonder there is an anxiety of influence.
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The highschooler who outsoloed Wynton Marsalis and other fun Seattle jazz stuff. Includes a callout to Matt Jorgenson.
“Vir-ir-gin-i-a”: from the UVA iPhone app to Bob Dylan
I was pleased to download and check out the University of Virginia’s new iPhone app. “One stop” doesn’t begin to cover the scope of this app — Grounds directory, news, alumni clubs, reunions, alumni magazine, the Cavalier Daily, sports scores (and notifications)…
…and music. I was even more pleased to find the Virginia Glee Club‘s recording of “Vir-ir-gin-i-a” on the app’s list (along with marching band renditions of “The Good Old Song” and other Virginia tunes. While “Vir-ir-gin-i-a” seems an odd tune to represent Club–the recording from which the song was taken, Songs of Virginia, has many more familiar UVA related songs including the superb “Virginia, Hail, All Hail“–it’s actually an interesting tie to the past of both the University and the Glee Club.
“Vir-ir-gin-i-a” has many connections to the Glee Club. Featuring an arrangement by long-time Club conductor Donald Loach based on a tune by Handel, the text is by UVa professor Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr. (1897-1972). Davis himself sang in the Glee Club shortly after the group’s reformation by Alfred Lawrence Hall-Quest, serving as secretary during the group’s 1916-1917 season (during which Club performed the blackface musical “Oh, Julius!,” a minstrel-show story of life in ancient Rome). Davis went on to serve in the Army during World War I; went to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship; and returned to the University as a professor in the English department in 1923.
And here’s where it gets interesting. Davis went on to his greatest fame as a folklorist, collecting three volumes of traditional ballad and folk songs through field research and becoming the archivist for the Virginia Folklore Society. The main thrust of his research was in showing that the English and Scottish ballads listed and enumerated by Harvard folklorist Francis J. Child (the “Child Ballads”) were alive and well on American soil for hundreds of years before their collection and numbering by Child.
While influencing numerous Virginia faculty, including Paul Gaston, his most unlikely influence was on folk singer and song collector Paul Clayton, a student of his in the 1950s, whose song “Who’ll Buy You Ribbons (When I’m Gone)” was “re-gifted” by Bob Dylan for “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” Of course “Who’ll Buy You Ribbons” was itself “re-gifted” from an Appalachian song called “Who’s Gonna Buy Your Chickens” which Clayton learned from Mary Bird McAllister, a song that was collected by Clayton while he was Davis’s student.
And “Vir-ir-gin-i-a”? Davis knocked it out in his spare time, apparently, in honor of the University’s sesquicentennial and premiered it himself at a meeting of the Jefferson Society. Loach arranged it for men’s voices for the 1972 Glee Club LP A Shadow’s on the Sundial, which financed the group’s first European tour, and it’s been in Club’s repertoire on and off since.
So while there are better known, and arguably better, pieces of Virginiana that could feature on future UVA app playlists, there are few that have so many interesting touchpoints to Glee Club, Virginia, and even pop music history.
links for 2010-08-26
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Nice. Now we need a "Strange Brew" cream ale.
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His takeaway from playing football at Virginia: "…[be] a good person. A good character guy. A community guy. That goes way beyond the Xs and the Os. If you are a stand-up guy, if you are true to your word, if you are respectful, I feel like you can do a lot of good things on the football field." If we can capture that spirit with Mike London, we'll have come a long way back from Al Groh.
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Making me rethink my pledge to never buy another VW.
Grab bag: Acquisition infopr0n, iPhone pinball
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That’s kind of awesome.
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Another interesting acquisition graphic.
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Fascinating coverage of a decade of Oracle acquisitions, and speculation on where it’s going next.
It’s full of stars
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Oh the beautiful visuals.
Design tipping points
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“Then this happened.” In retrospect it’s easy to see the design tipping points; they weren’t so apparent when they were happening.
Grab bag: More Fortify, the death of the web
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Gartner’s Joseph Feiman calls out Veracode as HP and IBM’s competitor.
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Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Grab bag: Fortify acquired
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Delighted to see HP’s acquisition of Fortify. Veracode now stands alone in offering independent third party assessments of application binaries. HP’s acquisition validates the market while accentuating Veracode’s differentiation.
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Excellent summary of thoughts and considerations about providing help content in web applications.
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No surprise if you’ve eaten Five Guys.
Proudly reversing scientific progress
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OK, antivaccination parents. Here’s the thing: you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. Your refusal to vaccinate your children is endangering everyone else.
Into the void
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Awesome, evocative model kit cum art project that uses Ray Bradbury’s 1949 story “Kaleidoscope” as a starting off point for a very physical meditation on mortality.
Security metrics presentation techniques
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Old but good article summarizing good data presentation techniques for security metrics.
Play, or promiscuous?
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Confirming what we all know. Sexy, sexy.
