Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

The 2010 Tour of the Northeast of the Virginia Glee Club is underway, and you can follow it on the first ever Club tour blog, Virginia Glee Club On Tour. So far it is bringing up memories of tours past: vain exhortations from group leadership to not strain the voice, movies on the bus (tip [...]

I have quite a few updates to post about the progress of the history of the Virginia Glee Club on the wiki, but today’s item deserved a jump to the head of the line: the resurfacing of a lost recording of the 1993 Virginia Glee Club singing our commissioned work to commemorate Thomas Jefferson’s 250th [...]

A quick post from the depths of Virginia musical history tonight. As part of a lot of miscellaneous University of Virginia memorabilia I got from eBay recently, I got an unusual item: a University of Virginia songbook that was handed out at football games. (Scans of the whole thing are available on Flickr.)  This particular [...]

I’m going through the backlog of blog posts I have about Club history and translating them into articles on the new Virginia Glee Club Wiki. It’s going to take a while, but slowly but surely things are getting filled in. This week I created new articles on J. A. Morrow and the Virginia Music Festival [...]

I’ve been busy recently, in my capacity as historian of the Virginia Glee Club Alumni and Friends Association, launching the next stage of the Virginia Glee Club history project: the Virginia Glee Club Wiki. Currently at 29 articles and growing, the wiki is intended as an authoritative repository of all sorts of Glee Club history.
Why [...]

There are two composers who pop up more consistently on recordings of the Virginia Glee Club than any other, across the years: E. A. Craighill, who is generally (though not completely correctly) credited with composing the “Good Old Song,” and J.A. Morrow, who composed the University’s official alma mater, “Virginia, Hail, All Hail.” The two [...]

I found more evidence tonight about the mysterious 1910 director of the Virginia Glee Club, M. S. Remsburg. Ironically enough, it came from the same source that gave us the information of his existence in the first place.
I was thrown off by a description of him as Prof. M.S. Remsburg. That may have been an [...]

We’ve visited the Virginia Glee Club during their spa years in the 1930s, but what was the group doing in the 1940s? Part of that history, the group’s participation in the creation of Randall Thompson’s “Testament of Freedom” (dedicated to the group and composed in honor of Thomas Jefferson’s 200th birthday), is well documented. The [...]

This is a review of a new CD from the Virginia Glee Club that is available for purchase on the group’s website.
This is the season of Virginia Glee Club CDs. After a long drought, Frank Albinder’s years as director are finally documented with not one, but three new recordings available now: Virginia Glee Club Live!, [...]

I’ve been busy, which is of course no excuse, but there are going to be posts forthcoming. I received my long-awaited copy of the Virginia Glee Club’s Songs of Virginia today in the mail, along with a new Christmas CD from the group, and notes on both will be forthcoming. I was tickled to get [...]

This post is one of an ongoing series on the history of the Virginia Glee Club.
Today, I heard something that hasn’t been widely heard in about seventy years: a recording of members of the Virginia Glee Club made in 1933.
Prior posts in this series have focused on the period from the 1890s to the early [...]

I’m gradually scanning and uploading the pages of the April 1921 Yellow Journal, that scurrilous anonymous satirical broadside at the University of Virginia. This morning I’ve uploaded pages 1 through 4 along with an index of the stories. The pages available through my site are 100dpi PNG files; TIFFs have also been produced.
For now, these [...]

Current status: Pages 1-4 are posted.
This page contains links to scans of the April 1921 edition of the anonymous satire broadsheet at the University of Virginia, The Yellow Journal. My copy of the issue is in fragile condition, so I photocopied it at 2 copies per page, then scanned the photocopies at 600 dpi in [...]

No, that’s not a typo, and no, I didn’t post the wrong picture–at least, not if the attributions in the Holsinger Digital Collection at UVA are correct. Today’s stroll down history lane with the Virginia Glee Club covers an era in their history which is, perhaps justifiably, forgotten–their days as a musical theatre troupe.
To understand [...]

I’ve had the pleasure this week of collaborating with an anonymous Wikipedia editor on a history of  the Yellow Journal–that scurrilous student humor magazine at the University of Virginia. In the process we found more than a few interesting points, like:

The Yellow Journal was originally founded in 1912 by the journalistic fraternity Sigma Delta Chi, [...]