Jarrett House NorthSecond verse, same as the first.

There’s not a lot to say about the Virginia Glee Club in the later 1950s, seemingly. The group lost one of its more influential directors, Stephen Tuttle, to Harvard in 1952, and saw two directors alternate during the remaining years. There were tours, sure; legend has it there were even panty raids on other campuses. But [...]

As these things tend to go, my Virginia Glee Club history project has ebbs and flows. Sometimes there’s not a lot to write about; sometimes there’s too much. Like this past week, when I nailed down the identity of a few presidents of the Glee Club and discovered one was a third cousin. I should [...]

In the process of putting together the Virginia Glee Club Wiki, containing the history of that illustrious 171-year-old assemblage, I’ve made my way through just about every official archive of Glee Club history. But there are gaps to be filled, so I’ve resorted to eBay. I’ve picked up yearbooks, magazines, and other ephemera trying to [...]

So here we are, on the eve of the last Virginia football game of 2011. At the beginning of the season, I had no hopes for a bowl game, in only the second season of the Mike London era. And yet here we are, in the Peach Bowl (now called the Chik-Fil-A Bowl) against Auburn. [...]

A while ago, I picked up an interesting historical keepsake from eBay–the program from the University of Virginia’s 1895 Public Days, aka graduation. I was hoping to find some Glee Club value here, and I got it. The program lists 1895-96 Glee Club president McLane Tilton, Jr. as completing his undergraduate degree, and also has [...]

It’s Saturday, so it’s time for another post about UVa’s football song heritage. This week’s contest isn’t one of those like the South’s Oldest Rivalry that has inspired its own set of songs—Virginia has only played Southern Mississippi a handful of times in the history of the program. The contest against Southern Miss in 2009 [...]

  Last Saturday wasn’t the best day in the Jarrett household. Having taught my four year old daughter to sing The Good Old Song, it was a disappointment to lose to Carolina, 28-17. But you have to have a long view in these things. The fight with Carolina is The South’s Oldest Rivalry, after all, [...]

Gearing up for today’s UVa football game against Indiana is a lot more fun now that my daughter is old enough to enjoy the game. Since last week she’s been imploring me to “sing ‘The Good Old Song,’ daddy! –and the second verse!” I’ve also started to teach her “Virginia, Hail, All Hail.” One Virginia [...]

Here it is, the best part of most UVa seasons–that time when the first game hasn’t started yet and the air is still full of anticipation. I’ve been playing UVa songs, mostly Virginia Glee Club repertoire, since earlier this week, and can’t wait to see what the new year’s football team will bring. In honor [...]

I got a digital download the other day from the Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. It contained what I’ve jokingly been calling my Historian’s Christmas present–high resolution scans of ten artifacts from the Glee Club’s archives, which have been donated to Special Collections over the years and have therefore been less [...]

I’m slowly processing mountains of data from the Virginia Glee Club 140th Anniversary Weekend. After a long delay, the audio recordings of the alumni sings and the banquet speakers have been posted at the Virginia Glee Club wiki. While there are a few glitches in the performances here and there (unsurprising given only a morning’s [...]

I’ve often complained that the founding era of the Virginia Glee Club is the most obscure, the hardest to get information on, the time most shrouded in mystery. (The uncertainty around the founding date of the group is just one example here.) Part of the challenge for the first twenty years of the group’s existence [...]

Thanks to the contributions of Jeff Slutzky, the archive of information about the Virginia Glee Club of the 1990s is now nearly complete. It stands at 90 articles, including concert articles, information about tours and rolls, and information about members of the group. For an alum who was a member of the group during this [...]

If you do research on a topic that has useful materials in Google Books, it pays to periodically check again to see what else has turned up. Yesterday, I happened to try my customary search term (“university of virginia” “glee club”) and was pleased to find a full five editions of Corks and Curls from [...]

I gave Jeff Slutzky, who was in the Virginia Glee Club with me starting in 1992 and continued on and off in the group throughout the 1990s, a lift back from the 140th reunion weekend last week. He had offered to lend me a set of Glee Club programs from his time in the group [...]