Today I learned that the Virginia Glee Club has a far longer history with the “Winter Song” than I originally thought. Modern performance of the song, with its “ice gnomes marching from their Norways,” dates to the John Liepold years in the early 1990s. But today I found a newspaper article that dates the first performance to 1915!!!
The “Winter Song” was on a concert program at Randolph-Macon College on April 17, 1915, some seventy-plus years earlier than previously known. 1914-1915 was the first year that there was a “modern” Glee Club, conducted by a UVA faculty member (Alfred Lawrence Hall-Quest), and took place a day after a concert in Richmond. The concert was well received; the student newspaper mentioned that the concert “turned our minds to music, men and laughter” and that “almost every number was encored.”
The “Winter Song,” written by Frederic Field Bullard, was originally titled “Hanover Winter Song” and first appeared in an 1898 book, Dartmouth Songs.