Restoring the musical archives of the Society of Orpheus and Bacchus has led me on a journey into the past, back to the earliest moments of the organization. Very little is known today by most alumni or current members. The mists of time have been cast over the events of nearly 75 years ago, as the story has been told and retold like a parlor game of Chinese Whispers.
We recently conducted an interview with our founder, Irving Walradt, class of 1941. Irving still has all his wits about him. The words he used were simple enough, but we did not grasp what he was saying. It was so different from the myth we'd created, so different from the projections of our reality that we could not hear his message.
History Made Every Day
After more research, more discussion, unearthing some photographs and a few more stories, the mist has begun to clear and now we're beginning to get it. Not all of us, mind you: We've told another story to ourselves for so long we may not be able to supplant the myth with the reality.
We have member rosters going back to the class of 1940, and we considered those men sang with the group in the year or so previous to graduating. In my day, we had an oral history that pinned the group's founding to 1939. Today, the group's oral history has backed that up to 1938. But Irving told us a story that made it look more like 1940, although he said there was an informal group singing with our name the previous year. But, he said they would never have endured without him founding the group to, in his words, "last forever".
Where Did We Begin?
So, what to make of this? Perhaps the group had been around as an informal organization when along comes our "founder" to establish some order that carries us to the present day. Isn't this just a man saying he added essential structure while clearly another kind of founding, of equal importance, had preceded his contribution? Didn't Irving just join those guys and augment what was already there? When was the moment of inception? Was there such a moment, or did we begin in a more organic and evolutionary way?
That's where we were after reading the extensive interview with Irving. After all, he told us the men we listed as our first members were singing together the previous year, but asserted it was he who had really founded the group. Reading his interview, we assumed that the group already existed in 1939, a story consistent with our shared myth, and along he comes, the first true Orpheus/Pitchpipe and sets a structure in place.
It Didn't Happen Like You Said
But it turns out that's not what happened at all. Over the last few months I've been digging into the deep past, reading histories, pumping the alumni for stories and photos and generally shaking trees to see what fruit falls out of them. As part of that process, I wrote to Irving at his home to request any old photos he might have of himself or the group. For weeks I'd heard nothing.
A couple of weeks ago, I took a day off to visit New Haven and archive some Whiffenpoof music in the Whiff Alumni office in Mory's and met Barry McMurtrey, SOB alum of the class of 1988, for lunch. Barry works at Yale's Sterling Library. As we waited for our meal, Barry showed me the "oldest known photograph of the SOBs". It was extraordinary, of extremely high quality, with 4 guys looking very dapper, and quite hip, singing a song in the open sun next to a 50 pound bag of oranges hanging on a hook. Barry told me he'd been given the photograph by Bill Oler, founder of the modern Spizzwinks and class of 1945, whose elder brother Wesley appeared at far left in the photo. Bill Oler had told Barry it was the oldest known photograph of the Society of Orpheus and Bacchus and had been taken on the historic Glee Club trip to South America.
The photograph had a sort of cover page wrapped around it, printed with the words Yale Glee Club Spring Trip of 1940, and noted the names of the men in the photo, calling them the Orpheus and Bacchus Association, also abbreviated, "OBA". We both knew of the historic trip to South America, and here was a shot in some tropical climate with what must have been the original name of our group: the OBA rather than the SOBs.
Who Are These People?
In it we saw what we wanted to see: four of our guys, maybe the very first guys Irving had described, singing informally together before he came along, before the group's name was "improved". Barry promised to scan the photo and send it to me. But after I returned to Boston, he wrote me that the names of two of the men were not in our official roster and so he no longer knew what the picture represented. We were suddenly very confused. I mean, hadn't Irving joined these guys the following year and formalized the organization? Barry was asking the right question: How come we didn't know who these guys were?
The OBA Quartet
I convinced Barry to send me the photo so I could send it to Irving and ask him to explain things to us. Once I got it, I checked in Tim DeWerff's "Louder Yet the Chorus Raise", a history of the Yale Glee Club to see whether these names were in the rosters Tim included in the appendices. Sure enough, all four men appeared in the roster for 1940. I thought, "it's merely an oversight - just add the names to our roster and move on".
The next morning I was at the gym and ran into a friend of mine from Polymnia and we started talking. Somehow the conversation turned to his father and he mentioned he was reading his father's journal from his trip with the Yale Glee Club to South America in 1941. Wow, I said, I was just looking at a photo from that trip and probably your dad knew these guys! But something stirred in my brain - the photo was marked as 1940 and my friend had said 1941. When I got home I check in DeWerff's book once more and saw the SA tour was in the summer of 1941. These were two different trips!
What Year Is It?
Then I looked closely at the Glee Club rosters in DeWerffs appendix, listed neatly year by year: 1939, 1940, 1941... and noticed that any given name only appeared in one list. The veil was slowly lifting from my eyes as I realized the Glee Club was run like college sports in those days. There was a Freshman Glee Club, then the Apollo (Junior Varsity) Glee Club and finally the Varsity Glee Club. Basically you had to rise up in the system to make it into the Varsity Glee Club, typically as a senior. Aha! These guys were all class of 1940, and they were all in that list. Irving was class of 1941 and appeared in the next list. Slowly the fog lifts a bit more...
A few days later I received Irving's reply to my request for photos. It came in a large manila envelope and included a two page, typewritten letter and an 8x10 B&W photograph of 8 men in white tie and tails. In the letter, Irving repeats his founder's story again and describes the 8 men as the first SOBs. Those other guys before "us" might have been SOBs, but that stood for you-know-what. His group was made up of seniors, juniors and sophomores, and had received their name "Sons of Orpheus and Bacchus" from the great Marshall Bartholomew himself.
Dawn Over Marblehead
Now my eyes opened fully and the light came shooting in. For a year or maybe more a bunch of seniors in the Varsity Glee Club had formed a pickup group and had some fun singing on the Glee Club tours. Perhaps they operated under the working name of Orpheus and Bacchus Association, a name inspired by their love of drinking and singing or maybe had been loosely given them by Barty.
But these guys graduate each year and are gone. Maybe a new pickup group repeats the following year or maybe it fades into oblivion. That's how the OBA was working, and that's who is depicted in the photo Barry had gotten from Bill Oler.
But Irving is admitted the Varsity Glee Club in the fall of 1940, and because he was not tapped for the Whiffenpoofs, has decided to start his own a cappella group. He picks guys from the underclassmen in the Apollo Glee Club so they will have longevity, puts together some cool arrangements for them, among them "Pretty Girl" and "Old Gray Bonnet". Marshall Bartholomew is thrilled and dubs the group "Sons of Orpheus and Bacchus". It is an historic moment. Up until this time, the Whiffenpoofs and senior pickup groups like the OBA perform break out numbers or sing to entertain one another on Glee Club tours. Now an a cappella group including undergraduates is included in the fun. Barty often invited the SOBs to tour with the Glee Club for the rest of his tenure. And "Pretty Girl" is still sung to this day to close every SOB concert.
The first SOB's
Irving chooses his voices with care, but also sizes up his lieutenants and establishes a leadership succession. It turns out to be enough to last forever.
The Whiffenpoof Blue Book
One last note before I sign off. As you know, I do archive work for the Whiffenpoofs. Many years before I got involved, the first archivist for the Whiffenpoofs was the aforementioned Bill Oler, 1945. One of the things Bill did, in addition to re-founding the modern Spizzwinks, was gather up all the music the Whiffenpoofs were singing and put it together into a book that came to be known as the Whiffenpoof Blue Book (WBB). In the process, he consulted with his older brother Wesley, from the OBA, and probably got manuscripts from him as well. Wesley and Bill were not able to establish who had arranged many of the songs; sometimes Wesley was able to tell him. There are notes on several of the WBB manuscripts to substantiate what I'm saying. But to this day most are still "Arrangement: WBB" meaning, "we don't know", including such songs as "Pretty Girl" and "Old Gray Bonnet".
In the interview with Irving, we also collected some of the first songs sung by the SOBs, including Irving's arrangements of "Pretty Girl" and "Old Gray Bonnet" and added them to our archives. These two songs are also in the Whiffenpoof archives, part of the WBB. In a court of law, under oath, I'd have to testify Irving Walradt '41, could well deserve the credit for arranging both of them.
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