rise and shine

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rise and shine

My first year at Virginia Tech (then VPI&SU) was 1973 and Patty's was 1975. Back then the Blacksburg Catholic community parish was St. Mary's on Progress St. (now the Anglican church.) Virginia Tech students worshiped as the Newman community, taking over the War Memorial Chapel on Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings. Two student "folk groups" split the 4 masses, one taking 4:30 Saturday and noon Sunday, and the other the two early ones Sunday, alternating each week (the 4:30 was tricky on game day.) I didn't get involved until the Spring of '74, and that Fall I joined Jesse's Group, because Bob's Group had a full complement of voices and guitars. By the fall of '76 there were three groups: Rise and Shine (formerly Jesse's Group), Bill Keneally's Group (formerly Bob's Group), and Kathleen's Group (they also had a name that I can't recall.) There were growing pains, like with any big group, but looking back, the good times dominate the memories.

Every few months, on a weekend we had the 4:30 Saturday mass, we would head up to Holy Family parish in Pearisburg to visit Father Charlie Beausoleil. He would make 5 hour no-peek stew and we would camp out in the Appalacian trail barn he had built as a ministry for trail hikers. In the morning we would do 2 masses and then head back to Blacksburg. We were the only live music they had -- otherwise they had tapes. Their gratitude and hospitality was overwhelming, especially since it was us owing thanks to them for those relaxing overnight retreats. A lot of the photos were taken there.

I have a Rise and Shine cassette from Spring '75 with about 30 songs on it, including all bazillion verses of Rise and Shine, but its hopelessly ruined by a screech that couldn't be filtered out (probably from multiple re-copies on cheap tape decks.) If anyone has a good copy let me know and I'll digitize it and post it here. The tape ends with Long Live Stan, from Father Stan's last mass.

The selections below were recorded after a regular practice in the Chapel, probably in the Spring of '77. That was graduation year for Rise and Shine's first class. I'm sure these people were there: Glenn Fowler, Patty McCubbin, Kathy Hibschman, Damien Muller, Bill Hemmingson, and Tim Desmond; I'm guessing Carol Voltmer, Tony Allred and Dave Kvasnika were also there, along with another guitar, maybe Jerry Sweeten. We sure had a good time, just listen to a few of the outtakes. Tim Desmond did the recording on reel-to-reel, which was copied to cassette, digitized to wav, cleaned up, split into tracks, and finally converted to mp3. Use the download link below for the iTunes compatible mp3's.