Tigertones visit the White House, perform for Obama

While most University students scrambled to pull the last assignments of the semester together, members of the Tigertones came back late Wednesday night after singing in the West Wing of the White House for President Barack Obama and his guests.

This year was the second such occasion for the Tigertones, who had also sung for one of the President’s numerous holiday parties in 2010.“Luckily, the people in the White House social office remembered us and offered a date for us to come back again this year,” former Tigertones president Daniel Yawitz ’12 said.

Whitaker Brown ’13, the current president of the group, said he wasn’t sure which of the many holiday parties at the White House the Tigertones attended.

“They have several of these types of parties,” he said. “I’m not sure this party had an official title.”

“The one ‘notable’ we saw there was Geena Davis,” he added. “I think it was just a lot of just-friends of the President or anyone who had connections to the White House.”

The Tigertones sang at the party for around two hours, Yawitz said, singing both Christmas carols and their normal reportoire.

“We were in a marble hall in the East Wing, next to a 10-foot Christmas tree and a five-foot bust of Abraham Lincoln,” Yawitz said.

The Tigertones also were able to spend a moment with the Obamas to take photographs and shake hands.

“[President Obama] asked us for a song, and we actually ended up singing a verse of ‘We wish you a Merry Christmas,’ ” Brown said. The Tigertones changed the last verse of the song to “We wish you a re-election and a good four more years.”

“[Obama] found that pretty funny,” Brown said.

But the best part of the evening, according to Yawitz and Brown, was singing the song “Brown Eyed Girl.”

“We got a room full of party guests and marines to clap and sing along,” Yawitz said. Brown added that “a huge crowd of guests who were leaving stopped,” and that the Marine in charge of moving people out of the room had to force the guests to leave.

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Though the group did not get to do much else in D.C., both Yawitz and Brown said they hope that the Tigertones will return to the White House next year.

“We basically drove down straight to the White House, sang for a while there ... and headed back to campus last night,” Brown said. “It was a pretty incredible experience and a tradition we’re looking to continue in the future.”

“I would love for this to become an annual tradition,” Yawitz said. “We put on the best show we could have, and hopefully they liked us enough to invite us back next year.”

The Tigertones apparently stand a good chance at the White House — the President confided in them that he preferred them to the Yale Whiffenpoofs, who had also visited the White House on Tuesday evening.

“Of course, that tradition will only last as long as the President is in office, but I’m still hoping for the best,” Yawitz noted.