I was in a glee club in intermediate (middle) school and orchestra too. I don’t know if my high school had any singing. There probably was. There was a club for everything. There were two bands and an orchestra, though. My high school had about 7000 kids.
Our intermediate school glee club was pretty good. We sang at local events and did parades and stuff like that. It was fun.
My son-- who went to the same high school I did-- says there was a show choir.
I had heard of “glee clubs” but had never encountered any (that were actually called that), and I sort of had the idea that they were old-fashioned relics of an earlier day, like freshman beanies.
My high school had (and probably still has) what I assume is a “show choir,” though I don’t remember it being called that, just “The [name of specific performing group].” I haven’t seen enough of the TV show to know whether it’s the same kind of thing.
I had heard of them, but I had a different impression of what they were than from the show.
To my vague concept, “Glee Club” was a choir that you didn’t have to try out for - they would accept anyone, and it was ummm whatchacallit, not-harmonized singing - unison, I guess. Needless to say, pretty much the bottom of the barrel, choir-wise.
My school had a pretty big vocal music department, with three or four different types of choirs - one huge one (no audition requirement, but the teacher attempted to teach harmony singing - it was an actual class), one smaller one that you had to audition for (also an actual class), plus the very small elite singing group (extracurricular) and another girls-only choir (extracurricular). All except the huge one required auditions, and the people who were in the elite group were usually in all the other ones, too.
I know that all the groups competed against other schools’ vocal music departments, but I know that they didn’t do the singing-and-dancing-and-playing-instruments that they have on Glee, so I don’t know if any of them were considered “show choirs” or not.
We did put on a musical every year - my teacher loved her some Sondheim, so the years I was there we did West Side Story, Sweeney Todd, and Merrily We Roll Along.
My 20 year old niece was in the regular school choir (which took everyone), the competitive choir, and the show choir - and the last was very definitively the elite one. And she loves the show Glee, although she is continually annoyed at the amount of AutoTuning done to the vocals.
The choir teacher managed to turn a budding punkette into a show tunes geek.
I’d heard of glee clubs before, but prior to the TV series I was under the (apparently mistaken) impression that they were “school spirit” organizations whose members performed skits at pep rallies, led the singing of the school song, etc. I always skipped out on pep rallies in high school so I had no experience to correct this idea, and I would have figured that “glee club” was an old-fashioned term that was rarely used today anyway.
I’d never heard of a show choir until grad school. A couple of my classmates had been in show choirs in high school or as undergrads. Come to think of it, my undergraduate school may have had a show choir, although I never heard it called by that name. There was a small, selective singing group called something like “Song Magic” that was distinct from the regular school choir. I know they had a colorful uniform whereas the regular choir wore all black, but I never actually saw them perform so I don’t know if they were a show choir with singing and dancing or if they were just another singing group like the campus a cappella group.
I wonder if with the show’s success the number is rising significantly.
Only in movies and on TV.
Wasn’t there one in the first American Pie movie? The big doofy guy joined one to try and seduce a girl or something? Then he had to choose between the big sing off and the sports final (he was also on some sports team).
Yes. And he found, to his surprise that he really enjoyed singing for it’s own sake.
Our high school had a strong music program. We had several vocal alternatives:
Treble Choir - only open to Freshmen girls, admission by “audition”, but a sham one for the experience, not real selection; everyone got in who auditioned. Practices held during the school day. It was a real class, so credit towards graduation was given. The girls sang at the Winter and Spring concerts, as part of a program including all the choirs and the bands, to an audience of parents and local community members who paid admission. (It was always sold out.) Usually had about 20 girls.
Concert Choir - Open to all, no audition required, not even a sham one. This one was held during the school day. It was also for credit, although many of us took it during our homeroom/lunch hour, for reasons involving credits that I forget right now. (Maybe we couldn’t include it and get enough other requirements for the college bound track unless we used up lunchtime? I don’t recall.) We also sang at the Winter and Spring concerts. Membership was huge, and kept growing every year I was there, until it was well over 200 my senior year. This prompted my director to form another class the year after I graduated, requiring a real audition to get in.
Show Choir, aka Swing Chorale - Like Glee, only if we were seminary students. Sexy was not allowed! Actually, it wasn’t entirely like Glee, in that choral singing was far more used than the gratuitous number of solos in Glee. We had one or two 20 second solos in our 25 minute show, and never more than one verse of any one song. Show Choir did involve dancing, and some years props. We did old standards, medleys of such groundbreaking new artists as The Beatles (this was in 1992) and “blue hair songs”. The reason for this was that most of our performances took place in nursing homes! We’d also go to local elementary schools and shopping malls. My senior year, we took a weeklong trip to St. Louis to sing at Six Flags and Mall of America. Rehearsals were after school, and performances either field trips during the school day (yay!) or on weekends. We did not compete with Show Choir, and I’m unaware of any competitive Show Choir programs in my area at that time. Show Choir was by rigorous audition only, and many fairly good students didn’t make it, simply because they wanted to keep the numbers down. My Freshman year was the smallest, and at that time only girls, at I think 18 girls. Later years they opened it to guys and the numbers grew to close to 30, 10 guys and 20 girls.
State Solo and Ensemble - This was the competitive one, with events for both solo singers and ensembles. Audition only, lots of hard work, rehearsals after school and competition on the weekends.
Nah. That’d be Madrigals. 
Our school didn’t have Madrigals, no matter how hard we begged for it. They added it the year after I graduated, those bastids! Madrigal singing is period tunes, generally sung a capella. Lots of polyphonies, instead of the melodies and harmonies we sung in our other choirs. It takes pretty strong singers to pull it off. You’d have to do that one by audition, and after school rehearsals.
I remember my sister being upset in the early 1980s because she tried out for glee club at school and wasn’t accepted. This was a Catholic grade school.
Beyond that, my junior high and high school had singing “clubs” but I don’t think any were called “glee club”. But they might have been – I never paid much attention.
We didn’t have anything like the show choir in the show at my Connecticut high school. We did have a conventional chorus (sopranos, altos, tenors and bass standing on risers). So those of you who had show choirs, where did you grow up? When the show was introduced, I remember the articles about it said that such show choirs were a Midwestern/Ohio thing.
South suburb of Chicago.
I think everyone I knew who’d done show choir was from Wisconsin.
My high school (also in Wisconsin) and the rival across town both had “show choirs”; people competed pretty hotly to be members.
We also had a Treble Choir, a Concert Choir, and a kind of newb-level starter choir. You had to try out for any choir higher than the starting one.
Glee is definitely the first time I ever heard of Lima, Ohio, the pictures of which online indicate it’s probably not filmed on location.
At the schools I attended it was called ‘chorus,’ but I’d heard the term ‘glee’ from the Weird Al song.
I’m from New York and it was called Glee Club when I was in it in the late '70’s/early '80s. We auditioned and it was extra-curricular. I got excused from class quite a few times to practice for important shows.
There were no solos and not much pop. I remember singing The Carpenters, Stevie Wonder and The Beatles. Oh and 3 Dog Night! Black and White. Mostly it was spirituals, big bandish or show tunes.
We had a show choir at my high school starting in my sophomore year, I think. 1994-ish. I do believe it was extra-curricular, since a lot of the band kids were able to join.
It wasn’t anything as spectacular as what is shown in Glee - no live musical accompaniment - but they had glittery uniforms and did some dancing. I don’t know if it was competitive or not, or whether or not they had auditions.
I just remember that a bunch of kids had the audacity to think that since they were in show choir they could hang out in the band room (where the show choir practiced). As if!
Ding Ding! That’s me, as well.
My niece’s show choir is in Kansas City.