Straight No Chaser

Straight No Chaser – Male A cappella Group. Organized at Indiana University by student Dan Ponce in the fall 1996, Straight No Chaser is an undergraduate male A cappella group that takes its ten members from the Singing Hoosiers. Surprisingly, no A cappella group existed on the Bloomington campus before the formation of Straight No Chaser, which made a big splash at their premiere performance as part of a 36-hour Dance Marathon at IU. Within its first few years, the group sang at games of the Chicago Cubs and Chicago White Sox, opened for artists such as Lou Rawls and Aretha Franklin, sang the national anthem at the Brickyard 400 in 1998, and appeared at Carnegie Hall for the National Championship of Collegiate A Cappella. Around ten years and several membership changes into the group’s career, the university invited the original members back for a reunion concert. In promotion of the event, original member Randy Stine put together a DVD of a long-forgotten 1998 concert, from which he posted clips of a comical version of “Twelve Days of Christmas” on Youtube. To everyone’s surprise, the Youtube posting immediately attracted an audience and received a staggering 7,000,000 hits in the month of December 2007. The most significant viewer was Atlantic Records CEO Craig Kallman, who ultimately offered the group a five-record deal. Overnight the former college buddies who had scattered themselves throughout various states and occupations now had a bright future ahead of them in music. Recorded at Bloomington’s Airtime Studios, the debut album Holiday Spirits will be available for Christmas of 2008 and has already reached #1 on the iTunes Top Holiday Albums Chart. The reunited members include eight of the originals and two from the 2002-2003 group. Half of the reunited members are Indiana natives; they are Charles Mechling (Bloomington), Steve Morgan (Evansville), David Roberts (Indianapolis), Ryan Louis Ahlwardt (Fishers), and Mike Luginbill (Indianapolis). With the exception of Ryan, all of the other Hoosiers are still with the group in 2009. To date, the group has seven studio albums.