When men gather in large numbers after work without a beer or TV remote in sight, especially on a Monday night, something extraordinary must beck on them. For the 120 men of the New Tradition Chorus, song is the lure, though not the kind normally heard at the Glenview church hall where they rehearse.
True, these mostly middle-aged men practice with faithful devotion, often until 11 p.m. Some drive from as far away as Green Bay, every week. And while their repertoire includes “Sweet Hour of Prayer” and “How Great Thou Art,” it also features “Danny Boy,” “Home on the Range,” “I Write The Songs” and a Stephen Foster medley (try belting those from the choir loft on a Sunday morning).
The New Tradition Chorus members sing barbershop. That’s right, barbershop–the music of straw boaters, sticky-sweet sentiment and swooning melodies. But if it sounds like mindless nostalgia, listen: When these ordinary-looking Joes open their mouths, they can make the hair on a grunge rocker’s head stand on end.
“The harmony, the idea of singing chords a cappella and making them lock in tune, it’s quite a thrill,” said Jay Giallombardo, New Tradition’s music director since the Northbrook-based chorus was formed in 1981. “It starts out as a personal thing, and extends out to the audience.”
With a sternness tempered by good humor, Giallombardo directs the chorus with passionate abandon. He threatens to single out the slackers. He scolds the nasal singers for their thin, sickly tone. When the basses fail to belt loud enough, he bellows, “Are you scared to sing? Are you wimps?” Laughing, they answer in unison: “NO!”
New Tradition is no cult of four-part harmony. Similar affiliations of barbershop singers exist all across Chicagoland, at least 16 at last count. And across North America, some 34,000 like-minded men belong to an organization with a tongue-twisting name: the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America (SPEBSQSA), based in Kenosha.
It is SPEBSQSA, in fact, that ranks New Tradition the No. 2 barbershop chorus in the world, for four years running (this year’s international competition will be held around the 4th of July in Indianapolis).
A good chunk of those SPEBSQSA members, their families and barbershop fans will converge on the Rosemont Theatre Feb. 22 for the 36th Annual Harmony Spectacular “Show Of Champions.” With the 1997 event, the barbershop crowd has something else to sing about; after a decade of slowly declining membership, SPEBSQSA’s rolls grew 3 percent over the last year.
That’s not enough to signal the start of a barbershop craze, but it does indicate a turnaround in the effort to keep this musical style alive. As any devotee will gladly point out, barbershop is a unique American art form as much as jazz or blues, and with some similar roots to the two (the plantation slave songs are often cited as a prime influence).
More to it than laughs
Still, barbershop has been ignored by radio and TV. Not even Lawrence Welk had a place for it in his bubbles-and-blue-hair musical universe.
Why is this?
Tone, the attitudinal kind, might have something to do with it. Where jazz and blues went serious, barbershop embraced vaudeville schtick. Championship quartets have been known to adopt monikers like the “Bartlesville Barflies,” or appear on stage in blinding aqua polyester suits. One 1940s foursome, the “Flat Foot Four,” dressed like doughnut-shaped cops, which in real life they were.
But barbershop’s spirit of levity is no reason to dismiss it as silly. It also has a reputation for sensitivity and tender male bonding, one that predates the current men’s movement by almost a century.
“We were into emotion, sentimentality and hugging long before Robert Bly came along,” said SPEBSQSA spokesman Brian Lynch. “This is an organization of men not afraid to pour their hearts out.”
But how will a generation more attuned to the wailing angst of Kurt Cobain and Alanis Morissette ever be sold on four-part harmony and ditties with lines like “See the toy soldiers march on parade/ Gee, it’s great to hear a military band”?
“That’s a real critical issue, not only to this chapter, but the Society,” said Stan Spencer, New Tradition’s president. “Somehow, we have to be able to recruit those younger guys. We can’t reproduce, so we have to recruit.”
Choruses like New Tradition are gambling that young men looking for a real alternative might just consider barbershop. Given the smattering of fresh faces at a recent rehearsal, New Tradition appears to be succeeding. Half of its board of directors is under 32.
“What young guys want is to be part of something unique, something high quality,” Spencer said. “That something is barbershop; born, bred and raised in America, the rich, male, virile sound.”
Having a family tie doesn’t hurt, either. Nineteen-year-old Greg Lee of Mt. Prospect has been hanging around rehearsals with his dad for the last 10 years. “I just sort of picked it up,” Lee said. Which is stating it mildly; Lee sings lead in a quartet, “Strike Up The Band,” made up of younger New Tradition singers. They do covers of Beatles songs. The oldest member is 35.
“The biggest thing for me, honestly, is the camaraderie,” said Joey Yates, 25, of Chicago, who sings tenor. “This chorus is the most supportive group I’ve ever been in, and they just love the music.”
400-year-old tradition
Barbershop’s chroniclers cannot say for certain when and where the singing started. Literary tradition places barbershop as far back as 1583, when Englishman Phillip Stubbs, perhaps inspired by a close shave, wrote, “You shall have fragrant waters for your face . . . your muzick again and pleasant harmony.” Cervantes’ “Don Quixote,” published in 1604, also contains an apparent barbershop reference: “Master Nicholas, the barber . . . most of all that family are players on the guitar and song makers.”
Cut from Europe to 19th Century America, where small-town working men lacking an Elks lodge or rec center gathered at local barbershops. While waiting for a shave and a haircut, men passed the time by vocalizing. And in this pre-saloon singing era, salon singing was king: If the barber or a customer broke into a familiar tune, others accompanied.
About that time, traveling minstrel shows of the 1850s spread four-part harmony fever across the nation. The emerging style picked up other influences, from European hymn singing to the improvised a cappella harmonies sung by slaves. Black quartets of the 1870s were among the first associated with early barbershop style, commonplace in cities from St. Louis to Jacksonville, Fla.
Then came the 1890s and “sol to sol” songs (named for the musical note) such as “Sweet Rosie O’Grady.” These revolved neatly around a circle of fifths, allowing an average quartet to blend without strain.
“Before radio and TV, a song had to be singable to be a hit,” Lynch said. “You had to be able to take it home and sing it in the parlor for it to sell as sheet music.”
Sell it did. By the turn of the century, Tin Pan Alley songwriters cranked out countless ditties tailored for quartets, though the new style still lacked a name. Then in 1911, the song “Mr. Jefferson Lord, Play That Barbershop Chord” appeared. Barbershop was born.
The peak popularity lasted until the late 1920s, when jazz bands, talking movies and radio eclipsed it. People became more engrossed in listening to music, and barbershop had all but vanished by the late 1930s.
Then came 1938, the year SPEBSQSA formed as something of an accident. A pair of Tulsa businessmen, snowed in at a Kansas City hotel, started singing barbershop to pass the time. When they returned home, they invited friends to join them in a rooftop sing-along at the Tulsa Club.
One of the men was O.C. Cash, a tax attorney with a slicing wit and ample public relations savvy. When 150 men arrived for his rooftop gathering, a newspaper reporter showed up to investigate the racket. In a spoof of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies, Cash concocted SPEBSQSA’s impossible acronym and passed it on to the reporter.
“He got a big story in the paper, the wire service picked it up and people started calling from all over the country asking, `How can I join?’ ” Lynch said.
Bright future
Now, as the torch and the torch songs pass to future generations, barbershoppers are hoping to fill a void left by arts cuts at schools across the country. A new program, “SingAmerica,” is slated to fund an estimated $250,000 in grants this year for music scholarships, education and four-day trips to a “Harmony Explosion” camp held each July in Muncie, Ind.
These men of musical and fraternal harmony also continue to uplift a lifestyle many homes have long since abandoned.
“It’s the issue of passive entertainment versus active entertainment,” said Lynch, a mid-30s barbershopper himself. “It’s easier after a long day at work to flop down in front of the tube and veg out. But every time I sing, I get recharged; it’s the activity, and the social aspect.”
To croon in the style of the striped pole, “You have to have some degree of extroversion,” said Joseph Schlesinger, a spokesman for the Chicagoland Association of Barbershop Chapters. “You have to be comfortable wearing your emotions on your sleeve.”
As for vocal ability, even a run-of-the-mill set of pipes will do. “In real general terms, it includes melodies that can be sung by an average lay singer, and implied harmonies that can be sung by average singers,” Schlesinger said.
The Society’s Lynch put it this way: “If you can sing `Happy Birthday,’ you can sing this.”
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For information on the 36th Annual Harmony Spectacular “Show of Champions,” or local barbershop chapters, call the Chicagoland Association of Barbershop Chapters 24-hour hotline at 847-475-8180.
