Barbershop is a style of music that has become one of
the most recognizable
both in and out of the music community.
However, what makes a particular arangement
"barbershop" and not jazz, doowop, or
any other form of a cappella music? Technically,
barbershop harmony is made up of four voices.
Three of the voices harmonize to the
melody,
normally sung by the lead part. The tenor harmonizes above the lead, while the
bass sings the lowest harmonizing
notes. The baritone part provides 'in-between' notes,
like the 'barbershop' seventh, that gives barbershop its original
and rich sounds.
Another notoriety of barbershop music are the musical
embellishments called swipes and
tags. Without any sort of
musical instruments for backing, barbershop singers need a
way to add a forward motion to the music. This is
accomplished by the progression of
two or more chords on a single word or syllable. Tags are the ending
portion of a song,
and are most often the most
memorable part. They are most often the most practiced
and power
parts of a given song.
Singing tags is an excellent way to understand the texture
in the music. Many
barbershoppers know at least one or
two tags right off of the top of their heads.
Singing these tags lets singers understand
the effect of proper vowel placement,
because of the low amounts of notes and words to remember. By focusing on vowel
placement, volume balancing, tone quality, other musical
components, singers can
really make chords lock and ring.
How did the society start?
SPEBSQSA was founded in 1938, when Tulsa tax attorney
Owen C. Cash happened
to meet a fellow Tulsan,
investment banker Rupert I. Hall, while both were in Kansas City,
stranded when a storm closed the airport.
Meeting by chance in a hotel lobby, the men
discovered their mutual love for vocal harmony, and together
they bemoaned the decline
of that all-American institution,
the barbershop quartet.
Determined to stem that decline, they wrote a humorous letter to friends, stating:
"In this age of dictators and
government control of everything, about the
only privilege guaranteed by the
Bill of Rights not in some way supervised
or directed is the art of barbershop quartet singing.
Without a doubt, we still
have the right of peaceable assembly which, we
are advised by competent
legal authority, includes
quartet singing. The writers have, for a long time,
thought that something should be
done to encourage the enjoyment of this
last remaining vestige of human liberty. Therefore, we have
decided to
hold a songfest on the roof garden of
the Tulsa Club on Monday, April 11,
1938, at 6:30 p.m."
Twenty-six men attended that first rooftop meeting, and
all agreed they should do it again.
Attendance at subsequent meetings multiplied rapidly; at the third gathering, more than 150
harmonizers raised such a sound that traffic stopped
on the street below. A reporter for
the Tulsa Daily World chanced to pass by the scene, sensed a good story, and put the
story on the national news wires. The lengthy name and initials, founder Cash's way
of poking fun at the New Deal's "alphabet soup" of initialed government agencies,
captured the imagination of readers coast to coast, and
inquiries came pouring in.