Barbershop Quartets

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Brian Granger

Barbershop quartets, a type of music group fashionable in early twentieth-century America, had a dramatic influence on American popular music styles. The sweet, close harmony of the quartets, the arrangement of voice parts, and their improvisational nature were all influences in the development of doo-wop (already heavily improvisational in form) as well as pre-rock group singing, close-harmony rock groups of the 1950s and 1960s like the Beach Boys and the teenaged "girl groups," and in the later development of background groups and their vocal arrangements.

A barbershop quartet is any four-person vocal music group that performs a cappella, without instrumental accompaniment--the popular American music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each member of the quartet sings a particular voice part. One person in the group is considered the lead and sings the melody around which the other members base their harmonies. The tenor sings a harmony placed above the melody, while the bass sings the lowest harmony below the melody line. The baritone completes the chord structure by singing a harmony either below the melody but above the bass line, or above the melody but below the tenor line. The three voices singing in support of the lead traditionally sing one complete chord for every note in the melody, though there is, in this mode of singing, a wide array of styles and arrangement patterns.

The barbershop style of singing has its roots in an old American pastime known as "woodshedding," in which one person would lead a group in song by taking up the melody of a popular tune, and the rest of the group would then improvise harmonies to that melody. Before the appearance of television, barbershops were important meeting places for men in America. Unlike bars and taverns, barbershops were well respected in each community and provided a social forum for men of all ages. Grandfathers, married, and single men, as well as their little sons, could gather together and tell jokes or discuss everything from politics and war to sports, women, or religion. Most barbershops had a radio, and the term "barbershop singing" is said to have originally referred to the way in which customers would improvise or "woodshed" harmonies to whatever popular song might be playing on the radio as they waited their turns for a haircut or shave. The term is also said to refer to the barber himself, who--in earlier European culture--also had a musical role in the community. Musical training was not needed, and very often not present in the men who sang in this improvisational way. All that was required was a lead who had a memory for the words and melodies of the day, and at least the three supporting vocal parts, which were picked up or developed "off the ear" by listening to the lead.

During the 1920s and 1930s there was a major decline in the popularity of this kind of community singing. Much of the music in those decades was relegated either to the church or to the many clubs and bars that had opened up since the end of Prohibition. In 1938, lawyer O. C. Cash of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and his friend banker Rupert Hall decided to create a social organization whose sole purpose was to maintain the tradition of barbershop singing as a unifying and fun recreation. From its inception, the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, most commonly referred to by its initials SPEBSQSA, had a nostalgic function. Founders Cash and Hall felt the encouragement of barbershop quartets might bring back to American culture some sense of the "normalcy" that they felt America was losing in the mid-twentieth century. The image of sweet nostalgia is one that remained with the organization and with barbershop quartets through the end of the twentieth century.

SPEBSQSA, Inc., began as an informal quartet. Community support and renewed popularity led to the formation of more quartets, and eventually SPEBSQSA became a national, then international, organization, sponsoring competitions around the world. Printed sheet music was rarely used in the original groups but was later brought in as the organization expanded and became involved in activities that were more choral and not strictly focused on the traditional quartet. Many professional musicians looked down on barbershop because of its informality and emphasis on improvisation, yet that opinion began to change, too, as barbershop developed its own codified technique and the appearance of barbershop groups--both quartets and full choruses--increased. For much of its history, the barbershop quartet had been exclusively male. However, SPEBSQSA, Inc., began to include women, and in 1945 a barbershop group exclusively for women called the Sweet Adelines was formed. Like SPEBSQSA, the Sweet Adelines became international in scope, and by the 1950s both groups had spawned a number of branch organizations and related musical groups, with membership numbers in the tens of thousands. Collectively, these groups were responsible for achieving SPEBSQSA's founding goal, which was to preserve the music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because of their enthusiasm and pursuit of the craft, barbershop maintained its presence in American popular culture through decades of musical and social change, long outliving other popular entertainments of its age.