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Barbershop: Chording 'A-Chording' to Tradition
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20110 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1992 |
3,887 Words |
| Author
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Eloise Paananen
Eloise Paananen is a food and travel writer based in
Washington, D.C. |
In March 1938, in the lobby of the Hotel Muehlebach in Kansas City, two men from Tulsa, Oklahoma, sat talking about how they both loved barbershop quartet harmony. Tax attorney Owen Clifton Cash told Rupert Hall, an investment man, that he sang a fine baritone. Hall allowed that he was a pretty good tenor. With that, they sent a bellboy around the lobby to find a bass. Actually, two men appeared, so they all went up to Hall's room and spent the night singing.
When the two man got back to Tulsa, they dictated a humorous letter to friends, stating:
In the 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 singling.
The writers have, for along time, though 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 shoed up and spent the evening singing. The gathering was so successful that the men decided to meet again the following week. The response doubled. By the third week the group had to find a larger room to accommodate the expanding number of participants. A reporter got wind of the goingson and wrote a tongue-in-cheek story titled "Warbler Waggle Their Tongues." Soon Cast was receiving letters from people all over the country who wanted to know how to start their own club.
Consequently, it was decided to establish an international society. In choosing a name for the organization, Cash decided to humorously express his ire toward the Roosevelt administration's agencies and programs with multi-initialed acronym (WPA, CCC, etc.). So the unpronounceable SPEBSQSA (The Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America) became the barbershop society's official title.
Cast incorporated the society as a nonprofit organization dedicated to fellowship among its members worldwide. The membership would support a wide variety of worthy local charities, and a ten-point ethics code was drawn up, which included the
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