The Encyclopedia Britannica describes Barbershop Quartet singing as being distinguished by close harmony and variations of tempo, diction, and phrasing. The arrangements “usually employ syncopated ragtime.”
The Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America (SPEBSQSA) managed for over fifty years to preserve the American public in a state of ignorance about the origins of Barbershop singing. In fact, the Society itself had a Whites-only membership policy until 1960. The deception was exposed by Lynn Abbott in a 36-page article, with 183 footnotes, in the journal American Music in 1992. Barbershop is a microcosm of the larger American cultural/racial scandal and serves as a case study of denial and revelation.
In the 1880s, said one vaudeville actor, “about every four dark faces you met was a quartet.”[i] In the 1890s, quartet singing was one of the main diversions of Black men in the South. Taking up where older vocal group traditions from the plantation had left off, they featured improvisation of harmonies, notably the “swipe” or “snake”—an upward slide by the baritone coupled with a downward slide by the tenor. All this could be heard whenever and wherever Black men congregated, especially in barbershops. Before the Civil War, most southern barbers were free Blacks, and the tradition persisted through the century. Whites came to their shops to spiff up, and spiffed up their music appreciation in the process. James Weldon Johnson wrote in 1940,
…every barber shop had its quartet, and the men spent their leisure time playing on the guitar—not banjo, mind you—and “harmonizing.” I have witnessed some of these explorations in the field of harmony and the scenes of hilarity and back-slapping when a new and peculiarly rich chord was discovered. There would be demands for repetitions, and cries of “Hold it! Hold it!” until it was firmly mastered…the “barber-shop chord” is the foundation of the close harmony method adopted by American musicians in making arrangements for male voices.[ii]
W.C. Handy, self-styled Father of the Blues, sang in a quartet in Alabama. Later the Mills Brothers, an important pop vocal quartet, learned their harmony from their father at his barbershop in Ohio. Jelly Roll Morton sang in a quartet. An eleven year-old named Louis Armstrong started his own. Much later, the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartette, a religious singing group, was formed in a barbershop in Virginia.[1] In 1910 a song called “Play That Barber Shop Chord” was sung to great acclaim by Bert Williams, Ma Rainey and other black performers. The song was about black singers and a black style. In 1912 Irving Berlin published a song, “When Johnson’s Quartet Harmonize,” with an illustration of a black singing group on the cover.
[1] Some barbers of note: Jelly Roll Morton’s uncle and Perry Como.
Also Richard Milburn of Philadelphia, who was singing and whistling his
“Listen to the Mocking-Bird” in the 1850s; it was transcribed for him
by someone who took his name off the credits.
In spite of all this, Barbershop’s official historians promulgated a “White origins” theory, postulating a link between a “harsh, discordant” style heard in barbershops in Elizabethan England and the modern mellifluous tones of the American salon. Sigmund Spaeth, a Barbershop singer and writer, wrote in his 1925 collection, Barbershop Ballads, of the many Black barbershops in Jacksonville, Florida that boasted their own quartets. Yet in the 1940 edition he hedged, pushing the Elizabethan link. [2] Turn of the century Barbershopper C.T. “Deac” Martin wrote in 1932 that
America’s musical debt to our colored people is beyond calculation, since negro influence has been felt almost from the inception of Native American music [sic]. And as to close harmony, a rich sheen in the blending of untrained negro voices makes trained white harmony hard, brittle, artificial by comparison.[iii]
[2] Spaeth also wrote an article in 1928 titled “Jazz Is Not Music.”
Which is to say, you ain’t heard Barbershop done right if you’ve only heard it done White. Or as Lynn Abbott puts it, the Black tradition was “more spontaneous, free-spirited, and at ease with itself than in the self-conscious, nostalgia-tinged habitat of white neobarbershop quartets.”
Yet Martin too found reason to fudge; when he became the official historian of the Society he wrote that “This barbers’ music came to our shores along with other old world customs.” It was not until 1970 that he would write, with the hindsight of age—or of community sentiment overtaking him—of his own first introduction to Barbershop, by a Black quartet in a park at the turn of the century.
The historical sleight of hand was nearly exposed when a Black group from New York, the Grand Central Red Caps, won a SPEBSQSA-organized regional contest in 1941, and was barred from the national finals. Among the notables who resigned from the organization as a result were former Governor Alfred E. Smith and the inventor of the freeway, Robert Moses, who said “if American ballads of Negro origin are to be ruled out of barber shop singing, most of the best songs we have will be blacklisted.”[iv]
The songs were not blacklisted: the harmonizers weren’t about to neglect such musical treasures just because they were neglecting their creators. Instead, they were blackfaced; this antique performance rite continued within the Society right up to 1979.
In 1988’s version of the official story, the new Society historian allowed as to how Black quartets did exist, and were one of many influences on Barbershop. The “Jacksonville connection” went unmentioned.
Why does it matter? For one thing, there’s the diminished seventh chord. It makes a smooth transition, semi-sophisticated, used in classical music and elsewhere. But it went directly from Barbershop into Scott Joplin’s rags.[v] And what makes a New Orleans brass band different from the European marching bands that went before? The jazz bands improvised collectively, the different instruments exploring new harmonic possibilities together, as voices did in Barbershop. The instrumental slurs in jazz are straight out of Barbershop. From the start, jazz players specialized in imitating vocal sounds. The pervasive vocal traditions of Black southerners had a lot to do with the evolution of jazz. Satchmo said so, and he might know.
It was a member of the Barbershop Society who directed me to Lynn Abbott’s article, and the Society kindly provided a copy of their response, essentially a summary of Abbott’s paper, published in the January-February 1994 issue of their periodical, The Harmonizer. They called the essay “remarkable,” and said that “barbershoppers of today owe Lynn Abbott a great debt,” but had no comment on why they had not managed to correct the record themselves. Beyond this rather self-serving and belated acceptance, an enthusiastic apology and embrace of Black quartet traditions would set an example for soul-searching, truth-telling, and multicultural celebration that could be used as a model for educational programs. We wait with bated breath.
[i] Bill McClain, in Clarke, 60.
[ii] Johnson, James Weldon and J. Rosamond, 1944, 36.
[iii] C.T. “Deac” Martin 1932, 15.
[iv] Hicks, Val, Heritage of Harmony, Friendship, WI: New Past Press (SPEBSQSA), 1988, 35, quoted in Abbott, American Music, 301.
[v] Clarke, 60.