NOTE: This is part one of a series of articles based on the original, which was published at www.aoh.org in October 2013. The material below has been revised and updated by the author beginning in July 2020 to reflect new research and developments that have occurred since the fiftieth anniversary of the St. Charles Chapter of the S.P.E.B.S.Q.S.A. (Barbershop Harmony Society). In 2023, the chapter changed its name to Harmony STL. Unless otherwise indicated, all pictures are from the archives of the Ambassadors of Harmony.
You are standing on a set of risers; your heart is pumping. The crowd starts to chant “A-O-H,” “A-O-H.” The announcement begins … “Representing the Central States District …” The rest is muffled by the crowd cheering in anticipation of 160 men who are about to perform two songs. Suddenly, the curtain rises, and you are greeted by a sea of people and a set of tables where there are seated fifteen men about to judge your performance. The two songs go by quickly. Then, at the last chord of the last song, the crowd suddenly gets out of their seats and cheers and claps. The curtain falls and the cheering eventually dies down. You catch your breath as you walk off the stage. This was my experience when I first competed with the Ambassadors of Harmony in 2004 at the International Barbershop Convention in Louisville, Kentucky. This was the first gold medal earned by the Ambassadors of Harmony; but the road to gold at the International Barbershop Convention had many twists and turns.
The Ambassadors of Harmony is the men’s chorus of the Harmony STL (formerly St. Charles) Chapter of the Barbershop Harmony Society. The BHS was originally founded in 1938 as the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, Inc. (S.P.E.B.S.Q.S.A.) [1] The roots for the tuning of barbershop chords go back to Pythagorean tuning and just intonation. In both cases, ratios are used to determine pitches. The proper ring is achieved by locking chords.[2] Barbershop harmony appears to have roots in the development of quartet clubs in the United Kingdom and the United States in the early nineteenth century. As early as 1836, the Blackburn Quartetto Club of Blackburn, England, was providing performances.[3] The first quartet club in the United States appears to have been the Boston Quartette Club, which performed in Brattleboro, Vermont, on 29 August 1839. They performed several classical works for their audience.[4] Early quartet clubs sang classical music, but that changed as the United States began to develop its own popular music. The music of black Americans was celebrated in the 1847 publication, The Ethiopian Glee Book, a book written for quartets.[5] The book contained songs sung by the Christy Minstrels “with many other popular Negro melodies, in four parts, arranged for quartet clubs.”[6] The quartet clubs appear to have been groups of amateur singers, such as those who sang in the Quartette Club of Madison, Indiana in 1852.[7] In St. Louis, a group of blacks formed their own quartet club shortly after the end of the Civil War. They were hired to sing love songs to a young black lady, but their singing attracted the attention of several other black ladies in the neighborhood.[8] The hiring of black quartets by blacks and whites was apparently more and more common in the 1870s. “The latest agony in the serenading line is to employ a negro quartette to do the singing and playing while the ‘feller’ places himself near the window to catch the coquet as it is gently dropped by his fair one,” lamented the Wichita (KS) Eagle in 1874.[9] The newspaper in Austin, Texas, had a more favorable opinion of the black quartet that performed in their office in 1883: “The Statesman office was favored with a serenade by the negro quartette of ‘A Mountain Pink’ company last night. They are excellent singers and the songs highly pleased all.”[10] The Harrison and Morton Quartette performed at a Republican campaign rally in Coronado, California, in 1888.[11] Another black quartet performed at the city jail in St. Joseph, Missouri, that year.[12]
The influence of African Americans on barbershop music has been extensively documented by Lynn Abbott in his article “Play That Barber Shop Chord.”[13] According to Abbott, James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) wrote: “In the days when such a thing as a white barber was unknown in the South, every barber shop had its quartet, and the men spent their leisure time playing on the guitar… and ‘harmonizing.’ I have witnessed some of these explorations in the field of harmony and the scenes of hilarity and backslapping when a new and rich chord was discovered. There would be demands for repetitions and cries of, ‘Hold it! Hold it!’ until it was firmly mastered. And well it was, for some of these chords were so new and strange for voices that, like Sullivan’s Lost Chord, they would have never been found again except for the celerity in which they were recaptured. In this way was born the famous but much abused ‘barber-shop chord.’”[14]
An example of the type of barbershop music that Johnson might have heard can be found in renowned ragtime pianist Scott Joplin’s (1868-1917) opera Treemonisha.[15] Joplin had his own touring quartet, The Texas Medley Quartette, an all-African American quartet that performed throughout the United States. In 1893, the group consisted of Pleasant Jackson, first tenor; Scott Joplin, second tenor; Richard Denson, baritone; and Grant Miner, bass. They stopped by the office of the Cedar Rapids (IA) Gazette and performed for the employees of the newspaper in August 1893.[16] They received rave reviews in St. Paul, Minnesota, when they came to town there to perform, “The Texas Medley quartette is in town, and is giving some splendid vocal music in the public buildings and in office buildings having large courts.”[17] In 1894, it was reported that the quartet had “won a wide reputation through the west during the past six years.”[18] The influence of barbershop on ragtime can be seen by some of the chord progressions and constructions in Joplin’s most famous rag, “Maple Leaf Rag,” and in his opera, “Treemonisha.” Barbershop also influenced another important American music genre, jazz. In 2019, Dr. Vic Hobson wrote Creating the Jazz Solo: Louis Armstrong & Barbershop Harmony, in which Hobson argues that Armstrong’s experience in quartet singing influenced the type of jazz Armstrong later played.[19] This led to a discussion involving Hobson, Dr. David Wright, and the quartet Crossroads at the Satchmo Summer Fest held by the French Quarter Festivals, Inc. in New Orleans, Louisiana on Saturday, 3 August 2019.[20] The impact of quartet singing on the music of Scott Joplin and Louis Armstrong points toward barbershop music as being at the center of the development of both ragtime and jazz.[21]
[1] https://www.barbershop.org/about/history-of-barbershop/the-history-of-the-society, accessed 1 July 2020
[2] http://www.medieval.org/emfaq/harmony/pyth2.html, accessed 1 August 2020; http://www.kylegann.com/tuning.html, accessed 1 August 2020
[3] Blackburn [UK] Weekly Standard and Express, 1 June 1836, Newspapers.com, accessed 19 December 2018
[4] Vermont Phoenix (Brattleboro, VT), 30 August 1839, Newspapers.com, accessed 19 December 2018
[5] Hartford (CT) Courant, 17 November 1847, Newspapers.com, accessed 19 December 2018
[6] The Ethiopian Glee Book (Boston, MA: Elias Howe, 1848), title page; https://archive.org/details/ethiopiangleeboo1848howe, accessed 11 July 2020
[7] Madison (IN) Daily Madisonian, 26 February 1852, Newspaper Archive, accessed 19 December 2018
[8] Hartford (CT) Courant, 22 August 1866, Newspapers.com, accessed 17 December 2018
[9] Wichita (KS) Eagle, 3 September 1874, Newspapers.com, accessed 17 December 2018
[10] Austin (TX) American-Statesman, 13 October 1883, Newspapers.com, accessed 17 December 2018
[11] Coronado (CA) Mercury, 4 September 1888, Newspaper Archive, accessed 17 December 2018
[12] St. Joseph (MO) Gazette-Herald, 1 July 1888, Newspapers.com, accessed 17 December 2018
[13] Lynn Abbott, “Play That Barber Shop Chord,” American Music (Fall 1992), https://composerjude.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Play-That-barbershop-Chord.pdf#:~:text=%22Play%20That%20Barber%20Shop%20Chord%22%3A%20A%20Case%20for,of%20barbershop%20harmony%20is%20couched%20in%20a%20roman-, accessed 9 July 2020
[14] James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson, American Negro Spirituals (New York: Viking Press), 35-36, quoted in Abbott
[15] David Wright, “The African-American Roots of Barbershop (and Why It Matters),” Harmonizer LXXV, no. 1 (Jan-Feb 2015): 12, http://harmonizer.s3.amazonaws.com/Harmonizer_vol75_no1_janfeb2015.pdf, accessed 9 July 2020; for a clip of this, watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMMRGcM-pvk, 8 January 2015
[16] Cedar Rapids (IA) Gazette, 22 August 1893, Newspapers.com, accessed 29 July 2020
[17] St. Paul (MN) Globe, 2 November 1893, Newspapers.com, accessed 29 July 2020
[18] Marshfield News and Wisconsin Hub (WI), 12 April 1894, Newspapers.com, accessed 29 July 2020; for more information, see https://syncopatedtimes.com/scott-joplins-forgotten-parlor-songs/, accessed 29 July 2020
[19] Neal Siegal, review of Creating the Jazz Solo: Louis Armstrong and Barbershop Harmony in The Syncopated Times, 25 February 2019, https://syncopatedtimes.com/creating-the-jazz-solo-louis-armstrong-barbershop-harmony/, accessed 31 July 2020
[20] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI4K6hrzICY, accessed 31 July 2020
[21] Further development is needed on the ragtime and barbershop connection, but that is beyond the purview of this article
Historical Projects of Justin Watkins 