Karen’s Opinion

My mother in-law detests hearing singing by barbershop quartets. I am shocked! It seems unpatriotic to me to even say such a thing. I love the harmony the groups produce. It is not easy producing a beautiful sound like that. I think it would be fun to sing in a group while wearing matching vests.

How did the whole barbershop thing start?

The oldest reference to barbershop harmony dates to 1900 and, hold on to your hat, it refers to African-American singers. I’ll bet that is a surprise. Most of us think singing quartets comprised of mostly whites, yet it is primarily a product of the African-American culture.

In the Fall 1992 issue of American Music published, “‘Play That Barber Shop Chord’: A Case for the African-American Origin of Barbershop Harmony,” by Lynn Abbot. This document gave precedence to the art of barbershop quartets that reminisced of early quartet singing by African-American musicians, including Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong.

Excerpts from an article written by Dr. Jim Henry;
Among Abbott’s recreational quartets, W.C. Handy, for example, offers a memory that is quite telling of the racial origins of barbershop music. Before he became famous as a composer and band leader, Handy sang tenor in a pickup quartet who, he recalls, “often serenaded their sweethearts with love songs; the young white bloods overheard, and took to hiring them to serenade the white girls.” The Mills Brothers learned to harmonize in their father’s barber shop in Piqua, Ohio, and several well known black gospel quartets were founded in neighborhood barber shops, among them the New Orleans Humming Four, the Southern Stars and the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartette.

It is unknown exactly when or why barbershop music became associated with whites. James Weldon Johnson who, in the introduction to his Book of American Negro Spirituals, published in 1925, offers a hint at how the association might have shifted.

It may sound like an extravagant claim, but it is, nevertheless a fact that the “barber-shop chord” is the foundation of the close harmony method adopted by American musicians in making arrangements for male voices. … “Barber-shop harmonies” gave a tremendous vogue to male quartet singing, first on the minstrel stage, then in vaudeville; and soon white young men, where four or more gathered together, tried themselves at “harmonizing.”