THE BRITISH BARBERSHOPPER

To Jonathan
The British Barbershopper
A Study in Socio-Musical Values

LIZ GARNETT
Head of Post-Graduate Studies, Birmingham Conservatoire
First published 2005 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright # L. Garnett 2005
The author has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or
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Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Garnett, Liz
The British barbershopper: a study in socio-musical values. – (Ashgate popular and folk music
series)
1. Barbershop singing – Great Britain 2. Music – Social aspects – Great Britain
I. Title
306.4’8423’0941

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Garnett, Liz, 1970-
The British barbershopper: a study in socio-musical values/Liz Garnett.
p. cm. – (Ashgate popular and folk music series)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-7546-3559-7 (alk. paper)
1. Barbershop singing–Great Britain. 2. Music–Social aspects–Great Britain. I. Title. II. Series.

ML3516.G37 2004
783.1 0442 00941–dc22
2004006875

ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-3559-8 (hbk)

 Contents
List of Figures vi
List of Music Examples vii
Acknowledgements viii
List of Abbreviations ix
General Editor’s Preface xi

1 Introduction: Barbershop singing in the UK 1

2 Ethics and aesthetics: The social theory of barbershop harmony 19
3 The procedures of preservation: Barbershop singing and the
invention of tradition 41
4 Ridicule, religion, and the public image of barbershop 67
5 Separate but equal? Sexual politics in the barbershop 89
6 Performance mannerism and the amateur imagination 111
7 Tag-singing: The private face of barbershop 137
8 To ‘be’ a barbershopper: Theorizing music and self-identity 155
9 Conclusion: Beyond barbershop 175

Glossary 185
Bibliography 191
Index 197
 List of Figures
4.1 Club bulletin cartoons by Harry Thomas. Used by permission 77
5.1(a) Primetime quartet. Photograph # Helen Owen 2001. Used
by permission 95
5.1(b) Out of the Blue quartet. Photograph # Amanda Fullagar
2002. Used by permission 95
5.2(a) Great Western Chorus. Photograph # George Mahoney
2001. Used by permission 98
5.2(b) Gem Connection. Photograph # Tennant Brown
Photography 2001. Used by permission 98
7.1 Afterglow at BABS Harmony College 2001. Photograph
# Al Lines 2001. Used by permission 145
Jacket photograph: The Newtown Ringers. # Peter May, BABS 1985.
Used by permission
 List of Music Examples
2.1 ‘I Love to Hear that Old Barbershop Style’ (1973). Words and
music Einar N. Pedersen. Arr. Val Hicks. Used by permission 26
2.2 ‘One Heart, One Voice’ (1989), bars 1–4. Words, music and
arrangement Joe Liles. Used by permission 29
2.3 ‘Dance with Me’ (1981), bars 29–32. Words and music Joe
Liles and Frank Mazarocco. Arr. Joe Liles. Used by
permission 29
2.4 ‘Give Me a Barbershop Song’ (1988), bars 13–16. Words and
music Roy Dawson. Arr. Steve Hall. Used by permission 29
2.5 ‘Bring Back those Days (of the Song and Dance Man)’ (1975),
bars 1–4. Words and music Einar N. Pedersen. Arr.
J. Edward Waesche. Used by permission 29
2.6 ‘I’ve Got the World on a String’ (1979), bars 41–483. Words,
music and arrangement Mac Huff. Used by permission 36
2.7 ‘Dance with Me’ (1981), bars 33–48. Words and music Joe
Liles and Frank Mazarocco. Arr. Joe Liles. Used by
permission 37
6.1 ‘Each Time I Fall in Love’ (1967), version 1, bars 252–303.
Words, music and arrangement S.K. Grundy. Used by
permission 123
6.2 ‘Each Time I Fall in Love’, version 2, bars 373–461 123
6.3 ‘Each Time I Fall in Love’ (1967), notional contraction of
phrase-end embellishment 124
7.1 ‘Just When I Thought I Was Through’. Words, music and
arrangement Paul Olguin. Used by permission 138
7.2 ‘The Old Dominion Line’. Words, music and arrangement by
Earl Moon. Used by permission 143
7.3 ‘Friends’. Words and music Michael W. Smith and Deborah
Smith. Arr. David Wright. # Meadowgreen Music Company/
EMI CMP. Administered by CopyCare, P.O. Box 77,
Hailsham BN27 3EF music@copycare.com. Used by
permission 147
7.4 ‘Goodbye, my Love’. Words, music and arrangement by
Bobby Gray. Used by permission 148
 Acknowledgements
This project would not have been possible without the generosity and
goodwill of those about whom it writes. Thanks are due to the very many
barbershoppers I have met, learned from and made music with over the past
seven years.
The following people in particular have provided specific help for my
research, with various combinations of providing materials, answering
questions, reading and commenting on work in progress, sharing ideas, and
offering cheerful and friendly moral support:

. From the British Association of Barbershop Singers: Rod Butcher,

Jon Conway, Paul Davies, Steve Hall, Alan Johnson, Kevin Liebling,
Al Lines, Mike Lofthouse, Mike Taylor, Neil Watkins and Harry
Wells.
. From the Ladies Association British Barbershop Singers: Sue Allies,
Chris Bullen, Debi Cox, Rhiannon Owens-Hall, Jean Sutton, Glenis
Todd and Maxine Udale.
. From the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber
Shop Quartet Singing in America: Toby Balsley, Tom Gentry, Jay
Giallombardo, Rob Hopkins, Steve Jamison, Jay Krumbholz, Joe
Liles, Roger Payne, Jeff Taylor, Ed Waesche and David Wright.
. From Birmingham Conservatoire: Jeremy Chapman, Steve Halfyard,
Peter Johnson, Trevor Lines and David Saint.
. From Colchester Institute: Alan Bullard and Bill Tamblyn.
. Thanks likewise to Nicholas Bannan, Jeremy Fisher, James Garnett
and Gillyanne Kayes.

I should also like to thank Colchester Institute’s School of Music and

Performance Arts for financial support during the earlier stages of this
project, and Birmingham Conservatoire likewise during its later stages.
Particular thanks are due to Jonathan Smith, not only for supporting this
project in every imaginable way, but also for introducing me to the world of
British barbershop in the first place.
 List of Abbreviations
BABS British Association of Barbershop Singers
HE Harmony Express
LABBS Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers
SCOTY Sainsbury’s Choir of the Year
SPEBSQSA Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber
Shop Quartet Singing in America
 General Editor’s Preface
The upheaval that occurred in musicology during the last two decades of the
twentieth century has created a new urgency for the study of popular music
alongside the development of new critical and theoretical models. A
relativistic outlook has replaced the universal perspective of modernism (the
international ambitions of the 12-note style); the grand narrative of the
evolution and dissolution of tonality has been challenged, and emphasis has
shifted to cultural context, reception and subject position. Together, these
have conspired to eat away at the status of canonical composers and
categories of high and low in music. A need has arisen, also, to recognize
and address the emergence of crossovers, mixed and new genres, to engage
in debates concerning the vexed problem of what constitutes authenticity in
music and to offer a critique of musical practice as the product of free,
individual expression.
Popular musicology is now a vital and exciting area of scholarship, and
the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series aims to present the best research
in the field. Authors will be concerned with locating musical practices,
values and meanings in cultural context, and may draw upon methodologies
and theories developed in cultural studies, semiotics, poststructuralism,
psychology and sociology. The series will focus on popular musics of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is designed to embrace the world’s
popular musics from Acid Jazz to Zydeco, whether high tech or low tech,
commercial or non-commercial, contemporary or traditional.

Professor Derek B. Scott

Chair of Music
University of Salford
 Chapter 1

Introduction: Barbershop
singing in the UK
Well, he sings barbershop, but he’s not really a
barbershopper, if you know what I mean.

These words, spoken casually by a friend about a mutual acquaintance,

have stayed with me over a period of years, since they encapsulate so much
that is both fascinating and utterly intractable in the study of barbershop
singing. There is the fact that it is possible to be a barbershopper in the first
place, in a way that seems far more freighted with meaning than being, say,
a pianist or a soprano. Then there is the gap between the musical act and the
assumption of the identity, that one can sing barbershop without actually
being a barbershopper. What, then, does one have to do in addition in order
to become a barbershopper? And what advantages does this have over
simply singing the stuff? My friend’s tone of voice made it clear that she
regarded ‘not really [being] a barbershopper’ as a matter of both failure and
loss: in merely singing barbershop, our acquaintance was both letting down
other barbershoppers in some unspecified but significant way, and depriving
himself of the greater rewards that awaited those who truly were
barbershoppers. And, at a more personal level, there is the fact that, yes,
I did know what she meant. Not only had I been so thoroughly inculcated
into barbershop values that I could make sense of such cryptic statements
quite readily, but it was obviously clear to others, from what I was doing or
saying, that I would be able to make sense of them. Indeed, in sharing this
judgement with me at all, my friend was implicitly placing me along with
herself in the category of barbershopper from which she was excluding our
acquaintance. Had I become a barbershopper? When had this happened?
And how could she tell?
Barbershop singing is a distinctive and under-documented facet of
Britain’s musical landscape. Imported from the USA in the 1960s, it has
developed into an active and highly organized musical community
characterized by strong social support structures and a proselytizing passion
for its particular style. With around 4000 people actively involved in it in the
UK, in around 120 choruses, it remains a minority interest, but one that
nonetheless makes a significant contribution to Britain’s musical life. It
remains surprisingly hidden from musicological view, however: the little
2 THE BRITISH BARBERSHOPPER

scholarly attention the genre has received focuses almost entirely on

practices in the USA and Canada, while the plentiful articles written by
barbershoppers about their activity and its meanings are almost exclusively
addressed to each other, to sustain the community rather than integrate it
into wider musical life.
This very self-enclosure allows the genre to provide an excellent case study
in the relationships between music, social values and self-identity, since it
allows the pursuit of potentially very broad questions within a self-limiting
field of enquiry. That is, it is precisely the means by which barbershop
guards its discrete identity within the plethora of activities in British musical
life that allows the terms in which the community theorizes itself, and the
ways these understandings relate to musical and social practices, to emerge
with an unusual degree of clarity. What results is a somewhat paradoxical
picture of a highly focused special-interest group that nonetheless cherishes
ideals of universal appeal and the encouragement and dissemination of the
style; and the group’s own reflexive and self-aware explorations of these
tensions are highly revealing of the processes both of the social mediation of
musical meanings and the musical mediation of social meanings.
The purpose of this book, therefore, is twofold: to document and analyse
the social and musical practices of this specific community of music-makers,
and thence use this analysis to theorize the relationship between music and
self-identity. It draws upon primary research into documentary sources,
interviews, and as a participant observer over a period of seven years, and
also a range of sociological and musicological theoretical frameworks, in
order to elucidate the ways in which musical style and cultural discourses
interact in the formation of identity. It aims, that is, not only to ask what a
musicological knowledge base can help us know about barbershop, but also
what the study of barbershop can contribute to how we do musicology.
For this book is written from a dual perspective. On one hand, it is my
background as a musicologist, and, in particular, an ongoing interest in
theories of musical meaning and social values, that provides the
epistemological framework for the analyses that it presents. On the other,
I have gained my greatest insights into British barbershop by ever-increasing
levels of direct involvement. My participant observation, that is, is only
observation in as much as I am also a musicologist, and thus in a position to
analyse these experiences as if from outside. The participation itself was for
real: I have paid my subscriptions and passed my auditions to perform with
ensembles, the marks I have written down as a Music Category judge have
contributed to contest results, and the skills and concepts I have shared as
an educator have changed the ways in which people perform. It is perhaps
not surprising that my friends consider me a barbershopper. And it is this
double vision, of both musicologist and barbershopper, that makes this book
possible.
 INTRODUCTION: BARBERSHOP SINGING IN THE UK 3

Barbershop in Britain

Barbershop singing at the start of the twenty-first century is practised

predominantly under the aegis of a number of umbrella organizations;
hence an awareness of its institutional framework is necessary to understand
both its cultural and musical practices. The first and largest barbershop
organization is the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of
Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America (SPEBSQSA; often referred to
simply as ‘the Society’), which was founded in 1938 by Owen Cash and
Rupert Hall as a response to a perceived decline of barbershop singing as a
living tradition.1 SPEBSQSA was restricted to male (and, initially, white)
membership, and was followed by the formation of a women’s organization,
Sweet Adelines (now Sweet Adelines International) in 1945. Harmony
Incorporated, the other women’s barbershop organization in America, was
formed as a splinter group of Sweet Adelines in 1959. Harmony
Incorporated is affiliated to SPEBSQSA and uses its style definitions and
contest criteria; Sweet Adelines maintains close institutional ties with the
Society, but operates its own separate organizational frameworks.
The UK was the first country outside the North American continent to
import this distinctively American tradition, and remains the largest non-
American barbershop community. In 1964, the first British barbershop
harmony club – the Crawley Chordsmen – was founded, followed by a
number of other clubs, both male and female, over the next decade. In 1974
the men’s clubs formalized their interaction at a national level, and created
the British Association of Barbershop Singers (BABS), which is affiliated to
SPEBSQSA. Two years later, the Ladies Association of British Barbershop
Singers (LABBS) formed as a sister organization, also affiliated with
SPEBSQSA. Other European and English-speaking countries have followed
over the years, and there are now groups affiliated to SPEBSQSA in
Australia, Germany, Holland, Ireland, New Zealand, Scandinavia and
South Africa. Many of these organizations are considerably smaller than the
British associations, and combine both men’s and women’s groups, while
Sweet Adelines International, as their name implies, also has affiliated
groups in a number of countries, including the UK.
As a result, there are two different women’s barbershop organizations
operating in the UK. For the purposes of this study, I have focused
primarily on LABBS, although much of what I discuss is equally applicable
to British Sweet Adelines. The detail of style definitions and contest
procedures differs between the organizations, and there is surprisingly little
overlap of common, widely known repertoire, but there are broad areas of
common ground in terms of culture and practices. At an institutional level,
BABS has far closer links with LABBS than Sweet Adelines, not least
because it shares the same contest framework borrowed from SPEBSQSA;
4 THE BRITISH BARBERSHOPPER

at a local level, however, the relationships between men’s and women’s clubs
operate in much the same way whatever the institutional affiliations.
The activities of a British barbershopper, whatever their institutional
affiliation, centre at a local level on the club, and revolve around the weekly
chorus rehearsal. This represents a subtle, if significant, difference in
emphasis from the American practice, where the chorus is seen as a
secondary ensemble to the quartet, both in historical and artistic terms, even
if chorus rehearsals occupy a considerable proportion of the time at chapter
meetings.2 In the UK, the chorus is largely coterminous with the club, and
admission to the latter is generally linked with acceptance into the former,
and probably reflects the fact that the UK has a strong choral tradition, but
not one of amateur quartetting. Quartets in the UK are treated
institutionally as subsets of the chorus, although they will usually rehearse
separately, in a member’s home, on a different day from the regular club
meeting. Rehearsals, whether in chorus or quartet, prepare for a variety of
different performance occasions: singouts (in which an ensemble is invited to
perform by an outside body) are the most frequent, competitions come once
or twice a year, and shows (performances organized and hosted by a chorus)
every one or two years. Social and/or fund-raising events (such as quiz
nights, barn dances, or joint parties with other local clubs) are another
frequent form of activity at club level, and present an opportunity to
integrate partners and families with the social circle of the club.
At the national level, the primary focus of organizational events is the
annual convention in which competitions for both choruses and quartets
provide a centrepiece; there are also preliminary or local contests to
determine which groups qualify for the main competitions. Winners of
BABS contests, and those of British Sweet Adelines, go on to compete at the
international conventions held by the American organizations each year.
The umbrella organizations also provide a variety of services, such as the
publication and sale of arrangements, recordings and memorabilia, and
educational services. The latter include ‘Harmony Colleges’ (residential
courses including classes on a variety of aspects of the barbershop craft),
coaching for individual ensembles, and seminars for judges, chorus directors
and club officers.
Barbershop in the UK is thus an entirely amateur activity, maintained by
dedicated volunteers. Clubs are managed by elected committees, and pay
subscriptions to the national organization per head of membership. Every
member club is represented on the governing council of the organization.
The organizations are managed by elected Executive Committees, which
have slightly different structures between BABS and LABBS, but broadly
similar functions. The central role of contest in the associations’ activities is
supported by training programmes for judges, who in turn do much of the
associations’ educational work, both at special events and with individual
 INTRODUCTION: BARBERSHOP SINGING IN THE UK 5

groups. While there is some sharing of functions between BABS and

LABBS, particularly in the human resources of educators, each organiza-
tion maintains this entire infrastructure separately.
It is worth considering the relationship between this world of organized
barbershop, and the idiom’s life outside the institutional umbrella –
barbershop’s life in the wild, so to speak. Many a public library carries a
couple of books of barbershop arrangements, and these are typically drawn
upon by members of other amateur choirs looking for light relief or a party
piece, or by school teachers looking for ways to inveigle teenage boys into
singing. Many of these arrangements use the term ‘barbershop’ loosely to
refer to any close-harmony arrangement of a popular song from a bygone
era, and would thus not be recognized by barbershoppers as ‘real’
barbershop; even where the arrangements would be recognized, the
performance practices brought to bear are likely to be considered
‘unstylistic’.3 The same is true of the few commercial recordings available
in the UK. Not a single arrangement on the Demon Barbers’ album, A Cut
Above, would be considered to be barbershop by the criteria used by
institutional contest barbershop, for instance, and, while the arrangements
performed by the Freddie Williams Four on The Best of Barbershop would
pass muster, their use of vibrato would not.4 This assertion of the right to
decide what is and what is not barbershop is central to the institutional and
contest practices imported with the genre and, as we shall see, is key both to
the strength of the identity of ‘barbershopper’, and to the problematics of
barbershoppers’ relationships with wider musical life.
The ‘British barbershopper’ in the title of this volume is a generic figure,
abstracted from the activities, values and practices shared among the UK’s
corpus of actual barbershoppers. However, in a group so relatively small
and close-knit, there are inevitably individuals who have had a significant
and defining impact on the shape and tenor of the barbershop community.
Three people in particular have an especial claim to the title of ‘the British
barbershopper’ as a specific rather than generic soubriquet.
The first is Harry Danser (1894–1976), who is credited with single-
handedly introducing barbershop to the UK back in the 1960s, and who was
the first president of what was initially named the Association of British
Barbershop Harmony Clubs.5 Barbershop music had, of course, been heard
in the UK before this – indeed, Danser had first developed a taste for it from
music-hall acts before World War I – and much of the genre’s core repertory
was accessible to the British popular imagination throughout the 1960s and
1970s through The Black and White Minstrel Show. However, it was
Danser’s subscription to the Society’s official publication, The Harmonizer,
in 1960, and his subsequent assiduous cultivation of contacts within the
Society, that opened up the possibility of barbershop as an organized,
participative activity in the UK. It was at the advice of a Canadian
6 THE BRITISH BARBERSHOPPER

barbershopper, George Shields, that Danser founded the UK’s first

barbershop chorus, and the first of a number of ‘missionary’ tours by
Society luminaries in 1970 to promote the hobby and support the formation
of new local groups was entirely the result of Danser’s efforts to build a
relationship between the nascent British barbershop scene and the Society.
So, while it may not be strictly accurate to say that Danser introduced
barbershop music to the UK, he certainly introduced barbershopping.
The second is Don Amos (1928–2002), who is pictured on the front of this
volume singing with his quartet, the Newtown Ringers (BABS Quartet
Champions 1977, and first BABS Senior Quartet Champions, 1992).6 Amos
joined the Crawley Chordsmen in 1966, and chaired the first meeting of
men’s barbershop harmony clubs in 1973 that led to the formation of the
national association a year later. As first chairman of BABS, Amos was
instrumental in negotiating the terms by which BABS would be affiliated to
SPEBSQSA. He was appointed Life President of the Association in 1979 in
recognition of his work, and in this role continued his interest in affiliation
between barbershop organizations by helping set up the World Harmony
Council, a group formed to develop performance and education opportu-
nities for barbershop organizations around the world. In an obituary in the
Daily Express, Amos was described as ‘Mr Barbershop’,7 and tributes from
BABS members after his death paid homage not only to his contributions to
institutional structures, but to his embodiment of core barbershop values
such as kindness, goodwill, and ‘infectious enthusiasm’ for his hobby.8
The third candidate for the title of ‘the British barbershopper’ is Steve
Hall (1959–2002), who represents the one exception to the part-time, unpaid
status of those who maintain the organizations, having spent eight years as
Field Services Officer for BABS. This was a role he created for himself, as
part freelance, part paid by BABS, to provide coaching and other
educational services to barbershop groups throughout the country. Hall
had already established a strong track record as an arranger and a singer
(with four quartet gold medals to his name), and, through his coaching, his
contributions to both BABS and LABBS Harmony Colleges, and his
continued performances as both quartet singer and chorus director,
probably came into contact with the majority of barbershoppers active in
Britain during the 1990s. After stepping down from his paid position with
BABS, he continued his educational work on a volunteer basis, in particular
in supporting the work of his wife, Rhiannon Owens-Hall, in developing
training programmes for Chorus Directors. In the years preceding his
untimely death from cancer, Hall was arguably the single most influential
figure in British barbershop, not simply because of the number of people
with whom he came in contact, but also because of his ability to galvanize
opinion. Despite his track record in contest, he maintained a distinctly
critical stance towards the judging fraternity, and consistently resisted
 INTRODUCTION: BARBERSHOP SINGING IN THE UK 7

assimilation into it. He thus promoted his various artistic agendas from both
within and outside the organizational authority structures, and inspired
both passionate support and some exasperation in response.
The British barbershop community relies heavily on its American
antecedents in its continued affiliation to, and acceptance of, musical
leadership from organizations in America. However, while these ties
represent a continuing influence, it is one which colours the day-to-day
experience of British barbershoppers only indirectly: the primary activities
of the barbershop community may be modelled on American practices, but
they take place within a British context which has developed a certain degree
of autonomy. Teasing out which aspects of barbershop culture are specific
to the British experience, and which are contiguous with its parent
organizations, is not always straightforward. The rest of this chapter will
therefore explore the nature of this relationship, and, specifically, the impact
it has had upon this study.

Within the American frame (i): Primary sources

This study draws on three main types of primary source: documentary, live
interaction (including both formal or semi-formal interviews and participant
observation) and electronic. For the purposes of analysis, these do not need
to be treated as significantly different in status: they all provide evidence of
the circulation of cultural meanings through discourse.9 It is worth
separating them out, though, to consider how they articulate a distinctively
British versus an international barbershop position.
The basic principle that locates the knowledge base for this study in the
UK is that all material, whether of British or American provenance, is
accessible to British barbershoppers, and can therefore be considered part of
their discursive world. Hence, for evidence of the social values held by
British barbershoppers I have drawn heavily on publications such as
Harmony Express, the regular newsletter issued by BABS, and a series of
LABBS publications which have gone under a variety of names over the
years: LABBS News, face facts, Singout and Voice Box. Meanwhile, much of
the educational material in use by both associations, including their entire
contest and judging frameworks, is published by the Society and imported
and distributed by the British associations. Much of the repertoire in use by
British ensembles has also been sourced from the States. In one sense, this
body of common literature represents a genuine continuity of experience
between the American and British practices. By placing it within the context
of the discourses and customs of British participants, however, I aim to
show how it is understood from this particular location: the texts may be the
same, but their intertextual relationships are not.
8 THE BRITISH BARBERSHOPPER

In the same way, the participant observation that has fed this study has all
occurred in a British context: the choruses and quartets I have sung with,
directed, coached and judged have all been British. And, while I have also
met, talked with, and sung with visiting American barbershoppers, this has
only been in the roles and circumstances that are available to British
barbershoppers qua barbershoppers, such as the visits of Society educators
to LABBS and BABS Harmony Colleges and Category Schools (judge-
training events), and the performance of American ensembles at both
associations’ conventions. Likewise, my experience of barbershop events in
the USA and Canada has been as a British barbershopper abroad: as judge
in training, as chorus director, and as convention delegate.10
Electronic media can in many ways be treated in the same way as these
other types of source: they act either as media for publication, and thus a
form of documentary source, or media for communication, and thus a form
of human interaction. They do have a rather different relationship with
place, however, from the older media, and thus deserve a brief discussion in
their own right. The growth of internet usage has vastly increased the
availability, both in terms of volume and of accessibility, of all sorts of
materials irrespective of place either of origin or of consumption: once a
document has been published on a website, it can be treated as published in
whichever country one is reading it in. These sources, then, feed freely into
the discursive world of the British barbershopper; however, like imported
publications, they are inevitably read in the context of the local.
An arguably more significant source resulting from the growth of the
internet is the email discussion list, since this permits an ongoing and active
negotiation of values, while leaving a clear trace of the negotiation process.
The oldest and most wide-ranging list in barbershopdom is the Harmonet,
which has members based throughout the world, but mostly in the USA and
Canada, and has a searchable archive of past messages.11 Of more
immediate impact on this study has been the Britonet, a discussion list
specifically for barbershoppers in the UK, and the CDnet, another British
list reserved for barbershoppers in roles of musical leadership, especially
chorus directors.
Of course, not all British barbershoppers have access to all of these
sources: availability in principle does not automatically equate to actual
contact. However, neither will a barbershopper who does not use computers
be completely cut off from these conversations. Material from websites is
often reproduced in club bulletins, and timely or topical emails are printed
off to be read out on club night; likewise selected posts from the Harmonet
may be forwarded to the Britonet for the attention specifically of the British
barbershop community. These processes of selection and re-circulation of
ideas again show how active the construction and maintenance of these
 INTRODUCTION: BARBERSHOP SINGING IN THE UK 9

discourses are, and how an international discourse can be customized for

local consumption.

Within the American frame (ii): Secondary sources

As mentioned above, what little previous scholarly work exists on

barbershop focuses almost entirely on the North American practice, and
like many of the North American practitioners it discusses, pays little if any
attention to what has happened to the genre on its various trips overseas.
This literature has thus provided a useful foil to the current study as a means
to determine areas of overlap with, and divergence from, the British
experience. There are four themes in particular I should like to identify; the
first two (nostalgia and African-American origins) represent significant
differences in emphasis between the two geographical areas, while the
second two (barbershop as serious leisure and the autobiographical urge)
transfer quite directly from America to the UK.
The first theme is that of nostalgia, which, in his detailed and nuanced
history of American barbershop, Gage Averill identifies as constituting the
key value of the barbershop revival movement of the 1930s, and as
remaining central to the structure of feelings articulated by institutionalized
barbershop ever since.12 He locates the source for this nostalgia in the
anxieties of middle-class white America experienced through such traumas
of modernity as World War I and the Great Depression. The sounds of
popular music from the turn of the twentieth century thus came to represent,
in the words of Society founder O.C. Cash, ‘genuine, old-time, small town,
neighborly affection and fellowship’ and ‘the old fashioned Gay Nineties
idea of pride, thrift, honesty, energy and neighborliness’.13
I would argue that, while this nostalgic flavour is recognizable in British
barbershop, not least in the self-referential celebration of songs of yesteryear
in so much of its repertoire, it is not the driving force in the UK that it is in
America. Main Street, USA has a different role in the British cultural
imaginary than in the American: it may still stand for community, simplicity
and honesty, but it is an exotic symbol for these values, mediated by
imported cultural forms, not home-grown. In other words, barbershop’s
nostalgia is tied not only to place, but also to national identity, as the
Society’s promotional materials make clear: ‘As much a part of American
culture as Old Glory, Mom and apple pie,’ starts a recent press release,
‘barbershop quartet singing is an original American musical art form.’14 So,
while British barbershoppers may well ‘idealize’ and ‘invest with . . .
longing’,15 the practices and discourses they adopt, the relationship these
emotional investments postulate, is not with the past, or at least, not with a
past they experience as their own. Rather, the mythologized object of this
10 THE BRITISH BARBERSHOPPER

desire is a more abstracted notion of harmony as social cohesion, only

intermittently mediated by self-consciously fictionalized images of small-
town America. One might as well ask a native of Illinois to feel nostalgic
about a cricket match on the village green.
Averill’s book also represents the culmination of a decade of work which
has aimed to write the African American back into the history of
barbershop. The early years of the barbershop revival movement saw black
participants excluded from SPEBSQSA, and a concomitant tendency to
rewrite the genre’s history as a predominantly, if not exclusively, white
pursuit. Although blacks were readmitted into the Society during the 1960s,
it was not until Lynn Abbott’s 1992 article in American Music arguing for an
African-American origin for barbershop harmony that the prevailing
histories were questioned.16 Jim Henry’s doctoral dissertation built on
Abbott’s work to argue that barbershop retains various stylistic traces of its
black origins. His work is significant in that it has been embraced by the
Society, which has published a summary of its arguments on its website: the
revised history has been given full official sanction.17 Averill’s book argues
that a narrative of white appropriation of black practices is too simplistic to
describe what was actually a more complex process of borrowings between a
variety of idioms, producing what he terms a ‘hybrid and miscegenated
history’.18
These debates have largely passed the British barbershopper by. While
British barbershop is, like its American counterpart, disproportionately
(though not exclusively) white, it shares with its parent organizations neither
their history of exclusion nor the concomitant discursive revisionism: the art
form that Danser imported in the 1960s was already white, as was its
imaginative vocabulary. And, while other imported cultural forms,
particularly cinema, provide myriad clues as to the sorts of racial references
associated with much of barbershop’s core repertoire, few contemporary
British barbershoppers appear to pick them up. There is certainly no sense
in which British performances display the sort of ‘blackvoice’ documented
by Averill in the early years of the idiom, and still in evidence in some
contemporary American quartets; the exotic references are to a generic and
largely colour-blind Americana. It is possible that these performances’
apparent unawareness of their songs’ racial connotations is implicated in the
continuing low level of participation in barbershop of British blacks.
However, I have found no evidence in the reception of British barbershop
that audiences are at all concerned about any racial insensitivity; moreover,
the close relationships that a number of barbershop choruses have built with
predominantly black gospel choirs suggests that such a concern would be
misplaced.
Averill argues that ‘the major issues in barbershop revivalism had been
adequately defined (although not necessarily resolved) by the early 1960s’,19
 INTRODUCTION: BARBERSHOP SINGING IN THE UK 11

and it is interesting that it is those issues which he identifies as key to the

early years of the Society that appear not to have travelled with the genre on
its journey to England at just this time. Rather, the organizational
structures, musical practices, and social mores that the barbershop
movement in the UK adopted were those that were susceptible to being
transported wholesale, and reliably replicated, via modern organizational
structures. It is therefore not surprising to discover that a study that focuses
on contemporary practices rather than historical aspects of the style
transfers much more directly to the current British context.
This study is Robert Stebbins’s sociological account of barbershop as
‘serious leisure’, which he defines as:

[T]he systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer activity that

participants find so substantial and interesting that they launch themselves on
a career, centred on acquiring and expressing its special skills, knowledge and
experience.20

Stebbins uses this concept to construct a picture of the ‘social world’ of male
and female barbershop singers from Calgary, and presents an account of
week-to-week activity that would be familiar to any British barbershopper.
The voices of individual participants that speak through his text via
verbatim quotations, moreover, reveal attitudes towards their hobby very
similar to those expressed by their British counterparts, and tell of their
experiences, aspirations and disappointments in strikingly comparable
terms. Stebbins’s description of the trajectory of a barbershopper’s ‘career’,
characterized by increasing levels of involvement and volunteer activity at
first local then organizational level, also applies to the British experience.
Indeed, one of the means by which British barbershoppers articulate the
depth of their own involvement is by their level of familiarity with both
institutional and musical developments in America: collecting recordings of
American quartets, joining the Harmonet, attending the Society’s interna-
tional convention, or holding an opinion about topical controversies in
American barbershop are all means to express and enact an engagement
with barbershop that goes beyond the casual.
Related to this notion of the barbershop career is a discursive
phenomenon upon which Stebbins does not comment, but which I would
consider a significant theme in its own right: the pervasive desire for
participants to tell the stories of their barbershop careers. This autobio-
graphical urge acts as a means for social connection: as a way for established
members of a club to inculcate newer members into the traditions and values
of the club in a kind of personalized folklore, and as a way for newly
acquainted barbershoppers to locate each other in relation to the pastime.
That it is a favourite narrative form in American as well as British
12 THE BRITISH BARBERSHOPPER

barbershop is confirmed by the recent republication of Fred Gielow’s Love,

Laughter and a Barbershop Song, which consists entirely of first-hand
accounts of participants’ barbershop experiences.21
This narrative drive to explain one’s relationship with the genre is
experienced not only by its participants, however; it also extends to its
scholars, as the opening words of Stebbins’s and Averill’s books testify:

This study of the hobby of barbershop singing reflects substantially my

personal lifelong involvement in American music and music as serious leisure.
Even though I do not sing barbershop, the ‘barbershopper’s’ social world
resembles my own musical world in many respects. In certain ways, then, this
book is also an autobiography.22

No single question has dogged my presentations on barbershop harmony more

than ‘How did you get interested in barbershop?’ Allow me to get this one out
of the way for once and for all.23

While I was inclined on first acquaintance to consider Stebbins’s

autobiographical opening distinctly self-indulgent and certainly unneces-
sary, my continued contact with barbershop and consequent exposure to
this narrative compulsion has led me to read it more sympathetically some
years on. I was certainly not surprised to see Averill prefacing his study with
a first-hand account, although the nostalgia for the old songs manifest in his
dedication was less expected. Moreover, I could quite truthfully have started
this book with same words with which Averill started his – a fact that has led
me to the quite self-conscious omission from this volume of any chronicle of
how I encountered barbershop.
This autobiographical urge shared by both scholar and subject, I will
argue later on, is a phenomenon by no means unique to barbershop, indeed,
is implicated in the construction of any kind of self-aware sense of identity,
but that organized barbershop’s discourses and practices intensify its
operation considerably. This is partly due to barbershop’s ambivalent
image: there is a need, or sometimes even a demand, to explain one’s
involvement, if not to make excuses for it. It is also related to the process of
incorporating oneself into the ready-made, strongly integrated social
support structure that becomes available on joining, or even simply on
becoming acquainted with organized barbershop. Indeed, these two factors
are related: the ties that hold the barbershop community together contribute
to the strong surface tension that deters outsiders. And that these tensions
are experienced by both participants and those who study them in turn
problematizes the insider/outsider positions posited both by the objectifying
discourses of scholarship and the inclusivistic discourses of hobbyism.
Neither scholar nor subject is entirely inside or entirely outside the identity
 INTRODUCTION: BARBERSHOP SINGING IN THE UK 13

of ‘barbershopper’; both can explain, however, how their particular

relationship with that identity came to pass.

Within the American frame (iii): Preview

In the same way that the British barbershopper has access to the culture and
practice of barbershop in America only through the mediation of his or her
local experiences, this book represents an analytical viewpoint that is
situated among its primary subjects, accessing the wider world of barber-
shop through the same channels as they do. The research process itself, that
is, has been mediated by its location. On the other hand, in the same way
that much of what has been written about American barbershop also applies
to its practice in the UK, many of my conclusions will be, if not equally valid
for, at least relevant to the genre in its home country. The final part of this
chapter outlines what follows in the book, and, in doing so, aims to locate
the subject of each chapter in relation to American practices. That is, it
considers both how much British practice is shaped by the American in each
case, and conversely, how much it may be useful to generalize from the
findings presented here to barbershop elsewhere in the world.
Chapter 2 examines how the concept of ‘harmony’ acts as a discursive
lynchpin between the regulation of both barbershop’s musical content and
its social values. The primary texts that define and theorize the style are
issued by SPEBSQSA and adopted wholesale by the British organizations,
although I read them primarily in the context of the social values and
discourses operating among barbershoppers in Britain. The themes that
emerge, however, show a broad continuity of belief between the British and
American practices, evidenced in the way these social values as articulated in
the UK can help to account for some apparent peculiarities in the way that
barbershop harmony is theorized. Notwithstanding the relative unimport-
ance of the nostalgic in British barbershop discourses compared to the
American, that is, there appear to be broadly similar ways of experiencing
camaraderie and musical experience in interrelated terms.
Chapter 3 considers barbershop as an ‘invented tradition’. The first
section is the only part of this book that focuses on the American practice
before its introduction to the UK, and traces the development of the
definition of the barbershop style through successive contest and judging
systems. This narrative reveals the extent to which the idiom has been
constructed and transformed by institutional practices throughout the
history of the Society, and how the ‘authenticity’ of these changes has been
guaranteed by the concept of ‘preservation’. The second section examines
how British barbershop has succeeded in developing a comparable sense of
group identity without having a literal historic past with which to posit a
14 THE BRITISH BARBERSHOPPER

connection by adopting and adapting the Society’s ritualized practices.

These British practices in turn suggest that, notwithstanding the Society’s
continued discursive appeals to preservation and historical continuity, it is
contemporary practices, and the sense of group membership they construct,
that sustain the idiom as an active tradition.
Chapter 4 considers the difficulty that British barbershop often has in
being taken seriously, despite its urgent efforts to promote itself. That
barbershoppers draw on the language of evangelism in their fervour to
‘spread the word’ provides the rationale for an analysis of their practices in
terms of church-sect theory and the sociology of new religious movements as
a means to explore barbershop’s relationship with wider musical life. This
discussion will suggest that the perception of barbershop as an object of
ridicule is due at least in part to the very practices by which it maintains and
polices the borders of its sense of identity. Britain imported barbershop’s
unflattering stereotypes along with the genre, and likewise the missionary
discourses that serve both to combat and, ironically, to perpetuate them;
much of this analysis, therefore, applies likewise to the American practice. It
is possible, however, that without the associations of national identity that
temper wider America’s hauteur towards barbershop with nostalgia, British
barbershop faces more obstacles in its quest not to appear too outlandish to
its neighbours.
Chapter 5 explores the gender relations within British barbershop, and
argues that the relationship between the men’s and women’s practices
displays both the potential for traditional gender hierarchies and the
opportunities for liberal feminism implied by the phrase ‘separate but
equal’. This is the chapter whose findings are most specifically focused on
the UK. The impression given both by secondary sources and my own
experience as a female barbershopper at Society events suggests gender
relationships in the American practice share some characteristics with the
British, but in a rather different balance. Specifically, the processes of
marginalization I discern, such as the belief that women’s barbershop is not
only derivative but consequently also inferior, and the importance of gender
segregation to some men as a means to maintain this belief, appear to be felt
more acutely in the USA and Canada, and the structures of equality I
delineate are commensurately less well developed.
Chapter 6 discusses barbershop’s performance practices, and in particular
its distinctive approach to interpretation. It describes a range of strategies
employed in the delivery and pacing of barbershop performances,
particularly ballads, and explores a number of explanations for them
adduced by both barbershoppers themselves and outside observers. It
proposes that some of the more idiosyncratic features of these strategies are
experienced by participants as ritualized enactments of a barbershop
 INTRODUCTION: BARBERSHOP SINGING IN THE UK 15

identity, to the extent that this may inhibit the development of broader
musicianship skills.
Performance is the area in which British barbershop most explicitly seeks
leadership from the Society, by importing American educators and
educational material, by emulating the performances of top American
ensembles, and by embracing wholesale the criteria for judgement enshrined
in the contest and judging system. Hence, both the practices themselves and
the frameworks of value through which they are understood show strong
continuity between Britain and American groups. British barbershop’s
greater reliance on reiterative practices to construct its identity in the
absence of home-grown historical discourses, however, might exacerbate the
tendency to embrace particular peculiarities of performance as markers of
identity; conversely the lack of a sense of the style as national patrimony
might make the British barbershopper more willing to be led towards new
modes of musical understanding. Clearly, however, these hypotheses cannot
be tested using experience on just one side of the Atlantic.
The practice of tag-singing, as discussed in Chapter 7, meanwhile,
represents an experience that is common to barbershoppers throughout the
world, but virtually invisible to everyone else. A purely participatory
pastime, the singing of tags (small extracts taken from the ends of songs) is
the activity through which barbershoppers enact the ideals of interpersonal
cooperation and musical freedom which are so strongly asserted in their
discourses, but so problematically played out in their rehearsal and
performance activities. The participants I quote directly in this chapter
are again all British, but the occasions I describe include both British and
American barbershoppers at events in both the UK and America.
Chapter 8 returns to the question with which I opened the book: what
does it mean to be a barbershopper? It considers the material presented in
Chapters 2 to 7 through the filters of two theories of self-identity which
come from rather different disciplinary backgrounds, but which nonetheless
interact quite fruitfully. This discussion also offers some insights as to why
both barbershoppers and barbershop scholars relate to the idiom in such
strongly autobiographical terms. My final chapter looks back outside
barbershop to consider the implications this book might have for the study
of other musics. These include the relationships between musical structures
and the behaviours they actuate, between musical styles and social identities,
between intra- and extra-musical discourses, and between scholars and their
subjects.
16 THE BRITISH BARBERSHOPPER

Notes

1. ‘America’ in the context of the Society’s title has come to denote the continent
of North America. I shall be following this usage; hence all references in this
book to barbershop in America should be understood to include both the USA
and Canada.
2. The relative emphasis upon quartet or chorus is the source of periodic
controversies in the Society, as discussed by Max Kaplan (1993), ‘SPEBSQSA’s
future: tradition and innovation’, in Kaplan, M. (ed.), Barbershopping: Musical
and Social Harmony, Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press,
pp. 135–136. Note also the different usages of ‘chapter’ (America) and ‘club’
(UK) for the local membership unit of the national organization.
3. For instance, none of the imaginative and effective arrangements in Nicholas
Hare’s collection of ‘barbershop’ arrangements for women’s voices would be
recognized as barbershop by the barbershop organizations (Nicholas Hare
(arr.) (1997), Close Harmony: Ladies Barbershop Song Book, London: Novello.)
4. The Demon Barbers (1990), A Cut Above, DBCD02; The Freddie Williams
Four (1996), The Best of Barbershop, Hallmark 303922.
5. For a full account of Danser’s contributions to British barbershop, see Alan
Johnson and Harry Wells (2003), 25 Years: The History of British Barbershop
Harmony, 1974 to 1999, Milton Keynes: BABS. I am immensely grateful to the
authors for sharing their work with me prior to publication.
6. The Seniors Quartet Contest is open to quartets in which every member is at
least 55 years old, and with an aggregate age of at least 240.
7. Richard Webber (2003), ‘The Man who Taught the World to Sing in Perfect
Harmony’, Daily Express, 20 January, reproduced in ‘A tribute to Don Amos
BABS Life President’, supplement to HE, February, p. 3.
8. Eileen and David Mason, ‘A Tribute to Don Amos’, p. 4.
9. They do, however, need to be differentiated in terms of the ethics of attribution.
My practice is as follows: all material derived from printed sources or published
on websites is given full bibliographical attribution; emails are quoted with
writers’ permission; material arising from conversations has been anonymized
with the exception of that from formal interviews.
10. I have been fortunate in receiving the support of LABBS to attend Harmony
Inc.’s Category School (a training event for both established and aspirant
judges) in January 2000 as part of my training as a Music Category judge, and
to audit, as a certified judge from an affiliate organization, the Society’s
Applicant School (a training event specifically for hopeful judges-to-be) in July
2002. I was invited to attend the Applicant School as I would be attending the
Society’s Directors College at the same venue the following week as a recipient
of one of BABS’s annual scholarships to Society educational events.
11. Messages back to August 2000 are available online at: <http://groups.
yahoo.com/group/bbshop> ; older messages can be accessed via the searchable
database at: <http://www.louisvilletimes.org/harmonet> (accessed 30 July
2003).
12. Gage Averill (2003), Four Parts, No Waiting: A Social History of American
Barbershop Harmony, New York: Oxford University Press.
13. O.C. Cash (2002), ‘The Founder’s Message’ and ‘Founder’s Column’, ed. B.
Bisio et al., SPEBSQSA, pp. 1, 25. Available online at: <http://www.spebsqsa.
org/web/groups/public/documents/graphics/pub_occash.pdf> (accessed 25
July 2003).
 INTRODUCTION: BARBERSHOP SINGING IN THE UK 17

14. Reed Sampson (2003), ‘Preserving an Art Form: The Barbershop Harmony
Society’ 9 January, available online at: <http://www.spebsqsa.org/web/groups/
public/documents/pages/pub_cb_00233.hcsp> (accessed 14 August 2003).
15. Averill (2003), p. 14.
16. Lynn Abbott (1992), ‘Play that Barbershop Chord: A case for the African-
American Origin of Barbershop Harmony’, American Music 10 (3), 289–325.
17. Henry, J.E. (2000), ‘The Origins of Barbershop Harmony: A Study of
Barbershop’s Musical Link to other African American Musics as Evidenced
through Recordings and Arrangements of Early Black and White Quartets’,
unpublished PhD thesis, Washington University in St Louis. The summary
can be accessed online at: <http://www.spebsqsa.org/web/groups/public/
documents/pages/pub_cb_00167.hcsp#P-7_0> (accessed 15 August 2003).
18. Averill (2003), p. 11.
19. Ibid., p. 17.
20. Robert A. Stebbins (1996), The Barber Shop Singer: Inside the Social World of a
Musical Hobby, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, p. 7.
21. Fred Gielow (ed.) (2002[1980]), Love, Laughter and a Barbershop Song,
Springboro, OH: Jim Coates.
22. Stebbins (1996), p. x.
23. Averill (2003), p. vii.
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