Music: Flat Feet v. Barflies

Many an oldtime whiskey tenor crouched closer to his radio one night last week. Reason: the finals of the Second Annual National Championship for Barber Shop Quartets, broadcast from the New York World’s Fair. All week winners of sectional contests had crooned, bleated and harmonized before a tableful of solemn judges. The performance to beat, all knew, was the precise, satin-smooth Just a Dream of You and Mandy Lee of last year’s champs, the mustachioed, white-aproned Phillips “66” Barflies of Bartlesville, Okla. Most favored challengers were the Flat Foot Four, a quartet of Oklahoma City cops in uniform. By the time the cops had finished a slurred-toned Shine, a highly original Annie

Laurie, a bouncing Roll Dem Bones, the Barflies were licked—by one point.

Sponsor of this contest was the Society for the Preservation & Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America. No mere anything-for-a-laugh letterhead organization, the S. P. E. B. S. Q. S. A. takes itself fairly seriously. Heart and founder of the organization is its Permanent Third Assistant Temporary Vice Chairman, bland, round-faced Tulsa oilman Owen Clifton (“O. C.”) Cash. Long addicted to informal harmonization with friends, Barbershopper Cash applied in May 1938 for a corporate charter in Oklahoma, proclaimed: “In this 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 singing. . . .” Local chapters of the S. P. E. B. S. Q. S. A. mushroomed all over the country, now number some 200. Among the 2,000 members: Major Bowes, Groucho Marx, Jim Farley, Bing Crosby, five Southwestern Governors.

Many a U. S. citizen finds it difficult to dissociate barbershop singing from barroom. Not so the S. P. E. B. S. Q. S. A. which rarely mixes liquor with its lyrics, explains simply: “A drunk can’t sing.” Equally proud is the society of the propriety of its songs, not one of which “you couldn’t sing in Church.”