Music: Barber Shop Chords

Mister Jefferson Lord,
Play that ‘barber shop chord,
That soothing harmony;
It makes an awful, awful hit with me.
Play that strain, just to please me, again.
‘Cause, mister, when yon start that ‘minor part
I feel your finger slipping and gripping at
my heart.
Oh, Lord, play that barber shop chord!

How did amateur singing in close harmony come to be associated with barber shops? Dr. Sigmund Spaeth, author of Barber Shop Ballads, points out that in “ancient” days barber shops were provided with lutes or citterns with which waiting patrons could occupy themselves. Also he suggests that “perhaps a barber shop chord is, after all, merely one which mutilates or dresses up some conventional formula of music.” Negro Scholar James Weldon Johnson recalls that all barbers in the South used to be black, that every shop had a quartet whose members passed their time experimenting with novel harmonies, sometimes to the accompaniment of demands to “Hold it! Hold it!”

Last week in Manhattan’s Central Park, barber shop music was glorified in an American Ballad Contest held under the popular and versatile leadership of Park Commissioner Robert Moses. While preliminary contests of barber shop quartets were held during the summer in five New York boroughs and two adjacent counties, city employes scouted for authentic properties to transform a bandstand in the Park into a “tonsorial emporium” of the 1890’s. They dug up three old barber chairs, Police Gazettes, a coal stove, a flyspecked clock, pictures of John L. Sullivan, Jim Jeffries, Jim Corbett, Bob Fitzsimmons, a rack of shaving mugs, a mustache curler, charts showing styles in mustaches, whiskers and such haircuts as the Saratoga, Newport, Elite, Square and Senator. With these they set the stage which was decorated with green & pink walls and flanked with tall striped barber poles.

Judges in the final contest, which 15,000 New Yorkers went to hear and see, were Dr. Spaeth, Alfred Emanuel Smith and Luther Corwin Steward, a Washington folk-song collector. Al Smith may have felt a sympathy with the Blessed Sacrament Lyceum Quartet of Queens which arrived in red, purple, green and yellow striped bathing suits, sang I’ve Been Working on the Railroad and Mandy Lee. But he and his colleagues unanimously liked best the Bay City Four (a teacher, a cashier, a clerk, a statistician) from Brooklyn. These young singers slicked their hair over their foreheads, put on high collars, white trousers, “dink” caps, and orange-&-black blazers, rolled gaily into Central Park on two tandem bicycles. They sang Ben Jonson’s lyric Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes. Then they swung through There’s a Tavern in the Town which was handsomely embellished with “swipes”—passages in which the first tenor holds the melody while the lower voices move in opposite directions in the scale. For their performance, appearance and deportment the Bay City Four took first prize, four silver shaving mugs. Second and third prizes went to the Rubsam & Horrmann brewery quartet, fixed up as bartenders, and the Early Birds from Borden Co., who appeared as milkmen.

Al Smith declined to sing his theme song, The Sidewalks of New York. But he joined Commissioner Moses, Mayor LaGuardia and the other two judges in rendering Sweet Adeline, sourly.