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Our tradition...
CELEBRATING AN AMERICAN MUSICAL ART FORM FOR MORE THAN 65 YEARS:
The Barbershop Harmony Society (SPEBSQSA Inc.).
As much a part of American culture as Old Glory, Mom and apple pie, barbershop quartet singing is an original American musical art form. It thrives today through the efforts of an organization originally called the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America (SPEBSQSA), now known as the “Barbershop Harmony Society.”
Though the roots of four-part harmony go back more than a century, it was not until the near-accidental formation of the Society that barbershop quartet music was actively promoted. The Society's founding was whimsical, but it takes its mission to "Keep The Whole World Singing" very seriously indeed.
The Early Years
The Society was founded in 1938, when Tulsa tax attorney Owen C. Cash ran into a fellow Tulsan, investment banker Rupert I. Hall, in the lobby of the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City, stranded when a storm closed the airport. Striking up a few chords (after tipping the bellboy to find them a tenor singer), the men bemoaned the decline of that all-American institution, the barbershop quartet. Determined to stem that decline, they wrote a humorous letter to friends, stating:
"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 quartet singing. Without a doubt, we still have the right of peaceable assembly, which, we are advised by competent legal authority, includes quartet singing.
"The writers have, for a long time, thought that something should be done to encourage the enjoyment of this last remaining vestige of human liberty. Therefore, we have decided to hold a songfest on the roof garden of the Tulsa Club on Monday, April 11, 1938, at 6:30 p.m."
Twenty-six men attended that first rooftop meeting, and their numbers swelled rapidly in subsequent meetings. At the third gathering, more than 150 harmonizers raised such a sound that traffic stopped on the street below. A reporter for the Tulsa Daily World chanced to pass by the scene, sensed a good story, and put the story on the national news wires. The lengthy name and initials, founder Cash's way of poking fun at the New Deal's "alphabet soup" of initialed government agencies, captured the imagination of readers coast to coast, and inquiries came pouring in. Membership grew to more than 2000 men in that first year, and the Society held its first convention and national contest the following year.
The Society today
From that whimsical start, the Barbershop Harmony Society has grown into the world's largest all-male singing organization, with more than 31,000 singers in more than 820 chapters in the United States and Canada. Another 4,000 barbershoppers are members of affiliated organizations in Australia, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, The Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa and Sweden.
The Barbershop Harmony Society is headquartered in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Harmony Hall is home to the Old Songs Library, the world's largest privately held collection of sheet music, containing 750,000 sheets and 125,000 titles from the heyday of Tin Pan Alley. The Heritage Hall Museum of Barbershop Harmony, also located in Harmony Hall, serves as a repository for barbershop memorabilia, early recordings, costumes, research materials and historical documents tracing the roots of the barbershop style.
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