"You're the Flower of My Heart, Sweet Adeline"

A Barbershop Quartet Standard

Here at Sometimes a Song we try to cover a wide range of musical styles, but today is our first foray into a specific singing stye called Barbershop. If you nose around online for information these days you will find a lot of low-content and high-repetition explanations — even exact repetition of wording — to describe whatever it is you are looking to learn about. When you notice such a phenomenon, I want you to close your eyes and imagine that you are sitting in a dilapidated Vaudevile stage with a loud buzzer sounding, followed by the opening of a trap door through which a poor entertainer falls out of sight AND out of earshot. We have reached the state of affairs we in the world when so much has disappeared down the cultural memory hole that no one notices when that the “airwaves” of information technology are playing the very same and often out-of-tune tune everywhere you turn the dial. If anything is able to take the latest “innovation” called Artificial Intelligence down a notch or 15, it’s that combination of low-content and high repetition that it passes along as THE answer to every question. There isn’t much nuance on the signs along the ol’ Information Highway!

But after falling through a few AI trap doors online, guess what I did learn? That the question “where did Barbershop music originate?” has no definitive answer. And I call that a good thing! Singing barbers go back a long way, it seems, to as long as there have been barbers, and yet not every barber invented a particular musical style that every other barber followed. Authentic barbershop music of the sort that came into being around the turn of the 20th century involved a unique sort of harmonization. We can begin to find the origins of this singing style by noting what general musical category it falls into — polyphonic acapella (as in the church) singing. Polyphonic singing dates back to very early sacred music and was a variation added to chant (sung in unison, unaccompanied) to include harmonization, note by note to the original. (Later, as music developed in the West, composers began to create instrumental polyphony by juxtaposing musical melodies each with another other to create one harmonious whole.) But Barbershop quartet singing is a particular form of unaccompanied singing in tight four-part harmony, a style which sprung up in barber shops in the United States. In the early 19th century, barber shops were social hubs, places where men gathered to socialize as well as get a haircut. The new harmonic style seems to have evolved from spontaneous singing by customers — and barbers! — while the men were gathered to wait their turn in the barber’s chair. And when it caught on, many barbers attracted customers to their shops by providing just that very musical entertainment. And of course, the entertainment spilled out into the streets.

The singing in four-part harmony likely came naturally to men raised on hymn singing, a form of folk music common to most people in those days. But instead of singing in the standard SATB fashion (Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass), the barbershop quartet men’s four parts were Countertenor, Tenor, Baritone, Bass. But can we call any four men singing these voices in an ensemble are a Barbershop quartet? No. And this is because Barbershop singing followed rules and adhered to a special kind of musical arrangement that gave it its unique — and immediately recognizable until a week before last Thursday — sound.

I’m not qualified (nor do I want) to go into technical detail about the musical arrangement here, but let us leave it at this: in every authentic Barbershop arrangement, the tenor sings the melody, with the other three singers forming a chord around the melody note. The counter-tenor always sings the highest note, the bass sings the lowest, and the baritone takes the note in-between to finish out a four-note chord — FOR EVERY NOTE in the entire song. PHEW. In this way Barbershop harmony is not like most SATB music. In fact, were you to set a church hymn in the Barbershop manner and get four men to sing it, a congregation might actually start laughing! It just might sound a little bit off, and .. corny! But recall musical and the lyrics fit with each other to make a very fine song. Don’t mess with this necessary combination! If you do this (as we sometimes hear done, to our barely-repressible amusement in church!) you are likely to strike the funny bone of your congregation.

Does Barbershop style music resonate in the modern ear? Perhaps not, but that may because our ears are tuned (to paraphrase my husband) to the key of C minus. And as a people, moderns have largely forgotten how to sing at all. But the Barbershop style once enjoyed great popularity in and out of actual barber shops for a solid twenty years (from 1900 to about 1920), in sheet music, in early recordings, and in Vaudeville, before its appeal began to fade with the rise of jazz, swing, and popular music of the mid-century. Still, the Barbershop genre has never gone entirely out of style, either. It enjoyed a real comeback in the 1940’s and 50’s, at which time associations devoted to the performance and perpetuation of the style began to form, and ladies got into the act, too, forming their own quartets, known as the Sweet Adelines. Even now, Barbershop quartet singing is alive and thriving in some circles. What a phenomenon! We have nothing like it today, for all of our technology. Not even our “flash mob” concerts can come close to it, good as those are.

And now let’s listen to our song for today, which I am going to present to you in three versions. First is the original release of the tune and lyrics as recorded on celluloid by the Haydn Quartet in 1904. Second is a recording by the wonderful and popular singing group, The Mills Brothers from 1939. And third is a comic version of the song, perhaps not entirely true to the Barbershop style but a great parody of it, by … well, scroll to the bottom to see by whom! Today with sheer joy I give you a delightful old song, with its full title, “You’re the Flower of My Heart, Sweet Adeline.”

Listen to the recording that made “Sweet Adeline” a household name!

Here are The Mills Brothers, singing the song in almost straight in Barbershop style, and then repeating it in a blu swing style, and finally in a sweetly syncopated style that will take your breath away.

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Enjoy the Ricardos and the Mertzes in their comic barbershop quartet routine! I Love Lucy (1952)

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