The Buffalo Bills, “I Want a Girl” (1950s). I sat in with the Bills once. It was a kick!
I sang in quartets from the age of fourteen until twenty-eight. With the exception of my high school doo wop group, they all sang barbershop music, which I don’t even very much like.
The high school quartets were occasional groups except for the last one, my quartet, which had no name, or if it did I don’t remember it, in my senior year. There was the Hi-Blenders in college. We sang together for three years in school and on the Boat.
After college, I was recruited into the Tune Charmers, a SPEBSQSA group out of Warren, Ohio. (For those who don’t know, SPEBSQSA stands for Society for the Preservation and Elevation of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America.) I stayed with them until 1962. It was a a good but not a great quartet. We regularly placed in the top five or ten in the Johnny Appleseed District competitions. In 1961, we made it to the international competition but flunked out in the first round.
It wasn’t that we weren’t good. Because we were. I was one of the go-to leads in the district and the tenor, Donnie Clapp, had a voice that would make an angel envious. But we only sang one way, full bore. We belled chords as well as any quartet in the society but we had no subtlety and not much flex. We sang loud, that’s what we did. We were great at that but more was required to be truly outstanding and I didn’t enjoy much being below that standard.
The Tune Charmers, 1960: Don Clapp, Bill Kraker, me, Bud Hirsch
For four years, I drove back and forth from the west side of Cleveland (first Olmsted Falls and then Berea), to Warren, way past Cleveland to the east, for our rehearsals and performances, an eighty-mile drive each way. We’d rehearse so late I’d have to stay over night at one of the guys’ house, if we were prepping for competition, the entire weekend. You can imagine what that did to my social life. By 1962, I’d had it. And to be honest, I was discouraged with the group. I couldn’t see us ever doing better than we’d already done. I wanted out.
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Then Danny Mihuta, George O’Brien and Dave Johnson of the Hi Fi Four, based out of Berea (where I lived!), asked me to join them in a new quartet. By SPEBSQSA rules, if no more than two members of a quartet remained after it won a title and the quartet changed its name, it could compete again as a new quartet. The Hi Fi Four were past District champions but their tenor, Dave Johnson, joined after they’d won their title so he didn’t count as one of their original members. If I joined and we renamed the group, we could compete in the coming District championship trials.
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We had six weeks –six weeks!–to learn new songs (two for the first round of the competition and one or two for the finals), get our sound together and perfect our routines –when do we move our arms, which direction should we look when? We bought tuxes with two contrasting patterned jackets: one was corn yellow and the other a patterned blue silk batik, it was beautiful!– and an ‘informal’ outfit of brown, white and black vertical striped zip-up sweaters. The tuxes were for shows and contests, the sweaters for the afterglows that follow SPEBSQSA Parades, where all the quartet groupies go.
We were teachers so we decided to name ourselves the Post Grads. We won the District competition hands down. I was selected for the All-District Quartet, which meant I sang one last time with Donnie Clapp, the tenor from the Tune Charmers, who was the All-District Tenor. (Donnie was also my favorite member of the Tune Charmers.)
The Post Grads were truly exceptional. We didn’t have four fully differentiated voices –a true bass, true baritone, a second tenor and a first tenor. Rather, we had two baritones and two tenors, in each case one with a slightly lower voice and the other with a slightly higher voice in that register, but not that separated. That meant our voices were different enough to give us range and enough alike to make blending easy. Our bass, Dannie, had an exceptionally smooth and pleasing bass voice. Our baritone, George, had an exceptional ear. He did what baritones are expected to do in quartets, make the chords richer by adding a fourth line but not sticking out. Davey had sung lead in the Hi Fi Four but switched easily to first tenor in the Post Grads,, with a falsetto-like sound on high notes but lovely tone and good volume. (Volume is important because you need it when you swell or bell the chords.) We all soloed in the group but I had marginally more solo space than the others. Davey and Dannie had their own solo vehicles and George joined in soloing on “Confusion.”
It was such an enjoyable group and they were such nice guys!
SPEBSQSA quartets and choruses were big on Irish tunes. My signature solo in the Tune Charmers had been “Molly Malone.” In the Post Grads, it was “Foggy, Foggy Dew.”
The Post Grads, 1963
I was a true lead but I had a killer range, three and a half, close to four octaves from top to bottom with very little drop in strength or tone quality across that range. When I was on the showboat (1956-58), I had sung all four parts in quartet at one time or another as people took ill or left. Plus I could sing soft or loud and never, I mean never, went off pitch. I could cut through group backup in solo, then blend right back into ensemble.
One of the signatures of a good barbershop quartet is the ability to “bell” chords: aligning individual voices so that overtones ring in sync. In the Post Grads, we could make chords ring one moment and cut our voices back to a whisper the next, without loss of precision, enunciation or –most important– electricity.
We were a success from the start.
It was fun being in that group.
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That summer (1963), we were the first barbershop quartet to perform in a Cleveland Orchestra Pops Concert. We sang “Lida Rose,” “Seventy-Six Trombones” and “Sincere” from The Music Man, “Standing on the Corner” (quartet) and “Abbondanza” (trio) from The Most Happy Fella.
(Decades later, in 1993-4, when Esther studied cabaret singing in New York, her teacher was Andy Anselmo, who taught Liza Minelli and Mandy Patinkin, and had made his nut as ingenue lead in The Most Happy Fella.)
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Our most memorable night was probably a New Year’s Eve gig celebrating the opening of a Gay Nineties club in downtown Cleveland in 196×3. The place was dominated by the bar, which rose in the middle of the room with tables all around and had a raised stage where we performed, looking down on the customers. We’d been told we were the headliners but hadn’t been told was that we’d be alternated sets with strippers. By the second set that night, we were being booed. By the third set, most of the customers had been drinking for three hours straight and we decided to cut our set short and let the strippers back on stage early. Cheers greeted their return.
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Everyone expected us to win a slot in the international competition that fall but the week before tryouts, Davey and I came down with laryngitis. We placed fourth but there were three slots allocated to the district. We went to Toronto that year, as alternates –spectators, not competitors.
I did get to sit in with the Buffalo Bills while we were there, which was cool.
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I left the Post Grads at the end of 1964, when Esther and I married and I left Ohio for New York.. A year later, my mother hosted a party when we returned to visit. Danny, George, and Davey were there and we sang again, just as we had when I came back to Cleveland, shortly after we were married, to work at a commercial fair, selling blender .
In the ’90s, the SPEBSQSA international competition was held in Anaheim, California, and I drove down to be with the guys and we sang again. Davey was alive then. Now he’s not.
Danny’s 94 now. George has to be 90 or nudging it. Last fall, Esther and I had lunch with Danny and his wife Barb at the monthly get-together of their and my old SPEBSQSA chapter. After the meal, the chapter chorus got up to sing and Danny said, you’ve got to get Dave Keymer up here to sing “Foggy, Foggy Dew.” I didn’t want to. I hadn’t sung in ages and I don’t liked singing unprepared. But I got up and started singing. The chorus improvised –hums, oohs, aahs– behind me. It wasn’t until I ‘d finished and sat down that I realized I hadn’t sung “Foggy, Foggy Dew “at all, the song I was asked to sing. I’d sung “Molly Malone,” the song I’d sung with the Tune Charmers. But nobody fronted me on my mistake.
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One final note about barbershop music: It’s great music to sing but not a kind of music I enjoy listening to. It’s hard to do barbershop right: you have to keep what’s good in your voice but sacrifice part of your individuality to a common end. When it works, though, you know you’ve really accomplished something.
The problem for me is that singing barbershop music is terribly rule bound. There are conventions about what’s acceptable to sing and what’s not. In contest, you only use certain chord combinations and sequences. You’re not allowed, for instance, to sing songs from Music Man in contest because there are too many disallowed chords in them. And god forbid, you try to swing like the Four Freshmen or the Hi Los. You’d be dead coming out of the blocks.
Barbershop music is also bound by the conventions of culture. It’s the product of an early twentieth-century white America nostalgia which places limits on topics and sentiments.
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As far as quartets go, I prefer the Four Freshmen or the Hi-Los to even the great Buffalo Bills. But I did love singing with the Bills.
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I never sang with better partners than Danny, George, and Davey. They were both great musical partners and truly decent human beings.
With Barry MacNutt, summer of 1963
“Abbondanza,” from The Most Happy Fella (n. d.)
MUSIC & ME 