The Four Freshmen, “It’s a Blue World” (1952). This is what I wanted my quartet to sound like.
What we hear is the quality of our listening. (Robert Fripp) / Never play anything the same way twice. (Louis Armstrong)/ Music is a verb. (Ornette Coleman)/ The piano ain’t got no wrong notes. (Thelonious Monk) / If you stumble, make it part of the dance. (Anon.)/ Music chooses her musicians. (Patricia Barber) / Man, all music is folk music. You ain’t never heard no horse sing a song, have you? (Louis Armstrong)
My sophomore year, I settled down a bit. I’d come back to Hiram determined to correct the mistakes I’d made the year before. Some time in the fall, I joined a quartet and I made new friends and got a new roommate, and the following summer I would spend the first of three glorious summers on the great, unforgettable, wholly unique Showboat Majestic.
I’ve already written about the Follies –how I got to sing with Ray Walle on guitar, how excited it was to sing the way I wanted to sing before an audience. Shortly after, I was approached by John Coldiron, whom I knew a little, and Richard (Barney) Curtis, whom I knew less. They were Chi Sigs, members of the club that always –I mean always!– won the Interclub Sing on campus.
They wanted to start a quartet. They wondered if I’d be interested in singing with them. “You bet!” I said and that was it. Shortly, we recruited Chuck McGowan as bass and a month or two after that, Chuck and I became roommates. For the remaining two and a half years I was in college, the Hi-Blenders was my quartet. Its membership changed halfway through my junior year when Chuck moved home to get married. Hugh “Hootie” Sturdy replaced him. John and I had sung with Hootie the previous summer on the Showboat. At the end of that year, Barney graduated and Kirby Miller, also from the Showboat, replaced him. From then on, the Showboat quartet and the HiBlenders were the same group.
John, Barney, Chuck, and later Hootie and Kirby became my friends, though not equally. I was good friends with John, and Chuck and I roomed together for a year. Hootie and I used to get into it occasionally, more over ego than anything serious –we both saw ourself as top dog in the quartet. None of us knew beans about quartet singing but we all had decent voices, and Hootie, John and I quite good ones. John and I had pretty much the same vocal range, his a little higher, mine a little lower. I had the stronger voice so I sang lead and he sang tenor harmony. Barnie and then Kirby did what baritones do in a quartet: they enriched the chords and for the rest, tried to stay out of the way of the rest of us. Chuck’s bass voice was deeper than Hootie’s, whose range lay somewhere between baritone and bass, but Hootie’s voice was seductive and rich and we sounded good together. The final year, the lion’s share of the solo work went to Hootie and me but everyone took a solo spot at some time.
Our rehearsal schedule was erratic. We had classes, we worked, and Barney and Chuck had steady girlfriends who needed regular attention. Both married their college sweethearts. Chuck’s marriage worked. Barney’s didn’t.
We were essentially bottom feeders in the local universe of barbershop quartets. Our high end events were things like entertainment night at the local senior citizen’s home or the Lions Club annual dinner, plus whatever we could scrounge up on campus. Most of the gigs we sang were for free but we got paid for some, and that was a kick. We had fans –not many, but people who went out of their way to come hear us perform.
John was the music director, as much as we had one. That was for good reason because until Kirby joined us, only John could read music and actually play piano. Kirby’s coming on board gave us a second trained ear to help with arrangements. Like everything else Kirby did, he did music thoroughly and well.
I have a tape cassette of the group somewhere. It was recorded by Kirby’s father a few months before we graduated in 1958. We didn’t sound bad at all –a bit rough, yes, but not bad. Our repertoire was never big: we borrowed most of what we sang from stock arrangements. John and Kirby did some arranging but Hootie and I were involved in the fine tuning. All told, it was a very democratic group.
The song that sits in my head after all these years is “Mood Indigo.” John sang the lead on it and Kirby and I filled in behind him, a mix of phrases and vocalized sounds. Hootie boomed out a walking bass line and at the end of the phrases, echoed John’s words. It was … copasthetic.
Most quartets have comedy songs. We had three. I brought two of them from high school: “Mountain Dew” and “Confusion.” “Dew” was mock hillbilly. I sang the lead on three of the four verses and Chuck, then Hootie, took the fourth. During the third verse, Chuck (or Hootie) would pick up my left arm, lift it above my head and pretend to play my belly like I was a string bass, while he boomed out the bass line. He plucked imaginary strings and I laughed as though tickled. I kept laughing, louder and louder, until the laughs squeezed out my singing. By the end of the verse, all I was doing was laughing. No words.
We each had a solo verse on ”Confusion.” Mine went: “My mother and father are I-Irish, my mother and father are I-irish, my mother and father are I-irish! And I am I-Irish too.” I flatted the “too” as I sang it -a surefire laugh getter. After we’d each sung our verse, we sang all four at once, competing over each other for attention, the sound louder and zanier as we sang.
The third comedy number was a parody of the quartet from Rigoletto. It came off a stock arrangements and featured solo passages for all four of us and a musical duel between Hootie and me. I looked for a performance of it on You Tube but could only find the straight version.
MUSIC & ME 