The Merriest Thing I Ever Saw: "Barber Shop Songs"

Gaiety and merriment are among the foremost characteristics of American society. Indeed the individual American, for all his diligence and hard work, is perhaps the merriest inhabitant of the whole world: at every stage of his life he does not beg gaiety from the people and things around him, but draws it out of himself, to pour it upon everything around him. And so the tourist, as he wanders through the United States, sees merriment everywhere. He sees it in the old, the young, and the children; he sees it in the parks and the skyscrapers; and he sees it too in sculpture, in music, in painting, in fashion, and in food.

But the merriest thing I ever saw, beyond all else, was the "Barber Shop Quartets"... I was with some friends of mine in one of the most famous restaurants of Detroit, and the place was packed with the wealthy of the city. And the inhabitants of Detroit are not of the ordinary classes of the rich. They are the owners of the famous automobile plants, and their doctors, their tailors, and the presidents of their clubs. They are the heirs of Ford and Dodge and Cadillac and Chrysler and the rest. As for us, we were a party that had shouldered the expense of the aforesaid restaurant in order to sit in a corner of it and watch its patrons... Suddenly we saw four men drawing near one another. They came together at a spot not far from the middle of the hall, linked arms to form a ring, and brought their heads close together as though they meant to discuss some weighty matter — and their voices rose in song. The song ended,

and everyone in the hall applauded loudly, with cheers breaking through; the ring broke up, the singers bowed to the audience, and each returned to his place. As for me, once my astonishment at the affair had passed, it seemed to me a novel manner of presenting professional singers. But I soon learned that they were nothing other than a "barber shop quartet."

The origin of these singing quartets goes back to the days when the barber's shop was the meeting-place of the townsfolk, who gathered there in their leisure hours to exchange talk and amuse themselves. The barber himself would relate the social news in detail, with his own commentary on it, and would discourse on the country's domestic politics, setting forth his private opinions on the subject. Nor was his work confined to barbering: it extended to the various arts of medicine. Perhaps one of the most curious facts of that age is that in the seventeenth century, in England and Europe, the barber had the right to practice the profession of medicine, while the law did not permit the licensed physician to practice the trade of barbering. And the barber was, in addition to all this, a recognized artist. His shop always contained a violin, or a qanun, or some other musical instrument with which the shop's patrons amused themselves.

Nor was the Eastern barber any less fortunate than the European and the American barber. My father and mother tell me of similar circles in the shops of the Beirut barbers in the recent past, and of the skill of the barber of yesterday in dentistry, in bone-setting, and the like. The Beirut barber, too, was a man of music: his shop housed an oud, and pupils learning to play and to sing.

The days passed, and the age of specialization arrived; laws were enacted forbidding the barber to practice medicine — in Europe first, then in America, then in the East. People grew busy, and the circles scattered from the barbers' shops, everyone going off to his own work. In Europe and the East, people gradually forgot the gaiety of the hours they had spent in the barber's shop. But in America they formed a union which they called the "Barber Shop Quartet Union," taking in those patrons of the shop who were devoted to singing. This union grew until it embraced a great part of the amateur singers of America. All its members are men; they meet from time to time to sing — and they sing wherever a sufficient number of them come together. Their songs are known among the American people as barber shop songs; all of them are quartets — a quartet being a musical composition comprising four different voices — and all of them are gay and merry. Their music is easy, and anyone who loves singing can sing them, whether his voice be good or not.