Volume 2, Number 3 May, 2014 Page 1

Troubadour

Earl Meseth, editor Member, PROBE (Public Relations Officers and

Bulletin Editors) 15611 Glen Dale Lane

Homer Glen, Illinois 60491 815-838-1953

earlm@elmhurst.edu

Published as the spirit moves, Troubadour is the official publication of the Will-Cook Illinois Chapter of SPEBSQSA. The Will-

Cook Chapter is the home of the Knights of Harmony Chorus

Leadership Team President …………...……………Lou Gonzalez Membership ………………....… Earl Meseth Music & Performance …....Rich Davidson Marketing …………………………...Dave Beck Program …………………………...Al Munneke Secretary …….……………….……..Hank King Treasurer…………………….…..Ken Witowski Member-at-Large …………………..Ed Brusic Member-at-Large ………………....Paul Cook Member-at-Large …………...Paul Marietta Member-at-Large……………...Tony Mehok Musical Director…………..Bill Kerschbaum Asst. Director…………………..Rich Davidson

The Chapter and Chorus meet on Thursday

evenings at 7:30 PM alternating between the First Congregational Church,

700 Ninth Street in Lockport and Glory to God Church,

18401 66th Avenue in Tinley Park

2014 Installation Banquet The 2014 Will-Cook installation of officers is history. They were installed into their respective offices by none other than our own baritone of the hour Bob Finley. Bob performed the ceremony flawlessly after taking up the challenge at the last minute when Craig Algrim notified the chapter that he had been fighting illness for a week and, after sumptuous apologies, would not be able to attend the evening’s festivities. So, trooper that he is, Bob was asked to preside. Among the highlights of the evening was a performance by the Illinois District quartet, Kankakee’s own Menagerie, a set by the Will-Cook Chorus, aided by various guests and the presentation of the Barbershopper of the Year award to ….drumroll….none other than ME!, your erstwhile bulletin editor (looks like this year the se-lection committee went for good looks rather than anything else). On the following page are some snapshots taken during the evening. If your face doesn’t appear, my apologies. We’ll try again next year.

HOD Votes To Move Contests In a major development, the Illinois District House of Delegates on Friday, April 25, voted 19-5 to have one contest in the fall to select District quartet/chorus champions as well as the Illinois In-ternational representatives. In spring, a “festival” event (perhaps in conjunction with IDAH) in which quartets/choruses can receive coaching, perform non-contest repertoire, etc., would be held. Although planning is still in its infancy, the plan would begin with the September 19-21 Fall conclave in Bloomington, IL. The spring event would be devised by the current IDAH group led by Terry Ludwig and Tim Pashon. More to come…..

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Bob Maluta, 60 year member

Installation, from p. 1

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THE BARBERSHOP BARI’S CREED by Earl McGhee

1.I will never forget that I am a Baritone and will nev-er attempt to act normal, lest others forget. 2. I will sing softly, with quality, leaving the bellowing to the Bass. 3. I will sing what works, even if it cannot be de-scribed on paper, for I am a Baritone. 4. I will show a little respect for the Tenor, for he also sings softly, though his notes are ordinary. 5. I will sing flawlessly thru the two part swipes, cre-ating wonderful sounds, in spite of the Bass. 6. I will never attempt to match volume with the Lead, for I understand that what I must seek is the harmony that only a Baritone can produce. 7. I will, at every opportunity, practice my part alone, for I know it drives others up the wall. 8. I will occasionally tilt my head to one side and smile blissfully, so that everyone will think I’m hear-ing wonderful harmonies that they can only dream about. 9. I will try to understand that others do not realize that it is really the pitch pipe that is off. 10. I will remember that very high notes, very low notes and the ability to carry a tune are grossly over-rated and that only a Baritone can settle a chord . From Probmotor, 2014 and reprinted from the September/October 2007 Barbershop Clippin’s, Fullerton, CA Dick Cote, editor

Thanks for this great honor!

Keeping the Whole World Singing with and for some friends

Installation, from p. 2

Prez Lou and Carol Gonzalez Hank King

Volume 2, Number 3 May, 2014 Page 3

The Songs We Sing… Darkness on the Delta

By Joanne Prichard Morris

When popular music fans in the Delta and across the land first heard “Darkness on the Delta,” the year was 1932, and the country was mired in the Great Depression. The crooner Rudy Vallee was sobbing “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” into his mega-phone. In the Mississippi Delta, people were literally bogged down—in the mud and muck from the 1927 Flood and the ongoing levee building.

Is it any wonder that the light-hearted, gently swinging, tuneful “Darkness on the Delta,” became a national hit? Mildred Bailey, the most popular white jazz singer of the day, introduced “Darkness” on a 78 rpm single. Other vocalists and orchestras recorded it, radios played it, and the sales of sheet music took off. Soon “Darkness on the Delta” was available on a player piano roll.

The lyrics of “Darkness on the Delta”—“lounging on the levee” and “cotton all around me”—suggest that someone familiar with the Mississippi Delta wrote them. In fact, the song was written by three young men in their twenties who had probably never set foot in the Mississippi Delta. They were among the many popular music collaborators getting a start in New York’s Tin Pan Alley. Jerry Livingston (Levinson), a recent arrival from Denver, Colorado, com-posed the music. He teamed up with the lyricists Al J. Nie-burg, a Vermonter, and Marty Symes, from Brooklyn. “Darkness on the Delta” was the first hit song for all three men.

As originally written, the song had “darkies singing

sweet and low.” Fortunately, the word “darkies” has long been replaced by “voices” or another racially unbiased word, casting the song in a totally different light. In the Delta’s segregated past, that wasn’t al-ways the case, as Diane Jacobs vividly remembers: “In 1959 when I was in the first grade, everybody in my class at Pearson Elementary School in Cleveland had to dress as pickaninnies and sing “Darkness on the Delta” in the middle of the football field! We all wore black gloves, had our faces blackened, and the girls wore bandanas on our heads.”

A less controversial faux pas is the line, “Listening to the nightingale way up above.” Everybody in the Delta knows they were really listening to the night songs of a mockingbird!

According to the composer Jerry Livingston’s son Dennis, popular music listeners throughout the coun-try in the 1930s loved nostalgic songs about the South, and it was common for non-Southerners like his father to write them. Cultural historians explain that a major source of southern details in popular music resulted from the friendships between Tin Pan Alley songwriters and African-Americans who had fled the South for the big city. In the very same year that “Darkness on the Delta” was released, Cab Callo-way and the Boswell Sisters separately recorded two Fats Waller songs about life in the Delta, “Old Yazoo” and “Down on the Delta.” Apparently “outsiders” found the Mississippi Delta as intriguing then as they do now!

Yet “Darkness on the Delta” is the song we know and love and not the two by Fats Waller. Jerry Living-ston’s melody and rhythms are an almost mystical imagining of the spirit of the Mississippi Delta. The song’s conventional 32-bar structure and predictable chord changes make it comfortable to hear and offer endless possibilities for improvisation. And quite simply, “Darkness on the Delta” is singable and danceable in a way that transcends the passing of time and changing personal tastes.

Mildred Bailey

The sustained popularity of “Darkness on the Del-ta” probably owes the most to singer and musician, Herbie Holmes of Yazoo City. A young man with a sky’s-the-limit ambition and the talent and drive to match, Herbie was a student at Ole Miss leading the Ole Miss jazz band, the Mississippians, when “Darkness on the Delta” came out. Not long after-ward, he won a won a trip to New York for a guest appearance on the Eddie Cantor Radio Show and a singing audition with NBC radio.

After college Holmes created his own band, and in 1935 he signed with Count Basie and Benny Good-man’s agent. The Herbie Holmes Orchestra went on the national circuit with his theme song, “Darkness on the Delta” and a repertoire of other popular upbeat Dixieland-style jazz pieces.

Today “Darkness on the Delta” is also a jazz stand-ard played around the world and recorded by such celebrated jazz musicians as Pete Fountain and Thelo-nious Monk. Jazz and blues combos play it in clubs and at music festivals from California to Connecticut. Master guitarist Chet Atkins recorded a slow, mellow guitar solo of “Darkness.” The song is beloved by bar-bershop quartets everywhere. There are recorded versions of “Darkness on the Delta” in ragtime and bluegrass, blues and traditional country, featuring individuals and groups who sing and play it fast and slow, on fiddles, steel guitars, ukuleles, and banjos…trumpets, saxophones, woodwinds, and harmonicas. A review of YouTube and iTunes reveals nearly 300 versions, many of them from barbershop groups*.

Anyone who has lived in the Delta can appreciate the song’s central vision, the blackness of a Delta night, when darkness envelops you and spreads out around you as far as you can see. The song calls it “the shelter of the night.” To Indianola native Steve Yarbrough, a fiction writer now living in Boston, the song “always evokes exactly the same image: looking out the windows on the west side of my grandfather’s house at that big field across the road.” I swear there were nights when you looked out and saw nothing but solid darkness, not a light in sight. The only possi-ble source of light would have been Mr. Cecil Poe’s house about three-quarters of a mile away, on the other side of the field, but Mr. Poe went to bed early,

and once his lights were turned off, it was total black-ness.

Eden Brent suspects that the inspiration for the song was the Great Flood of 1927. “The devastation would have been invisible after dark,” she says. “With that in mind, the song suggests that even in the face of hardship, the people here tend to make the best of a situation, not just persevering, but enjoying life.”

More than eighty years after it was written, “Darkness on the Delta” still delights and enlightens.

*I probably needn’t remind that Chordiac Arrest sang a parody: “Darkness On A Delta” poking fun at Delta Airlines.

This article was excerpted with permission from the January 15, 2014 issue of Delta Magazine, billed as: “Easily the most unique regional lifestyle publication, Delta Magazine is also known as the most southern magazine on earth.” The magazine is available for subscription at deltamagazine.com. Many thanks to the editors. EHM

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The Mississippi Delta is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi that lies between the Missis-sippi and Yazoo rivers. The region has been called "The Most Southern Place on Earth"[1] ("Southern" in the sense of "characteristic of its region, the American South") be-cause of its unique racial, cultural, and economic history. It was one of the richest cotton-growing areas in the nation. Before the American Civil War (1861-1865), the region attracted many speculators who developed land for cotton plantations; they became wealthy planters dependent for labor on black slaves, who comprised the majority of popu-lation in these counties well before the Civil War.

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Hank King’s Doppelgänger Found! I almost dropped my teeth when I got the mail and looked at the cover of the new “Harmonizer”. There, I thought, was Hank King singing with the Music City Cho-rus out of Nashville, Tennessee! Now, Hank has never let it be known that he was a dual member of that chap-ter nor had he been absent from our rehearsals enough the run down to Nashville on a regular basis. The only conclusion then is that Hank has someone walking around with his face. Below is the real Hank King whose mug can also be found elsewhere this issue of the Trou-badour. Make your own comparison. Uncanny, eh?

The real Hank King

Not the real Hank King

A Brief Guide To Musical Terminology (humor) by Brian Sellnow Welcome to the barbershop community! Many of you may already be familiar with the terminology used in our hobby, but in a different environment. Some of you may be new to performing music or sing-ing in a group. Whatever your back-ground, you may find the following list of terms to be helpful. Barbershop Quartet – a small vocal ensemble consisting of a bass, a lead who sings the melody, and two other har-mony parts. Barbershop Chorus – a large ensemble of singers, usually grouped by voice part, with the basses in the middle and every-one else off to the sides. Bass – The foundation upon which all barbershop music rests. The bass sets the rhythm of the song, keeps the quartet

in tune, and sings all the manly low notes that lesser singers cannot achieve. Lead – Guy who has enough musical talent to read notes and stay on pitch but not enough testosterone to sing bass. Will often try to hog the spotlight, sing the loudest and insist that the bass follow his rhythm. Yeah right. Tenor – Guy on the other side of the lead who sings chirpy little notes way up high. Can be ignored. Baritone – These guys are strange. They can sing almost as low as basses, but they hit all kinds of weird notes all over the scale. When you challenge them on it, they come up with all kinds of excus-es about thirds and sevenths and inverted diminished something-or-other. Director – Guy up front who waves his arms at us while we’re trying to sing. Often asks the basses to sing solo during rehearsal, and spends a lot of time talking to the bass section (probably complaining about the other three parts). When he says something, just nod like you under-stand and he’s happy.

Gang Singing – just like normal singing, except without the director waving at you. Sheet Music – Paper with lines and squiggles and dots all over it. The lower the dots, the lower you sing. Also has the words to the song, which the guy next to you will hopefully memorize. NOTE: All barbershop music is arranged by leads and baritones, so sheet music is part of their plot to constrain the glorious sound of the bass singer. Are you going to let them control you? “Off The Spots” – A term meaning you don’t have to pretend to follow the sheet music any more. Ballad – A slow and emotional song which showcases the musical talents of the bass, who must often sing louder than the other three parts combined in order to balance the sound. Uptune – A faster song, in which the bass supplies the rhythm and often has a solo. Or should. See Guide, p. 7

Try This Classic Tag

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Guide from p. 6 Chord – What happens when the other three parts manage to sing in harmony with the bass. Root – The note that is blown on the pitch pipe at the start of the song. Should al-ways be the bass note, unless the arranger is trying to sabotage the basses by monkeying with the chord structure. Bell Chord – A bass solo, with the other three parts then joining one at a time, hopefully on the right note. Treble clef – The upper half of the

music, with the lead and tenor parts. Bass clef – The lower half of the music. Notice that it is not called “baritone clef.” Overtones – Imaginary notes that directors and leads claim to hear when the chorus or quartet is in tune with the bass. Just smile and nod and pretend you hear them too. Sharp – Singing too high. Rarely a problem. Flat – Singing too low, as if that were possible. Directors and leads, jealous of the manly sound of the bass, will often

accuse them of being “flat.” Accidental – When the note is flat or sharp on purpose. If you can understand why this is called “accidental” you should probably be a baritone. Tag – The last few measures of the song, usually a repeat of the last line. Often characterized by the tenor or lead screaming out some ridiculously high note, followed by the bass and other two parts singing actual music. Lifted from Probemotor, Oct/Dec, 2013