had trouble keeping up with the demand for new-member certificates.

By the early ’90s, though, America’s tastes had changed. In the age of punk, grunge, and hip-hop, barbershop singing had gained a reputation as a geriatric pastime, like playing bingo or yelling at computers. Few new singers were joining, and the old ones were dying off. Then, in the mid-’90s, at the apex of the boy-band explosion and the college a cappella craze, barbershop’s leaders saw an opening. If they could capitalize on those trends, if they could convince young people that barbershop was cool again, well, that would fix everything. So, a few years ago, SPEBSQSA came to be known as the less arcane Barbershop Harmony Society, updated its logo, expanded its college quartet contest, and moved its headquarters from Keno-

barbershop groups stuck to songs written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with titles like “Sweet Adeline” and “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.” Now, following the lead of barberpop groups like OC Times, quartets are singing four-part adaptations of show tunes, Sinatra chestnuts, even Motown classics like the Jackson 5’s “ABC.” At last year’s contest, OC Times debuted “Fun, Fun, Fun” and “Surfer Girl,” two new barbershop arrangements of classic Beach Boys songs. It was a risky move, and it paid off—the quartet was rewarded with a minute-long ovation.

But not everyone was clapping.

Pole Positions
Guess which celebs have barbershop
quartets on their résumés

“WE ARE THE KIBBERS,”
says Jack Martin, a 40-year
member of the Barbershop
Harmony Society.
“THAT’S K-I-B—‘KEEP

IT BARBERSHOP.’ ”

Lance Bass The former ’N Sync crooner and Dancing With the Stars contestant began his music career in a Mississippi quartet as a high schooler, singing doo-wop classics like “Sixteen Candles.”

Frank Sinatra ↑ The Chairman of the Board was the baritone of the Hoboken Four, presumably the tough-est barbershop quartet in North Jersey.

Peter Jennings The late anchor sang barbershop as a kid in Canada and reprised his act at informal gatherings in his later years. All told, a less obnoxious party trick than shouting, “That is our report on World News Tonight. For everyone here at ABC News, I’m drunk.”

The Singing Senators In the late ’90s, four GOP senators—Larry Craig (lead), John Ashcroft (baritone), Jim Jeffords (tenor), and Trent Lott (bass)— proved that four-part harmony isn’t just for heterosexuals, civil libertarians, actual Republicans, and the racially tolerant.

The Osmonds As kids, Donny’s older brothers sang four-part classics like “Side by Side” on The Andy Williams Show.

Dick Van Dyke A lifetime member of the Barbershop Harmony Society, he sings bass in the Vantastix, a name that narrowly edged out Chitty Chitty Sang Sang and Diagnosis: Barber. K.R.

sha, Wisconsin, to downtown Nashville. It lessened its official focus on preserving the old-time barbershop style and allowed for more modern arrangements and songs.

The man most responsible for barbershop’s modern makeover is Rick Spencer, the BHS’s director of music and education. Spencer, who began singing barbershop with his father at age ten, is convinced that the BHS can reverse its membership slide if it can crush the stereotype of the old-fashioned quartet. “Every time the society creates a new piece of advertising, they run it by me first,” he says. “If it has a straw hat or a red-and-white-striped barber pole anywhere on it, I cross the whole thing out and send it back. We need a new image for barbershop.”

That image, he says, is likely to revolve around OC Times, whose youth and photogenic charm make them perfect poster boys for the society’s new recruitment campaign. In the past several years, the quartet has performed at BHS-sponsored harmony camps all over the country, visited high school music classes, and made a big push to increase barbershop’s Internet visibility by posting YouTube videos and setting up a MySpace profile. Last summer, Sean Devine moved to Nashville to take a job with the Harmony Foundation, the BHS’s nonprofit arm, where he’s in charge of soliciting major financial gifts.

OC Times’ lasting contribution to barbershop’s future, though, is likely to be the Westminster Chorus, an elite group of young singers (average age: 23) that turned the barbershop world on its head by winning the 2007 BHS chorus contest (barbershop choruses, which contain anywhere from a dozen singers to several hundred, hold their own annual contests). When OC Times created the group in 2002 with some fellow SoCal singers, they were the only all-youth chorus in barbershop history, and certainly the first to appear on America’s Got Talent (judge Sharon Osbourne called them “ infectious”). Today, inspired by Westminster’s unlikely success, other youth choruses are popping up all over the world (including one Swedish group formed by teens who were introduced to barbershop through OC Times’ YouTube videos). Early last year, the BHS held its first-ever youth chorus contest, with six choruses competing. This year, at least 12 are expected. “We’re seeing a lot more young guys come in,” says Spencer. “And I think it’s because of groups like OC Times getting out there, and I think it’s also because we’re singing more accessible music now.”

Until recently, Spencer explains, most

A 76-YEAR-OLD RETIREE FROM CUMMING, Georgia, Martin is one of many BHS members pushing back against barbershop’s sprint to modernity. He’s the current leader of the Barbershop Quartet Preservation Association, a splinter group of kibbers who take umbrage with OC Times and the barberpop movement. To kibbers, singing “Fun, Fun, Fun” in a barbershop contest is like trying to squeeze two extra syllables into a haiku—it’s deep structural blasphemy, a total betrayal of the art form’s roots. “Barbershop groups should sing songs that are reminiscent of the early 1900s,” Martin says. “That’s the time period in which our style is based, and those are the songs our founders wanted us to preserve.”

Despite the insistence of barbershop’s leaders that modern music is necessary to bring in young singers, kibbers (who make up roughly half of the BHS’s membership, according to Martin) don’t want to see barbershop turned into an extension of the college a cappella scene, even as a marketing gimmick. They’ve been vocal opponents of BHS policy on the BHS’s unofficial online listserv (“the Harmonet”), and at this year’s BQPA convention, held several weeks after the official Nashville convention, only old-time barbershop was sung.

“What the society is doing is an abomination!” barks Tom Neal, who founded the BQPA in 1982. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for bringing kids into our hobby. But there’s nothing wrong with teaching them real barbershop instead of this doo-wop horseshit.”

“I understand the traditionalists’ fears,” says BHS president Noah Funderburg, one of many barbershop leaders growing tired of fighting the kibber wars. “They’re scared that if we dilute the amount of pure barbershop being sung in contest, it’ll be 50 percent someday,

CBS Photo arChiveS/Getty imaGeS

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