GRAND JUNCTION — The regular coffee drinkers were sipping their mid-morning lattes Thursday at Main Street Bagels when five gents in black suits and red bow ties trooped in with a special delivery.
They had been hired by a husband to bring early-Valentine love songs to his wife.
Cellphones came out, and so did grins, as this grey-haired gang of retirees — a German teacher, a mechanic, a pastor, a carpenter and a mailman (who also drummed in the U.S. Air Force band) — lined up on creaky knees like the old pros they are and broke into “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” and “Heart of My Heart.”
They had already crooned those songs at a private home, poolside for a water aerobics class, and next to the shampoo sinks in a beauty shop. With other quartets in their Bookcliff Barbershop Chorus, they will continue to fan out through Valentine’s Day to schools, banks, hospitals, nursing homes, restaurants and more living rooms.
They will entertain at a reservation-only dinner at a McDonald’s in Clifton, where the owner has a Valentine’s Day tradition of putting out white tablecloths, candles and flowers for lovey-dovey Big Mac fans.
They will end their two-day musical sprint with a performance at Moody’s, a downtown Grand Junction speakeasy normally known for youngish vibes, not barbershop music.
In 56 years of delivering singing valentines, carrying out “random acts of harmony,” and doing pop-up “sing-outs” in public places, the Bookcliff Barbershop Chorus has spread harmonies across all parts of the Grand Valley.
“The only place we know that we haven’t been invited is the strip club out by the auto dealers,” chorus president Dave Woodward noted.
Behind the well-practiced a cappella harmonies, the sparkly bow ties and the hands held meaningfully over hearts, the chorus members have a whole lot of togetherness that encompasses more than just melding lead, tenor, baritone and bass parts into sweet harmony.
The 35 or so members say what they do is as much about fellowship and camaraderie as it is about hitting the right notes.
Life’s challenges tightly bind the members.
Their average age is estimated to be in the 70s (no one has officially done the math). Some members have lost some faculties and body parts. Missing an eye; no big deal. Lost a leg to cancer; we can push you to singing gigs in a wheelchair. Prostate problems; we can relate. Hearing aids need a tuneup; we can help with that.
The Bookcliff Barbershop Chorus’ performances have included harmonizing sad songs at members’ funerals.
Outside of their harmonic get-togethers, these men are — or were — teachers, insurance salesmen, bus drivers, artists, real estate agents, pastors and IT experts. One of the rare younger members repairs tires at a tire shop. Another is a high school sophomore.
The thing they most share is a seriousness about the nitpicky details of proper harmonizing.
Practice makes pitch perfect
Every Tuesday evening, the singers spend hours in a church basement, circled under the nets in a basketball court doing some serious practice.
With director Olyn Carlson’s guidance, they begin by panting, hissing “shhhhhhhh,” rolling out belly laughs, and turning to greet their neighbors with startlingly loud, “heys!”
They read lists of words from a chart: “See, thee, bee, sit, fit, bit, fawn, lawn, love, dove …” They do it with gusto and with precise pronunciation. A large print of a skeleton standing in profile reminds them how important posture is for correct singing.
Warm-up sounds are followed by a few church hymns. Then they move into a repertoire of barbershop versions of songs including “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” “Under the Boardwalk,” and The Beatles’ tune “When I’m Sixty-Four.”
“It’s good for your brain,” said member Jim Witt of having to memorize all the parts and the lyrics for so many songs.
Their musical scores are kept in fat binders that members tote in to practice in shopping bags or rolling suitcases. Each binder includes a roster of 24 songs called the Barberpole Cat. These are songs that every barbershop singer around the world memorizes so it’s possible to drop into a session in, say, Latvia, France, Namibia, Australia or Grand Junction and everyone will know the same songs and can harmonize together in English.
“We had a quartet come here from Russia one year to sing with us and they had learned all the songs in English,” said Dennis Kiefer, who joined the Bookcliff chorus in 1968.
The Bookcliff chorus and the 15 choruses in Colorado, the estimated 800 choruses around the country, and the 70,000 or so barbershop singers around the world, trace their origins to Black barbershops.
Black quartet singing dates back to the 1880s when barbershop patrons would harmonize while waiting for their turn in the barber chair.
In 1938, the Barbershop Harmony Society was established. Members harmonizing caught on and the a cappella barbershop genre exploded into a worldwide movement that now includes the rule-bound Barbershop Harmony Society, a Harmony University that will set up shop at the University of Denver in July, The Harmonizer magazine with 19,000 subscribers, and a slew of contests around the world. It also gave rise to the Sweet Adelines, the female proponents of barbershop singing.
The rules that make barbershop singing barbershop include a requirement that lyrics must be understandable. (No rapping!) The melodies must be recognizable. And the harmonies must come from a specifically defined list of options. Many chords heard in pop, blues, jazz or other modern music are a no-no.
Many listeners may not realize that there is a defining characteristic of barbershop singing that leads to a barbershopper’s version of nirvana.
When the frequencies and harmonics in the voices are just right, a chord “rings” and creates what the singers recognize as an overtone. They call that point of harmony the 7th chord. It can’t be played on a piano or a guitar. It can only be created when lead, tenor, baritone and bass voices come together and reverberate just so.
“When you do it right and do it well, it brings chills to your spine,” Kiefer said. “If you hit that chord just right, it’s just so fun.”
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Hamming it up is another element of barbershop singing. Songs aren’t just sung. The singers swoop and sway. They hold hands over hearts and flutter outstretched arms out as they hold notes. They turn their eyes to the heavens.
When they aren’t singing love songs for valentines, they add a bit of Three Stooges lite to their performances. They make fun of their ages by acting like it is hard to bend over. They pretend to wield shovels, and to dump out empty wallets. They playfully shove each other. They look at each other with bug eyes like they are nuts — all the while belting out very precise tunes.
Grand Junction resident Jordan Scott witnessed this last week at a Barnes & Noble store, when a Bookcliff Chorus quartet was doing their schtick and warming up ahead of Valentine’s Day. Scott is 30 — more than half the age of the singers — and he was grinning, really beaming, as he watched from behind a stack of paperback best sellers.
“I don’t know if I would choose them on my Spotify,” Scott said. “But I would go out of my way to see them live in a place like here. They are great.”