Esteemed older-than-I gentlemen,
I am in my late 20s. I am a barbershopper, the de facto assistant director of the Central KS chapter. I’m working on my 3rd official year of membership, and have been singing barbershop for almost 4 years now. I’ve attended 3 district conventions and been to Harmony University twice.
I have come to really appreciate the Society’s way of doing things, to believe in the mission of the Society in such a way that I am trying to do what I can to help get, and keep, the world singing barbershop, harmonizing together. I am struck most strongly by barbershop when I’m at a convention or at HU and I see how many happy people are walking around. The atmosphere is saturated with jovial, relaxed people who always have singing or listening on their mind.
Our world, the barbershopping world, is a world that deserves to be preserved; in order to preserve it, it needs new members. By simple logic, we conclude that many of these members need to be younger so that there are still men to carry the torch in the years to come when we have to get by without your wisdom and guidance.
If you want to recruit the younger generations, I have a request to make, and it takes a little explaining.
First off, I know that you are trying to reach us, and are sympathetic to the fact that we want to be able to sing songs that we’re familiar with, but, please understand, contemporary pop music is not marketed to us. It’s marketed to teenage girls. It’s why so many freaked out about Miley Cyrus’s “dance move"... They were worried about the effect on girls’ expectations for themselves and how they have to act to get boys’ attention.
So, why would younger people want to be around barbershop? It’s the same reason that anyone ever has… The younger folks would join barbershop because a barbershop chord is a barbershop chord! There is so much music that has been produced in the last 120 years, and the music that endures does so because a good song is still a good song.
I am not experienced enough to be able to make a conclusive statement that I know how recruiting younger people will be most effective. What I do know is that I’ve had a number of conversations with other barbershoppers, at conventions and at Harmony U., who seem to think that the key to bringing us in is to have newer songs. Would that help? Sure, I suppose that it could. But, why do we need newer songs? A well-tuned chord a well-tuned chord. Sure, there might be rhythms and such that aren’t in the older songs, but humans love rhythm, so that’s easy enough to adjust to. Is it in the lyrics that the songs feel outdated? I suppose… we younger guys rarely say “at night, dear heart.” But, I recently met a woman whose middle name is Rose, and I find her to be a marvelous woman. If I need an image to fully express “Heart of my Heart,” I can think of her now. I went to high school with a girl named Nelly. I know where Coney Island is, and it’s not hard for me to imagine meeting a girl, having a great conversation with her and feeling almost instantly attracted to her, and wanting to sing “Hello, Mary Lou” with her in mind.
Younger barbershoppers aren’t joining as much as any of us would like, and there are other, more much logical, reasons why we haven’t yet gotten more younger barbershoppers than that there is a dearth of arrangements of new songs being performed throughout the society. Young men watch sports. They read comics. They play war videogames. They work out. The principal commonality between all of these activities is that, relaxed environment or not, loud noises or not, something is always happening. Everything has value. We’ve grown up in a world saturated with information, a world where we could talk to 6 people all around the globe at the same time. My younger brother (mid-teens) probably can’t remember a time when there was no such thing as high-speed internet. And pre-teen boys will grow up in world where there was always Netflix and Hulu ($8/month to watch a plethora of movies and shows without commercials!). It’s not that we’re too busy, that we wouldn’t be open to joining an organization where there’s singing. It’s that we’re accustomed to always being able to find something to do and something that has value to us. Perhaps there are ways to get barbershop meetings to where what goes on is so blatantly worth our time; having new music would only be a part of that.
So, what I ask is that you give us younger folks more credit. It feels a little insulting to know that older generations hold to the idea that younger guys will join if only there are newer songs in the repertoire. Please consider the following: “My Wild Irish Rose” was published in 1899. Even allowing for the fact that it was published at a time when people bought sheet music instead of mp3s and it took much longer for a song to get imbibed into the culture, that song wasn’t new when you joined the society. It was already an “old song.” It was as old to the guys at the Muehlebach as “Annie’s Song” by John Denver and “Piano Man” by Billy Joel are to me. Show us why you love the old songs, and more of us may come to love them, too.
Finally, thank you for preserving the society so that I could be a part of it. I hope that my sharing this is a small step towards our generations’ understanding each other better. I do appreciate you trying to meet my generation’s needs. We probably do listen to some music that you would like, and, perhaps, we can share this music in the coming years.
Yours in Harmony, Michael Tate
