Tuesday Night

What tunes are we singing now?

In our family when I was young there was a form of musical religion Dad practiced every Tuesday night; one to which he was nearly as devoted to as the Mass our family attended every Sunday in a brick box church six blocks away from home.

Mass was Sunday’s ritual, invariably followed by scrambled eggs and buttery English muffins slathered in strawberry jam. Come Tuesday evening at 6:45pm, though, Dad would either jump into one of four station wagons he owned over the years, or an old friend would drive up and honk. Then he would be off until late and sometimes later, depending on how lively his weekly night out became.

My dad was the founder and, by the end of his life back in 2004, a 52 year member of the Billings Big Sky Barbershop Chorus. They sang old-fashioned four part harmony as a chorus and in quartets in strengths that in some years reached as many as 80 men on the risers. Through dues to their national organization they supported the Institute for Logopedics (later renamed Heartspring), a medical charity for children with speech impediments. He never missed a meeting if he could possibly help it.

Every year the Chorus would put on their locally well-known annual show, some years nearly selling out the thousand-plus seat Lincoln auditorium two and even three shows in a row. This happened mostly through hundreds upon hundreds of ticket sales every year by my dad, who would spend weeks dialing people up on our old rotary phone, working his way through a box of 3x5 cards he had been keeping since before our parents were married, carefully marking the year and the number of tickets to be held by name at will-call. The annual show ticket sales competition was about who could come in second place to my dad.

Sunday matinees were the smallest crowd for the annual show, but highly devoted. I still get chills remembering the whole Chorus quietly humming a tune called Keep America Singing as my dad — who was the “emcee” of virtually any show they performed — delivered a sterlingly memorized oration over the hum, about the purpose of the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbership Quartet Singing in America (S.P.E.B.S.Q.S.A.) and their work with children through the “Institute for Logopedics in Wichita, Kansas.” As his deep, well-practiced, and slowly rising speaker’s voice moved towards its familiar climax, the choral humming would grow louder and louder, lifting up my dad’s missional oratory until a whole stack of men standing on gritty risers would joyously thunder forth “Keep Amerrrrrica Siiiinng-innngggging!” in glorious harmony, ranging from Wally Zentner’s basso profundo to Pat Krivec’s soaring tenor floating gracefully over the top. Forty or more men’s voices blending in and across complex minor to major chord resolutions I first absorbed in utero, because Dad had married the Barbershoppers nearly a decade before he married Mom. For our family, four-part harmony was a way of life, flat notes, squeakers, and all.

When Dad died twenty years ago this month, the Big Sky Barbershop Chorus came and sang the Lord’s Prayer (“Our Father …”) at his funeral mass. It was as stirring as you could imagine. Something Catholics would not normally allow. But, when you are burying a man who helped found the parish the same year as the Chorus, clocked half a century out in the pews, and had nearly 700 show up for his funeral, certain allowances for humanity can be made, even by a Bishop who would shut the parish down and sell the building off just a few years later.

I don’t recall Dad ever mentioning politics being part of these weekly meetings even though rehearsals began with the Pledge of Allegiance and the Chorus had the national anthem and a half-dozen other patriotic classics in their repertoire. Politics was not the point. The point was singing together. Learning to ring out a half dozen or so new songs every year in soaring harmony. Learning to carefully listen to what is going on around you so you can slide beautifully together into that next minor seventh. Then closing out the evening by having a beer with your buddies and catching up on the news of each other lives. Not a bad way to mark the weeks.

This past week we learned who America is now willing to elect to represent our nation to the world. While I know my World War 2 Veteran Dad would have never voted for someone of such poor personal character as our new president, that is really not the point at this point. Democracy is democracy and what is done is done, for now. Regrets will come sooner for some than for others. Hangovers are like that. But, what I keep asking myself right now is: why has our nation stopped loving harmonies and chords?