What’s So Masculine About Joining Voices in Four-Part Harmony?

“Barbershop quartet.”

To the average person, the words suggest a group of smiling, dapper gentlemen in straw skimmers, crooning a sentimental tune and savoring an authentic American art form that is clean, fun, and masculine .

But that is really only half the picture, like a shave without a haircut. The Sweet Adelines, an international network of women barbershop singers, is strong and tuneful right here in Orange County.

This isn’t simply a bevy of white-haired ladies in Gibson Girl attire singing “Bye Bye Blackbird.” The 99 members of the Adelines’ local Harbor Lights Chapter are of all ages and interests. They have been known to perform in slit satin gowns with feather boas, and one of their favorite numbers is Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again.”

Barbershop is not, as many perceive, a body of specific songs. It is a singing style, and any song can be adapted to a barbershop arrangement, often with surprising results. The Harbor Lights’ only guideline is that a song be secular and more or less apolitical.

“Broadway, Bright Lights and Barbershop,” the chapter’s annual fall showcase, will be staged in Anaheim Saturday night. The showcase, which has been designated an official event of the Orange County Centennial, is one of several projects the Harbor Lights undertake each year.

The Harbor Lights do yearly stints at Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, the Irvine Harvest Festival and numerous conventions. Each Christmas, to raise funds, they record and market an original singing telegram cassette. Their last major production, a dinner cabaret last spring, was “sold out to the walls,” according to their musical director, 36-year-old Bonnie Sherburne.

The Sweet Adelines first started harmonizing in Tulsa, Okla., in 1947. The group “was begun by a group of women who saw how much fun their husbands were having singing barbershop and wanted to do something comparable,” says the Harbor Lights’ Fran Carman.

Predictably, perhaps, the women’s efforts were met with some criticism by those who felt that barbershop singing should remain in the exclusive, sacred male domain.

The story goes that the Daily Oklahoman ran an editorial severely questioning whether women ought to be allowed to sing barbershop. The following day, the full contingent of Sweet Adelines appeared at the Oklahoman offices and diplomatically showered the writer with both home-baked bread and eight-part harmony.

He relented.

Since then, their numbers have grown to include 34,000 members (only 3,000 fewer than are in the all-male Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America). Wives of servicemen began chapters in Germany, Holland, Sweden, Japan, Australia and other countries.

More than 40 years later, there is no shortage of enthusiasm; the Harbor Lights alone have doubled the size of their roster in the last 6 years. The ranks include housewives and mothers as well as clerical workers, nurses, teachers and other professionals. While one must be at least 18 to join a chorus, there is no upper-age limit. (“I’m too old for men to care and too young for Medicare,” said Gertrude Knego, a senior member).

Very few of them are professional singers. A potential Adeline might not even know how to read music (though many chapters, including the Harbor Lights, will teach new members the fundamentals). All that is required is a love for singing and the ability to carry a tune within one of the four voice parts: bass, baritone, lead, and tenor--the same as in men’s barbershop, but sung within the women’s voice range.

Typically, the singers will learn their parts from practice tapes before convening for rehearsal. “The tapes will let me hear what it sounds like in a quartet,” explains Carman. “Then I hear it with my part prominent. Then I hear it with my part missing. If you’re smart, you’ll learn your music in the car.”

The quality of the musicianship becomes especially critical each year at competitions which result in the selection of one quartet as the International Queens of Harmony. These contests are judged entirely by women, at both the regional and international levels. The Harbor Lights have taken second-place medals in three of the last four competitions.

According to a number of Sweet Adelines, it is not unusual for spontaneous, inter-regional quartets, called pick-up quartets, to form at these competitive gatherings. The results are impromptu bursts of song in restaurants, on street corners and in hotel lobbies.

The opportunity to express themselves informally in song is what keeps many women in Sweet Adelines for decades at a time. “It’s for everybody,” director Sherburne explains. “It’s something that you can start as soon as you have the craving to become an entertainer, and it’s a good place to springboard from.

“My Monday (rehearsal) nights are an absolute, total release.”

The Harbor Lights Chapter of the Sweet Adelines performs Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Anaheim High School Auditorium, 811 W. Lincoln Ave., Anaheim. Tickets: $5 to $8. Information: (714) 552-1933.