Quartet Takes Its Harmony to Students

They bounded into the Rose Avenue School cafeteria Wednesday like rock stars, shaking hands with the students seated in the front row.

But even though members of the Jest for Phun? barbershop quartet crooned tunes dating back to the early 1900s, the Oxnard elementary school children whooped it up as if the group were at the top of the Billboard charts.

Fourth-grader D.J. Price’s favorite was the “San Francisco Bay Blues,” a soft, sad tune chronicling the departure of a man’s sweetheart on an ocean liner.

“We could really hear each of the four different voices,” said the 9-year-old from Oxnard who has studied the piano for three years. “The melody came through really well. It was real harmony.”

But the hundreds of students seated on the floor hooted the loudest when the quartet from Thousand Oaks serenaded a teacher with a song called “Lida Rose.” Clad in black with a silver vest and pink bow tie, lead vocalist and group ham George Dallas pulled the teacher into his lap. Laughter rippled through the cafeteria as the other three vocalists circled the couple and warbled the song’s highs and lows.

“I thought that was pretty nice,” said fourth-grader Andrew Cox, 9. “And pretty funny actually.”

Founded five years ago, Jest for Phun? is one of several barbershop quartets in Ventura County. Countywide, about 40 men belong to such groups, keeping alive a music form that developed in the South beginning in the 1890s. Ventura County also has a group for women called the Sweet Adelines that performs similar music.

Along with jazz, the music produced by barbershop quartets is one of the few types of music that originated in the United States. In a typical quartet, a tenor, baritone and bass sing in harmony with a lead vocalist, at times pantomiming the words of the songs.

“Barbershop quartet music started in barbershops,” said Jest for Phun? member John Ford, 66, of Thousand Oaks. “Guys didn’t have anywhere to go on Saturday nights and they started to congregate in barbershops and picked up singing.”

Ford said the group’s performance in La Colonia on Wednesday, one of about 30 shows every year, served not only to entertain, but also to interest youngsters in joining quartets in the future.

“It’s not that they are going to be able to sing it right now, but when they get older, they might like to,” said Ford, a retired telephone company employee.

Although 9-year-old Joey Hernandez would have to join the Sweet Adelines rather than Jest for Phun?, she said she has not ruled it out of her life plans.

“It was a great show,” she said. “They can sing really high and they can sing really low.”