What is the history of barber shop quartets?
There is a long history of music in barbers’ shops. Barbering can be a long business and the wait can be tedious. In Elizabethan England the barber usually kept a lute hanging on the wall for customers to amuse themselves with while waiting. Customers also, when there were enough waiting to make up a group (usually 4), sang madrigals and other part-songs. This went out of fashion in England in the Commonwealth, but persisted in the USA. The barbershop quartet is the direct descendant of the madrigal-singing, lute-plucking Englishmen. Interestingly this was not only an English or Anglo-Saxon custom. In Spain, music was also offered; it was, however, the barber himself who would sing while he worked. Here and there this custom survived to within living memory – I have had a barber’s smelly breath intoning flamenco into my ear as I was trimmed. But that was years ago – I haven’t met with it recently.
