Racial Dissonance

American Barbershop Harmony in the Age of Jim Crow

(in progress)

In the summer of 1941, roughly 15,000 people gathered in New York City’s Central Park to attend the city’s seventh annual contest for barber shop quartet singing—a four-part, a cappella tradition known for its camaraderie and ringing harmonies. Judged by New York’s political elite—including mayor Fiorello La Guardia, former governor Al Smith, and parks commissioner Robert Moses—the contest ended with the Grand Central Red Caps, an African American quartet from Harlem, being declared the winners. Their victory earned them a spot at a national barbershop competition held in St. Louis, hosted by the newly formed Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America (SPEBSQSA). However, the Red Caps never made it to St. Louis. As it turns out, SPEBSQSA was racially segregated and strongly opposed the quartet’s participation. The ensuing scandal prompted Moses, Smith, and La Guardia to resign from the Society in protest, triggering a massive public-relations crisis covered by The New York Times and dozens of other news outlets nationwide. Despite the prominence of this episode in the history of barbershop, there has been no sustained study of the institutionalized segregationist logic that permeated every facet of the genre’s development—shaping not only its racial demographics and its audiences, but also its very musical and aesthetic characteristics. The project thus contends that the nostalgic archetype of the white, male barbershop quartet—immortalized by Norman Rockwell paintings, popularized by The Music Man, and solidified in the American consciousness through popular culture—is not a historical accident, but rather the direct consequence of segregationist politics that continue to limit our understanding of barbershop to this day.

Racial Dissonance: American Barbershop Harmony in the Age of Jim Crow traces a century of barbershop quartet singing (c. 1890–1990) to reveal how this seemingly carefree musical style functioned as an important battleground for racial segregationists and as a site of white racial formation in the twentieth-century U.S. The monograph grounds this analysis in a key historical simultaneity: the 1890s emergence of barbershop music and the dawn of legalized Jim Crow via the landmark 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. This project argues that the era’s “separate but equal” ideology directly drove the historical erasure of the genre’s deep Black American cultural roots, in ways that shed new light on the Jim Crow era and civil rights movement more broadly. With the founding of the SPEBSQSA in 1938, segregationist logics became formalized as the Society sought to institutionalize a strictly white version of the tradition. Because the impact of this racial gatekeeping extended far past the Society’s formal desegregation in 1963, the book also examines how this sonic color line continued to be enforced through musical style and repertoire into the late twentieth century. Ultimately, Racial Dissonance demonstrates how barbershop codified a musical and racial “harmony” that mirrored—and actively informed—both the segregationist impulse and the national struggle for civil rights.

A history of race relations in American barbershop music necessitates an institutional history of SPEBSQSA. Racial Dissonance draws on a substantial, previously unexamined archive of Society documents, including administrative records, board meeting minutes, and internal correspondence. Taken together, these documents reveal a history of racial segregation that the organization actively sought to suppress and even attempted to rewrite by excising its secretive exclusionary efforts. To demonstrate how white anxieties and segregationist logics permeated the very musical materials of the barbershop world, I perform close discourse and music analyses of Society-published texts, including songbooks, arranging manuals, and contest judging handbooks. I supplement these institutional materials with a comprehensive survey of the Black press alongside oral histories conducted with the descendants of mid-century Black barbershoppers. Methodologically, the book reads these diverse sources through a critical race lens to construct a microhistory of everyday Black musical life under Jim Crow. My attention to quotidian figures represents one of the book’s core interventions: barbershop did not become a segregated space through the high-profile exclusion of stars like Marian Anderson or Sammy Davis Jr., but rather through the routine exclusion of mostly unknown amateur musicians. Furthermore, by focusing on the sonic phenomena that simultaneously united and divided the barbershop world, Racial Dissonance goes beyond traditional histories of U.S. civil rights by showing how popular, widely performed music became yet another site of white racial formation as well as a site of resistance for Black musicians. Interdisciplinary in scope, the monograph speaks directly to scholars and students in musicology, (African) American studies, and U.S. history, as well as general readers interested in the enduring legacies of white supremacy and the ongoing battles to overcome the national and local manifestations of Jim Crow logic.