New Award for Gord!

[bevybear]

http://www.spebsqsa.org/web/groups/public/documents/print/pub_print_ID_057853.hcsp

[SilverHeels]

http://www.spebsqsa.org/web/groups/public/documents/print/pub_print_ID_057853.hcsp

[Jesse Joe]

Good show Bru, {SILVERHEELS}

Good for him not that he needs awards, he must have just about every award a Canadian can get. But he deserves it for being the outstanding person that he is.Congratulations GORDON LIGHTFOOT!!!

[charlene]

Mike Ford mentioned on Saturday after he sang at the Trib show that his dad was onstage with Gord that same night because he's a member of the society.
I think i mentioned it in my report...Apparently there was a short clip on the news that night too...but I missed it traveling back home....
It was mentioned last week in one local Toronto paper and the Hamilton paper but nothing after the award...
I was hoping for a follow-up pic.
I wonder if he sang harmony with a some of the guys there.....!

I'll have to search around to find a pic somewhere.......

[charlene]

Mike Ford mentioned on Saturday after he sang at the Trib show that his dad was onstage with Gord that same night because he's a member of the society.
I think i mentioned it in my report...Apparently there was a short clip on the news that night too...but I missed it traveling back home....
It was mentioned last week in one local Toronto paper and the Hamilton paper but nothing after the award...
I was hoping for a follow-up pic.
I wonder if he sang harmony with a some of the guys there.....!

I'll have to search around to find a pic somewhere.......

[SilverHeels]

ooops, sorry Char. Didnt mean to barge in on your news reporting. :)

[charlene]

I just hope he wasn't wearing one of those red and white striped shirts with the vest and little hat.....or the little cane/white shoes...red pants/white shoes...
oh geeeze...that's a visual that's scary!
lol

[geodeticman]

Thanks Bru for the link which I saved to my digital scrapbook. And thanks to Char, too for the references to the local papers et al :)
GM

[Borderstone]

Nice award for him. :) This may sound like a dumb question but did these kinds of singer actually sing in barber shops or were they called that because thier moustache's needed serious trimming? :D

Real question! :cool:

[Auburn Annie]

No such thing as a dumb question (this from a librarian who has heard 'em all). Here's a link to the history of barbershop singing:

http://www.acappellafoundation.org/essay/bbshistory.html

An excerpt:

Immigrants to the new world brought with them a musical repertoire that included hymns, psalms, and folk songs. These simple songs were often sung in four parts with the melody set in the second-lowest voice. Minstrel shows of the mid-1800s often consisted of white singers in blackface (later black singers themselves) performing songs and sketches based on a romanticized vision of plantation life. As the minstrel show was supplanted by the equally popular vaudeville, the tradition of close-harmony quartets remained, often as a "four act" combining music with ethnic comedy that would be scandalous by modern standards.

The "barbershop" style of music is first associated with black southern quartets of the 1870s, such as The American Four and The Hamtown Students. The African influence is particularly notable in the improvisational nature of the harmonization, and the flexing of melody to produce harmonies in "swipes" and "snakes." Black quartets "cracking a chord" were commonplace at places like Joe Sarpy's Cut Rate Shaving Parlor in St. Louis, or in Jacksonville, Florida, where, black historian James Weldon Johnson writes, "every barbershop seemed to have its own quartet." The first written use of the word "barbershop" when referring to harmonizing came in 1910, with the publication of the song, "Play That Barbershop Chord"‹evidence that the term was in common parlance by that time.