Tuesday, October 12, 2021 Bye Bye Blues

I didn’t join our high school choir until I was a senior. Early on in the year, I was approached by fellow choir member Karen, who asked me to be part of a barbershop quarter with her and two others. Although the school’s regular choir director did NOT approve of women singing barbershop material (she may have thought the bass part was too low and not suitable for a woman), she was on sabbatical that year and couldn’t object.

Our quartet, The Honey Blondes, was conceived of and coordinated by Karen, who was just about the most musically talented person I knew at the time. In fact, she invited me once to her organ recital. Imagine my surprise when I got there and she told me she didn’t have a page turner and could I please do it for her? She played the most magnificent and complex pieces, but I was so stressed out over the whole page-turning thing that I couldn’t enjoy it.

Back to the HB’s, though. By the time Karen recruited me, she already had the other two girls lined up: Elin (low alto/bass) and Sue (soprano/tenor). Karen sang alto/baritone and I was being asked to sing the lead. To say I was flattered hardly covers it. I was THRILLED. It turned out my grandfather had also sung barbershop, so my mom had a few of his old barbershop songbooks handy. We were off and running.

The first song we worked up was called “Bye Bye Blues,” and we did it for the high school talent show in the fall. This was not the kind of talent that the illustrious student body at our school was used to, so we got some jeers and unkind laughter, but that didn’t stop us. We even had a little dance routine to go with it! The spotlights! The greasepaint! Well, okay, there wasn’t any greasepaint, but we did have some t-shirts made – light yellow with the words “Honey Blondes” in black capital letters. Prince attended our high school and later became wildly famous, so it was fun to be able to tell people that I once shared a stage with Prince, since he performed at the same talent show.

We actually sounded pretty good, if I may toot our own horn a bit. We blended well and practiced often. Somewhere in this house, I have a cassette tape of one of our rehearsals – I need to get that on a CD before it disintegrates with age. Some of the other songs we did were: “Rugged But Right,” “When You Wore A Tulip,” and “How Dry I Am,” the latter song no doubt a product of the Prohibition Years. We didn’t really think about the words, but they were probably songs that were all written in the 1920’s and ‘30’s or earlier. Part of the tulip song goes “When you caressed me, ’twas then heaven blessed me, what a blessing no one knows.” Oh dear, I’m afraid that would get howls of laughter and leering looks if sung these days.

One of my favorite Honey Blonde memories was the time Karen got us a gig singing at the local Shakey’s Pizza Parlor. We were given those funny stiff flat-top hats (like styrofoam) and were supposed to entertain the pizza-eating masses. I think in our minds, we were definitely thinking there would be masses. In reality, there was only one man in the place, who studiously avoided us by reading his newspaper instead of watching us sing. This, of course, made us feel quite self-conscious and silly about the whole thing and we giggled through our repertoire like a bunch of little girls (which I guess we were, in a way). We got to keep the hats, though, and I had mine for a long time.

It was a golden time and I loved every part of my experience in the group. I was the only senior – all the rest were juniors – so when I graduated, the group essentially folded. I was still in town during the next year and we made a couple half-hearted efforts to get things going again, but the season had ended. As Karen’s boyfriend (also a senior) wrote in my yearbook when we graduated: “Seniors ruin everything.”

This has been Tuesday True Stories with Lynniebeemuseoday

🎶 Sun is shining, no more pining, Bye bye blues… 🎶
and bye bye to this post in the morning.