Racial Dissonance

American Barbershop Harmony in the Age of Jim Crow

At the turn of the twentieth century, American culture was enamored with barbershop harmony, a four-part, a cappella singing tradition known for its ringing harmonies and camaraderie. Yet this bonhomie had its limits, as the musical style was still plagued by the racial tensions prevalent in the country. Indeed, close-harmony singing was largely a racially segregated practice: for example, the Barbershop Harmony Society (BHS), a fraternal organization with over 35,000 members across the U.S. and Canada during the mid-century, excluded men of color (specifically Black men) from its founding in 1938 to 1963. Nonetheless, most white barbershoppers acknowledged the influence of Black Americans on the musical style, even insisting that “the American Negro is the very fountainhead of barbershop harmony” (1946). 

Beginning in the 1940s, however, a growing number of white practitioners believed that “Negroes don’t sing barbershop harmony” (1946) and that the style was “not instinctive or natural” (1963) to Black Americans, whose musical talents were supposedly limited to spirituals and jazz. What’s more, white barbershoppers drew on this racialized logic in their efforts to preserve the barbershop style, declaring in arranging manuals that the style “must be pure and undiluted by other [musical forms],” lest it become a “crossbreed” (1961). These anxieties surrounding musical and social miscegenation were so profound that BHS leaders even feared that racial integration would result in “the destruction of the Society” (1958). How, then, did Black Americans go from being recognized as an essential part of the barbershop tradition to viewed as fundamentally incompatible with, and even threatening to, the musical style? 

In Racial Dissonance: American Barbershop Harmony in the Age of Jim Crow, I explore how this form of close harmony functioned as a site of racial division, ultimately resulting in the erasure of Black Americans from the historiography of barbershop music. Drawing on music-theoretical texts such as arranging manuals and contest judging handbooks, together with archival research and oral history, I contend that musical-gatekeeping efforts to protect the barbershop style from musical contamination and intermixture were deeply intertwined with social-gatekeeping efforts common during the Jim Crow era. In other words, propaganda such as the BHS’s slogan “keep it barbershop” were often a euphemism for “keep it white.” As such, even though de jure segregation ended following the civil rights movement, the legacy of anti-blackness in barbershop harmony has lived on via the style’s musical structures and its purported history. Racial Dissonance disrupts these processes of institutional forgetting by highlighting a largely untold history of Black barbershop singing, and the structural racism that sought to silence their voices.