"Barbershop as a tradition doesn't appear to have much of a pedigree, whereas folkmusic and song go back forever".-eric the red

With regard to the history of barbershop singing, you might be interested in this article that I found on the barbershop.org website: "The historical roots of barbershop harmony" By Dr. Jim Henry, bass, The Gas House Gang, 1993 International Quartet Champion

Here's a longish excerpt from that article:

"...Barbershop quartets often are characterized as four dandies, perhaps bedecked with straw hats, striped vests and handlebar mustaches. These caricatures of the barbershop tradition are not only a quaint symbol of small-town Americana, but have some historical foundation. Barbershop music was indeed borne out of informal gatherings of amateur singers in such unpretentious settings as the local barber shop.

But modern scholarship is demonstrating with greater and greater authority that while the stereotype seems to have successfully retained the trappings of the early barbershop harmony tradition, it breaks down on one key point. If you visualized the characters described above as you were reading, you probably pictured them -- like Rockwell did over sixty years ago -- as white men. And therein lies barbershop music's greatest enigma: it is associated with and practiced today mostly by whites, yet it is primarily a product of the African-American culture.

Historical evidence

The African-American origins theory is not new. Several of our early Society members and recent historians have made the assertion, or at least suggested an African-American influence upon barbershop harmony. But it was a non-Barbershopper, Lynn Abbott, who in the Fall 1992 issue of American Music published, "'Play That Barber Shop Chord': A Case for the African-American Origin of Barbershop Harmony," presented the most thoroughly documented exploration into the roots of barbershop to appear up to that time. In that writing, Abbott draws from rare turn-of-the-twentieth-century articles, passages from books long out of print, and reminiscences of early quartet singing by African-American musicians, including Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, to argue that barbershop music is indeed a product of the African-American musical tradition...

The earliest white quartet recordings are rife with minstrel show conventions which included negro dialect and other parodies of the African-American culture, suggesting an African-American association with the music.

Early musicians associated barbershop music with blacks ...

Among Abbott's findings are specific early musical referecnes [sic]that suggest that barbershop was once acknowledged as African-American music...

and the earliest known reference to barbershop music is associated with black quartets...

It is unknown exactly when or why barbershop music became associated with whites. Abbott cites African-American author James Weldon Johnson who, in the introduction to his Book of American Negro Spirituals, published in 1925, offers a hint at how the association might have shifted:

It may sound like an extravagant claim, but it is, nevertheless a fact that the "barber-shop chord" is the foundation of the close harmony method adopted by American musicians in making arrangements for male voices. ... "Barber-shop harmonies" gave a tremendous vogue to male quartet singing, first on the minstrel stage, then in vaudeville; and soon white young men, where four or more gathered together, tried themselves at "harmonizing."

There is additional support for the effluence of barbershop music from black neighborhoods into the white mainstream, as suggested by Johnson, in its parallel with other forms of African-American music..."

http://www.barbershop.org/web/groups/public/documents/pages/pub_cb_00167.hcsp


And the beat goes on.