On a smaller scale, In the first six years of the Gospel Messengers, I went through three tenors. For the last five years, I have not been able to find an acceptable replacement. The two singers I tried immediately insisted on changing all the arrangements to sound more contemporary, assuming that we were too muddle-brained to figure out anything more complicated than plain old four part harmony. That didn't work out at all. One of the oddities with both of the flushed tenors was that they tried to get my friend Joe who is one of the finest bass singers I've ever heard, to sing high tenor, while I sang the bass. I had a third tenor who expressed some interest but made it clear that he didn't like our harmonies and that we'd need a lot of work (by someone as gifted as him, of course,) to ever amount to anything.

Trio singing works fine.

After all, it wasn't the Kingston Quartet, or Peter Paul, Fred, and Mary.

Jerry