Five voices and one program

The Tuesday night rehearsal in a Tampa fellowship hall begins the same way each week. Four folding chairs are set in a half circle. A pitch pipe rests on the seat of the nearest one, next to a program folded in three. Five men walk in. Four sit down. The fifth stands behind the circle, jacket off, and waits to be needed. The formation under study is the classic gospel quartet, four chairs and a spare, worked the same way across Florida and the Southeast for as long as the recordings remember. Two rehearsals a week keep it oiled. This book walked the formation chair by chair, checked each voice against the printed programs and the label copy, and set down the order of a program from the first song to the last. What follows is the record of that walk.

What does each chair sing?

The lead sits nearest the piano and carries the melody, which in quartet practice means he carries most of the words. On the slower numbers he sings almost alone at the front of the verse, and the other three come in behind him like a frame around a photograph. The tenor works above him, high enough to be heard over the blend without ever quite leaving it. The baritone fills the middle, the least showy chair and the hardest to replace, because every other part leans on the space he keeps. The bass holds the bottom, sometimes stretching one syllable across two bars. The Smithsonian Folkways notes on quartet singing describe these parts being passed from one singer to the next by rote, learned in vans and kitchens, and the rehearsal room shows exactly that: nothing on the music stands but a single page of lyrics.

The utility singer, and how he covers an absence

The fifth man is the utility singer. At a Macon program last spring, the tenor's car broke down on the interstate, and the quartet went on anyway: the utility man took the tenor chair for the whole first set and sang it note for note, a full tone lower in places and never less than certain. He knows all four parts because he has sung all four, a cassette single in the church van and an hour of call and response between cities teaching him what the music stands never did. The printed program from that same weekend lists only four names under the group, no understudy printed, yet the formation held. The same arrangement kept turning up wherever the quartet was observed: the spare voice is not a substitute kept for an emergency. He is part of the standing plan, a fifth voice held in tune against the day one of the four cannot make it.

How is a program ordered?

The order of a program is not left to feeling. On the page folded in three, the songs are listed the way they will be sung, and the pattern repeats from one program to the next. The quartet opens fast, two songs in a row, enough to settle the room and the singers' nerves at once. The middle belongs to the slow number, the one the lead sings nearly alone, and it is placed there on purpose, as a hinge. The close is the hardest song the group can reliably land, often the oldest one in the book. The rehearsal works the program backward as much as forward: the close is run twice, with a metronome on the table to keep the tempo from climbing. The order was checked against a Gainesville shelf of CDs and cassettes, a Golden Gate Quartet reissue among them, where the track lists on the backs of the cases repeat the same shape: fast, fast, slow, close.

Why does the order hold up when one voice is missing?

Because the parts are learned by rote, the program survives an absence better than a written score would. When the utility singer steps into the tenor chair, the other three do not shift to help him; they keep their own lines, and the harmony simply resumes one chair over. The rehearsal room shows why. The group never practices the four parts as four separate songs; it practices one song five ways, the fifth way being the version sung when one chair is empty. The Library of Congress collection of field recordings from the Southeast preserves dozens of quartet performances made in working churches, and the pattern in them is the same: the formation holds no matter who stands in which chair. Wherever the four chairs were observed, they behaved as if the spare were already on the riser.

A small task for the next visit

For the chorister: learn one part that is not yours, a single verse, and note how differently the song stands up from that chair. For the collector: take one quartet record off the shelf, CD or cassette, and write down the order of the songs before you play it; the shape will be there to be read. For the Sunday visitor: arrive early enough to watch the group set up, and count the chairs. If there are five men and four chairs, you will already know, before a note is sung, what the fifth one is for. That is the whole program, read from the chairs alone. Four chairs, five voices, and one fixed order: everything else the singers bring, and everything else the room provides.