Written by Matt Short
When Wayne asked for an article about the quartet, I readily agreed to do the writing thinking that it would be a very easy task to scribble a few lines telling everyone what we had been up to lately.
When I sat down to begin, I realized that it has now been nine and a half years since the “Slickers” became a reality. Consequently, there could be many people reading this who really don’t know too much about us. With that in mind, I decided to make this article a short history of the quartet, and, hopefully, an encouragement to others to enjoy the experience of quarteting.
As most Ontario Barbershoppers know, Duncan and Morgan were the bass and tenor respectively in one of Ontario District’s most popular quartets, “The Positive Outlook”, for several years. In the summer of 1974, the quartet disbanded because one of the members could no longer devote the time required to continue.
At that time, I was coming to the end of a very happy involvement as the lead with a Markham Chapter quartet called “The Moonlight Knights”.
As so often happens, Duncan and I met at a District H.E.P. school and began to discuss our future goals and most important of all, our philosophy with regard to our hobby. Happily, we found that what we had in common was the desire to sing as well as possible and have fun doing it, with the emphasis on having fun. We quickly approached Morgan, who showed enthusiasm
but now decided he would like to return to bari, having sung that part with the 1966 Ontario Champion “Bards of Harmony”.
All we had to do now was find a tenor. This proved to be a real problem and for a while it looked as though we would have to shelve our plans until there was a personnel change somewhere in the District.
Now, as everyone knows, when Duncan decides that something has merit, he becomes the most exuberant and tenacious being alive. So it will come as no surprise to learn that he found the solution to our dilemma; however, no one else believed it would work. As Duncan saw it, what we really needed was a bass, not a tenor, the logic being that Morgan would be quite happy to sing tenor and he, Duncan, would switch to bari, completely ignoring the fact that he had never sung the part before. Besides, he reasoned, one of Ontario’s finest bass singers was idling away his time in 0shawa in the person of Elmer Down, who already had two District Championship pins singing with “Four in Accord” and the “Rumble Seat Raiders”.
The stage was set for our first meeting, having agreed with Elmer that, “yes” we probably were a little crazy but it was only for one night.
We assembled in my basement early in September of 1974 with a couple of Barber Pole Cat arrangements and a lot of enthusiasm. The result was a source of amazement to all four of us – we were terrible!!
We did, however, during the three hours we were together, manage to ring one chord, which was all the encouragement we needed and, true to the nature of the quartet, we decided to stay together long enough to compete in October and hear what the judges had to say.
Following this experience, we rationalized that judges had been wrong before and in our opinion didn’t know much anyway. Besides that, the fun had begun, so there was no stopping us. The “Tri-City Slickers” were here to stay.
The next couple of years were filled with countless hours of friendship and song while we accepted every offer we could fit in to sing for anyone who would listen.
During this time, we were fortunate to receive coaching help from people like George Shields, Ray Danley, and Harry Williamson as we continued to compete in the District contests, hoping that some day we would put it all together at the right time and realize our goal of being District Champions.
In 1976, in St. Catharines, it happened -WE WON-and it was the most thrilling experience of our career as a quartet.
Since that time, we have continued, as we began, to sing to the best of our ability and to enjoy to the fullest our hobby while hopefully returning to our fellow barbershoppers some of the friendship and support that have been extended to us over the years.
Duncan expressed it best when he wrote the caption for our championship photograph-he said, “We sing together because it’s fun; when it stops being fun, we will stop singing together.”
None of us, so far, can foresee the day when it will stop being fun and we are truly indebted to every Barbershopper who has ever stopped to listen and to give us the opportunity of singing together. Quarteting is a very rewarding experience.
Try it, you’ll like it.