Winning Members
My father, Jim, was singing barbershop in the early 1950s before he knew there was a Society; he eventually joined before I was born. My mother, Paula, sang in a Sweet Adeline chorus in Louisville, so I grew up with barbershopping all around. Every vacation was to a Cardinal District convention or other function, or to the International contest. We moved to Louisville when I was six and Dad joined the Thoroughbreds.
I sang tags with his friends and various quartets who came to the house, and then started going to chorus rehearsals regularly in my early teens. I joined at 15 and first competed on the International stage as a member of the Thoroughbreds in 1972 in Atlanta.
At that convention, my mother leaned over during the quartet contest and said, “I’ll give you five years to be in a quartet on that stage.” Four years later, the Bluegrass Student Union was fortunate enough to win a fourth-place medal in our first International contest in San Francisco. We eventually won in 1978 just after the Thoroughbreds had won the chorus contest earlier in the afternoon.
The quartet had formed partly because Ken Hatton, his brother Allen Hatton, Rick Staab and I were about the only people of our generation singing with the Thoroughbreds at the time, so we naturally gravitated toward each other. The chorus leadership had instilled a pretty rigorous work ethic in all of us, and we started out determined to do whatever it took to become as good as we could get.
We were truly fortunate to get great coaching, guidance and advice from some terrific barbershoppers both inside and outside of the Thoroughbreds, from the Citations quartet and coach Ed Gentry, various International-level judges, and Don Clause.
Overall, I was a part of four International chorus championships and a number of other chorus medals. The quartet sang together for over 30 years and was able to get to every corner of North America and other parts of the world, as well. I made two trips to China with Ken Hatton and a small group of singers (including such AIC greats as Brian Beck, Terry Clarke, Kent Martin, John Sherburn, and Bobby Gray) to teach a cappella music to various groups there.
My wife is my high-school sweetheart, Cyndy, and we have two sons, Matthew (who lives in Charlottesville VA with his wife Arlyn and daughters Harper and Olivia), and Christopher (who lives in Memphis with his wife Ruthie and kids Nancy and Sammie).
