Our Barbershop Brotherhood

I got an email today from Dave Luck, the Music VP and Assistant Director of the Low Country Chorus, the Grand Strand (SC) chapter of the Carolinas District. It started out:  It is with great sorrow that I inform you of the death of Bob Young at 8 a.m. this morning. I had met Bob last summer when, with six months of barbershop experience under my belt, I sang with the chorus for six or seven weeks during our beach vacation.

I went into the living room and started to tell my wife Sylvia that someone from the Low Country Chorus had died but my voice started to waver. I apologized and said that I didn’t know why it had affected me that way – Bob was very welcoming to me and seemed like a good man but I didn’t really know him at all beyond barbershop. Sylvia replied, “But he was still a brother.” And that’s true – he was.

Other men may join in groups because of shared interests in a profession, or in antique cars, or woodworking. We have joined together because of the joy we get (and engender in others) by making our wonderful music together. For some reason this creates a special kind of brotherhood, one that even encompasses our families, and when one of us is lost we all feel that loss.

In our own chorus family we’ve lost both Sam Frankhouser and Nancy Martin in the last few months. We can’t bring our brothers or their wives back. We can’t stop them from continuing to leave us. But we can rejoice that we live our lives in such a way that we’re surrounded by good people like Bob and Sam and Nancy and so many others.