Seventh Chords and "those minor chords"

Barbershoppers start every chorus practice and board meeting by singing The Old Songs, and in the second line we sing about how we "love to hear those minor chords." Yet there aren't any minor chords in the song, and in fact, most barbershop music contains mostly the happy sounds of major chords and few of the sadder sounds of minor chords. So why does this song call out the sound of minor chords when it doesn't have any? The answer requires that we know something about a chord that's characteristic of barbershop music – the seventh chord.

Seventh chords

Seventh chords are named for one particular note they contain – the seventh note. Think of the place on the musical staff where a chord starts as position 1 or the primary note or root or the chord. If you count up the lines and spaces on the staff to position 8 the note there is an octave higher than the primary note. If you only go up to position 7 on the staff that note is called the seventh, and the presence of that note in a chord is what gives it the name seventh chord.

  A simple seventh chord contains the notes in the first, third, and fifth staff positions (called a major triad) plus the note in the seventh position. The first figure shows a C-seventh (C7) chord on a music staff with the key signature of F. It contains the major triad middle-C, E, and G and the seventh note B♭. Of course a B♮ is also on the seventh staff position, and a chord containing that note would have a different sound from the one with the B♭. The interval from the primary C up to B♮ is slightly larger than the interval from the C to the B♭, and consequently the larger interval is called the major seventh and the chord containing it is a major seventh chord. The smaller interval to the B♭ is called the minor seventh.

A major seventh chord has a dissonant, unpleasing sound and is seldom used in barbershop music. (The second figure shows an example of a C major seventh chord containing a B♮.)  A good example of a major seventh chord in popular music occurs in Burt Bacharach's Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head. In the first phrase the word "head" is accompanied by an F major seventh chord that is held for a full measure. It provides a transition to a more-usual F dominant seventh chord (see below) that accompanies the entire next measure starting with the word "just."

The chord containing the minor seventh – the B♭ in this example – is called the major-minor seventh or dominant seventh. Unlike the major seventh, the dominant seventh chord is used constantly in barbershop – so much so that it has acquired the name barbershop seventh. (When skillful singers sing a barbershop seventh they tune the chord to slightly different notes from those on a piano or pitch pipe to get the sweetest sound. The reasons for this are outside the scope of this short article.) The seventh chord is so important to the barbershop style that there are strict contest requirements about how much of a song's duration must be comprised of seventh chords.

So what about the "minor chords" in The Old Songs?

Musicians today understand clearly what a minor chord is but a century ago barbershop singers understood it in a different way. As pointed out by Gage Averill in Four Parts, No Waiting: A Social History of American Barbershop Harmony (Oxford University Press, 2003) the minor chords referred to in songs such as Mr. Jefferson, Lord Play that Barbershop Chord (1910) were the dominant seventh chords containing the minor seventh interval that we now call barbershop sevenths.

Now we can understand the words in The Old Songs, which was written in 1921. The "minor chords" it refers to aren't minor chords in the music-theory sense – they're the barbershop sevenths that are in all our songs. So if The Old Songs doesn't have any minor chords in the modern sense, how many minor chords in the old barbershop sense (i.e., barbershop sevenths) does it have?

In the music below for The Old Songs I've marked all the seventh chords. It can be seen that of the 23 chords in the song, 12 are the "minor" (i.e., seventh) chords that the lyrics speak about. In addition, they are comprised of seventh chords based on seven different notes – a veritable banquet of seventh chords in a song about seventh chords!