Music in a barbershop

I suppose I should have put two-and-two together and figured out that the term "barbershop quartet" probably linked music and barbershops in some fashion. But barbershop quartets didn't have any cachet when I was growing up so I never paid any attention to them.

This article isn't about those a cappella groups, but it is about a long tradition, in at least one Appalachian town, of having morning live music in a barbershop. Maybe it is time to get back to this in more places.

KnoxNews, 1/31/07 - Barbershop offers southern musical heritage along with clean shave: "Each Thursday, for the past half-century, musicians of various stripe and age have arrived at 8 a.m. at the barbershop on West State and 10th Street to pick and sing for three hours. Then, they pack up and leave, just as leisurely as they arrived.

If you go there, make it by 8 a.m., or you might not get in. Some Thursday mornings, Boyd's barbershop is so jammed with jamming musicians that finding a seat is all but impossible. One side of a wooden partition separates those waiting for a haircut and those playing music. There is only one barber chair used for cutting hair....

[Bill] Bowman says that Thursdays are not the only events in Bristol where musicians gather. It all began, he says, in the 1920s outside the Hickory Tree Grocery. Today, several other places around Bristol provide venues for musicians to pick and sing, but Star Barber Shop is probably the most popular because of Boyd and tradition.

'Music just seems to be handed down through families here,' says Bowman. 'It is just part of our lifestyle. You grow up with it. I think music is something you are born with.

About 80 percent of all musicians who have made big names hail from within 100 miles of here, he says.

'At one time, we had live radio shows out of here,' he says. 'That was the only entertainment there was.'"

third places