The Four Freshmen

The Four Freshmen are an American male vocal quartet founded in the barbershop tradition. Its influences include the big band vocal group sounds of The Modernaires, The Pied Pipers, and The Mel-Tones. The singers accompany themselves on guitar, horns, bass, and drums, among other instrumental configurations.The group was founded in 1948 in Indiana and reached its peak popularity in the mid-1950s. The last original member retired in 1993, but the group continues to tour internationally. It has recorded jazz harmonies since its founding in the late 1940s in the halls of the Jordan School of Music at Butler University in Indianapolis.Brothers Don and Ross Barbour grew up in a musical family in Columbus, Indiana, and had sung with their cousin Bob Flanigan as kids. In 1947, while attending the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana, music theory classmate Hal Kratzsch convinced the Barbours that forming a barbershop quartet would be a great source of income, so they formed a barbershop quartet called Hal's Harmonizers. Kratzsch knew from instinct how to sing the bottom part; Don, with his wide vocal range, was tapped to sing the second part; and Ross, a natural baritone, took the third part. To sing the top part, they recruited classmate Marvin Pruitt. They would perform songs like "Sweet Adeline" at fairs and conventions while wearing armbands, exaggerated false mustaches, and waiters' aprons. Bored with the confinement of barbershop chords, and not wanting to give up their income base, they renamed themselves as the Toppers, and experimented with more complex chords and jazz arrangements. At first, the group was influenced by Glenn Miller's quartet, The Modernaires, and Mel Tormé's Mel-Tones, but soon developed its own style of improvised vocal harmony.As the Toppers' popularity grew, Pruitt developed stage fright and resigned. Initially, they replaced him with Ross's girlfriend and future wife Nancy Sue Carson, but feeling that a fourth male voice would be more appropriate for the group's sound, the Barbour brothers contacted Flanigan, who was living in Greencastle, Indiana and had previously been part of a high school quintet singing songs inspired by the Modernaires, to become their new lead singer. In the meantime, they started accompanying themselves with musical instruments: Don, having played guitar through high school and a couple of years in Arabia with the Air Force, on guitar; Ross, first on piano, then on drums; Flanigan, who played trombone through his army time in Germany, except when the dance band needed a bass player, alternating between string bass and trombone, and Kratzsch, who played trumpet in high school and in the Navy in the South Pacific, on trumpet, mellophone and string bass. Soon, the group dropped out of school and drove to Chicago, where they met agent Dick Shelton. As he already had a group called the Cottontoppers, he renamed them as the Freshmen Four, which they reversed to the Four Freshmen. They made their debut at Fort Wayne's 113 Club on September 20, 1948, and nearly lost the job since the manager had never heard jazz chords, but his daughter had a crush on Kratzsch, allowing them to stay for a week.Soon, the Four Freshmen drew the admiration of jazz legends such as Dizzy Gillespie and Woody Herman. On March 21, 1950, Stan Kenton heard the quartet at the Esquire Lounge in Dayton, Ohio. He "had been told at his own show earlier that night about a quartet in town that sounded like his 43-piece ensemble", and was sufficiently impressed that on April 14, he arranged for an audition with his label, Capitol Records, which signed them later that year. The demo included "Laura", "Basin' Street Blues", "Dry Bones", and two other songs. In 1950, they released a single, "Mr. B's Blues", and appeared in their first and only film, Rich, Young and Pretty, where they sang "How D'Ya Like Your Eggs In The Morning" with Jane Powell and Vic Damone. The Freshmen released another single in 1951, "Now You Know", which was not a commercial success. Later in the year Capitol rejected their proposed next single, "It's a Blue World", and dropped them from the label. In May of the following year, a furious Stan Kenton demanded that the record company send them the demo tapes so that they could promote the song themselves. They managed to get the song onto the radio, and in 1952, "It's a Blue World" became their first charted single. Capitol re-signed the group in July of the same year.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.