After 46 years of entertaining the community with a four-part barbershop style, the Mount Forest Harmonaires have sung their last note.
At a dinner meeting and ladies’ night at the Mount Forest Legion on April 9, Harmonaires members “closed the door on a great time together” by officially disbanding the chorus.
“As we are all getting older and have been unable to attract new members to join our group, it has been decided to end with a song,” said Laverne Stinson of Harriston, a 23-year member of the group and its current president.
A plaque presented to director Grant Lawson in appreciation of his years as director was engraved with the following: “I’m so glad we had this time together, just to laugh and sing a song. Seems we just got started and before you know it, it’s time we have to say so long.”
Chorus directors over the years have included Howard Pretty, Elmer MacKenzie, Sid Hewitt, Ron Fallis, Byron Ballagh, Andreas Hackner, Dave Litwiller and, for the past decade or so, Lawson.
“It was a bittersweet night,” Ken Hincks said of Saturday’s ladies’ night and dinner meeting. The Mount Forest resident has been a member of the Harmonaires for 44 years.
“We’ve run into the situation where we (the members) have had too many birthdays,” he said. “A lot of the guys wouldn’t drive in the winter or didn’t want to drive at night.”
In addition to Mount Forest and area, members come from Shelburne, Listowel, Fordwich, Alma, Walkerton and Hanover.
“We didn’t have a show last fall because we just didn’t feel our music was good enough. We only had a couple of baritones and tenors,” Stinson said.
Hincks agreed.
“Grant Lawson is a first class director, almost professional, and we needed at least 20 guys to do it right, and 90 per cent attendance at (weekly Monday night) rehearsals, and we didn’t have that anymore,” Hincks said.
In 1970 the Mount Forest Harmonaires, numbering 35, presented their first barbershop show at the Mount Forest District High School.
That night the chorus received its charter, a symbol of its involvement in “a widely recognized ever-growing singing fraternity of men, drawn together by their love of the four-part, a capella, close-harmony style of music known as barbershop, whose mission is to perpetuate that style by sharing it and their love of it with people of all ages throughout the world,” according to The Society for the Encouragement and Preservation of Barbershop Singing in America.
Original charter officers were John Laughlin, Sidney Hewitt, Richard Neath, Elmer MacKenzie, Ritchie Stewart, Howard Pretty, Len Kerr, Verne Small and Jim McLuhan.
The Harmonaires presented annual shows in Mount Forest in the spring during the first years, and later in the fall as many of its members spent winters in the sunny south and were unavailable for practises for long stretches at a time. The last barbershop show was presented in the fall of 2014.
The group did, however, take part in a very successful variety concert last fall. The Harmonaires joined several other choirs to raise money to bring a refugee family to Mount Forest. The family is slated to arrive soon.
“We wanted to leave on a high note,” Lawson said. “And we did.”
The Harmonaires represented Mount Forest throughout Ontario over the years, competing with choruses from much larger centres in the Ontario District Chorus competitions, and providing quality barbershop music for special occasions as well as the annual concerts. The chorus also spawned numerous quartets that competed, took part in concerts, private parties, fundraisers and even provided “singing Valentines” for years.
Funds raised over the years were given to The Society for the Encouragement and Preservation of Barbershop Singing in America, now known as the Barbershop Harmony Society. The organization, in addition to promoting and preserving barbershop singing, provides funds for speech pathology and other services under the motto “We sing so they shall speak.”
