Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 19:4 (Autumn 2005)
Article: Editor’s Ink
Author: William David Spencer

PP 19:4 (Autumn 2005) p. 3

Editor’s Ink

William David Spencer

Readers who love music know that a revolution has taken place in the world of A Cappella. Years ago, in the United States, A Cappella meant Barbershop four part harmonizing, and those of us who were children in the early years of the twentieth century remember the Barbershop groups that used to delight us all with old standards in those wonderful blends. Occasionally a group would transition to the pop charts, as did the female Barbershop quartet, The Chordettes, which was founded in 1947 by the daughter of the then president of The Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America, Inc. This rare group of women shouldered its way through the male-dominated movement, winning a spot on the Arthur Godfrey show (the Jay Leno of his day) while still competing in quartet conventions, and ended up partnering with the legendary bandleader Archie Bleyer to record such classic chestnuts as “Mr. Sandman.”

Like so much today, A Cappella is still with us, but it has been transformed. Electrified by the heady combination of such world influences as South Africa’s missionary-inspired Mbube movement, the gospel stylings of southern U.S. choirs, and jazz vocals from the Mills Brothers in the 1920s through the ‘50s Lambert, Hendricks & Ross to the late ‘60s Doo Wop through the ‘90s Manhattan Transfer, today’s A Cappella has hit the college campuses and broken out of the straight jacket of four parts. Mainely A Cappella’s Best of College A Cappella (BOCA) series is a year by year summary of samples from privately pressed student-led groups of unbelievable intensity and breath-taking harmonies, full of energy, taste, and flair. With a digital recorder, young college and university women and men, reared in church and high school choirs (see also their Best of High School A Cappella [BOHSA]), are arranging and performing their own arrangements and even compositions at their own initiative and the results are refreshing and electrifying. Do-it-yourself is what music has always really been about.

I write this by way of introduction to the present issue—another first for us at Priscilla Papers. Readers who like myself regularly check out each biographical paragraph to learn a little about the authors will notice that we have been working occasional contributions from seminary and graduate students from our constituency in among the heavy hitting professors, pastors, and independent scholars that Priscilla Papers regularly features. Our reason is that we want to use our pages in two directions: to edify our readers with the best groundbreaking information we can muster, while we develop the leaders of the future from the best and brightest of our advanced degree students. Most outstanding...