Question:
The “Golden Era” of barbershop quartetting began in 1890 and ended soon after the conclusion of World War I. One short decade thereafter, barbershop was in extremis. Name as many reasons as you can to explain barbershop’s demise.
Answers:
1- By the 1920’s, vaudeville, then barbershop’s premier showcase, was in rapid decline due to the proliferation of home radios which made musical entertainment in the home, albeit of dismal sound quality, available to humanity for the very first time. Once the depression deepened (by 1931), unemployment was endemic (500% greater than it is today) and very few people had money to buy tickets to vaudeville shows and vaudeville went under.
2- Another technical innovation in the world of entertainment, which accelerated barbershop’s demise after WWI, was the invention by the Western Electric Company of the Vitaphone. This device (somewhat like a phonograph record) allowed any sound(s) to be synchronized with a motion picture camera. It created what we know today as a “sound track.” The first great commercial motion picture triumph based on Vitaphone technology, of course, was “The Jazz Singer” which starred Al Jolson and premiered in 1926. Thus did Americans have yet another opportunity for musical entertainment which did not require live performers in real time.
3- After WWI ended, the deep psychological distress it created in great numbers of people persisted. A powerful generational divid opened, i.e., out with the old and in with the new. Barbershop represented the old.
4- Tin Pan Alley song writers abandoned the easy-to-harmonize compositional style of earlier years (goodbye dominant sevenths) and adopted the unacceptable (at least to barbershop) syncopations, chords, and chord progressions of the emerging jazz era.
5- Americans became increasingly a nation of dancers. Barbershop is great to sing or to listen to; it doesn’t have much value on the dance floor.
Note: Barbershop’s demise after WWI was rapid and nearly complete (the bad news), but superior music dies hard (the good news). It wasn’t long before Robert Moses in NYC (mid 1930’s), and O.C. Cash/Rupert Hall in Oklahoma (late 1930’s) were stirring the barbershop pot in their respective necks of the woods. The barbershop revival movement then took on a life of its own and spread throughout the nation in very short order.