SPEBSQSA Singers in Jennings Circa 1949

I found this article online last year and it surprised me a bit.  It is from 1949 and it is about a music group from Lake Charles visiting Jennings and performing for them.  I don’t know how the event came about, but it must have been sufficiently interesting enough to make it into the newspaper.  And I’m glad it did.

When I was growing up in Jennings, Louisiana, we did a lot of singing.  My parents sang, my brothers sang, and my sisters sang.  We all sang together.  We sang at home.  We sang at church.  We sang at school.  We even went to school during the summers so we could sing some more!

The main reason was because my dad was a band and choral director and my mom had majored in music at college as well.  When I saw this article, I was brought back to summer vacations when we’d all pile in the old Country Squire station wagon and head to Texas or the Gulf Coast.  That old car had a sticker on the back window, and it was for this group – SPEBSQSA.  We were so proud that we could quote and say it really fast.

I always figured that my dad brought his singing and barbershopping to Jennings for the first time in 1963 when we moved there.  But this article shows me how I wrong I was to assume that.  My dad had been to Jennings in 1949 with the barbershop group from Lake Charles!  From what I know, he started with that group in 1948 when he was just 19 years old.  He wouldn’t meet my mom – Betty Lou Bucklin from Hathaway – for another year.  She was still in high school at the Hathaway school.

It looks like my dad was part of a barbershop quartet as well as the choral group.  I know he would do that a few years later when he was in the Air Force.  Then when we lived in Jennings for those many years, he would always have a quartet.  He stayed involved with SPEBSQSA for the rest of his life, even after they changed their name.  He was a fixture at those barbershop conventions through the years.  They’d sing and sing and sing til all hours of the night in to the morning.

After many hours singing and woodshedding, he’d climb into bed to sleep.  As his head hit the pillow, he probably could still hear the sounds of “When it’s darkness on the Delta” or “When it’s sleepy time down South” in his mind.  The harmonies would quickly lull him to sleep.