The Barbershop Harmony Society, which hosts the day's page and runs its hashtags, says it commemorates the birth of the organized barbershop movement at a Tulsa songfest on April 11, 1938. No record names who first turned that anniversary into an observance, or when.
CHAPTER 01
Twenty-six came, and then the country did
Cash and Rupert Hall got twenty-six men instead of fourteen. What followed moved faster than either of them planned. An Oklahoma City chapter began that July, and groups formed in Kansas City, St. Louis and four other towns before the year was out.
By June 1939 the group had a national contest. Fifty quartets from seventeen cities in ten states crowded into the south auditorium of Tulsa Central High School. The Bartlesville Barflies of Oklahoma won a trophy and a fifty dollar check, which came to twelve dollars and fifty cents a man.
