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Peter Neushul's Musings; There is something very important about singing harmony. The most important thing about it is that it isn't important at all. As American children we are taught that we should only work and win and never just enjoy ourselves. Even our recreation seems to be about winning some sort of contest. Growing vegetables turns out to be a competitive sport, my car is bigger than your car, my lawn is greener than yours, etc. Even the sublime art of barbershop quartet singing is perverted into a huge contest where the best stadium shouting freaks usually win. 139th is about pure pleasure for pleasure's sake. We picked songs because they were amusing or interesting for some reason. I think that there is a big difference between art and drafting. Art is what you do and drafting is what someone else tells you to do. This is not to say that drafting isn't attractive or that art is always good art. I suppose art could be an oil painting or drawing with crayons on butcher paper or even a barbershop quartet. 139th St quartet almost always went wherever their artistic bent took it. It didn't always work but here it is as well as we can present it. We didn't have studio recordings of everything so some of it is recorded a bit rough but it will give you an idea of what we had in mind. The quartet sang from 1975 until 2000 something. In fact it still gets together (2007) and sings. We even wrote and sang a new intro to a song in 2005. Something that I don't think many people understand is that the quartet was about exploring various areas of music. If you look at the entire CD set you can sort of work it out. We started singing a lot of Harry Von Tilzer upbeats like Can You Tame Wild Wimmin, Don't Put A Tax On The Beautiful Girls, etc. Then we listened to what George Burns was singing and cadged a few of those like quot;Where Did You Get That Girl.quot; Another area that interested us was the very old barbershop standards like quot;Down By The Old Mill Streamquot; and quot;Swanee.quot; We also wrote several and sang some originals that people gave us. Most of the originals were semi-autobiographical. We went through a long Ragtime craze that went on for years and is still my favorite. There are several classical and classical put-on songs that we found funny. When we sang with Larry we did quite a few slurpy ballads that he and Jimmy liked. We sang a few modern numbers as well. We did lots of silly stuff and we sang with quite a few others, Hal Purdy, our kids, Neil Diamond, et al. Mostly we did songs that we loved. • Life is very short and if it isn't amusing, what is it for? Oh wait, (for) is a preposition and a preposition is something you should never end a sentence with. Life is very short and if it isn't amusing then for what is it? That isn't right either is it? • There is a lot of humor arranged into the songs. It isn't jokes necessarily but musical things that made us laugh, like changing the key on the last note of Crazy Words. We couldn't seem to get a good tag and Larry was noodling on the keyboard and made the key change and we all fell on the floor. It stayed. We also thought that the itinerant baritone pick up on the third of the chord was very amusing. We used that a lot. Before anyone else, we started sporting spectator shoes. Today there probably isn't a championship barbershop quartet singer who doesn't have a pair in his closet. We wore them as a joke not a fashion statement! The little whistle on an ess sound is there because someone lau