Fans of barbershop harmonies will be in for a treat this week, with the latest in the 2006-2007 series of cultural events sponsored by the Bethany Beach Cultural and Historical Affairs Committee. “An Evening with the Ebbtide Quartet” will be held in Bethany’s town hall on Wednesday, Jan. 24, at 7:30 p.m.
Baritone and former Ocean View Town Manager Joe Lobb is one of the four members of the Ebbtide Quartet, which is an offshoot of the popular local barbershop chorus Nautical Sounds. He promised an entertaining time on Wednesday but would not provide an exact list of songs the quartet will perform.
“We practice different songs every time,” Lobb said, adding that the final decisions on the evening’s musical lineup hadn’t yet been made early this week. But the feel of the event, he said, is guaranteed. “We’ll do some songs that are very touching and have something to do with love or home, and also some ‘jump tunes’ like ‘Beer Barrel Polka.’ We try to mix it up.”
Lobb said that he and bass voice Charlie Disharoon, lead Warren VanArsdalen and tenor Jack Coxe plan to entertain what is traditionally a full house at the town hall for at least 30 to 45 minutes. The event is free and open to the public, and light refreshments will be served.
It’s one of many performances on the quartet’s schedule, in addition to the larger group performances of the Nautical Sounds. “We just try to entertain,” Lobb said. “We do it quite often in different places. We’ll be performing at the Milton Senior Center next month.”
Lobb said the group also performs at local retirement homes and other facilities for the elderly, as well as care units for those with Alzheimer’s disease. They’re also frequent guest performers on the Bethany Beach and Rehoboth Beach bandstands during the summer performance seasons.
Nautical Sounds has been together for more than 15 years, gathering members from around the coastal region for a variety of performances throughout the year. “We cover the whole coast,” Lobb explained of the 25 active members of the group. “Most of our members are from the Ocean View area and South Bethany and Bethany, and a few from Ocean City, Rehoboth Beach and Lewes.”
Lobb said he came to the group already having established his love of singing in public.
“I used to sing a lot in church choir, for many years in Pennsylvania and at St. Ann’s in Bethany Beach. I’d always listened to barbershop, and I’d always wanted to try it. So made up my mind to do that,” he explained.
Lobb said that once that decision was made, some 16 years ago, he opted to forego his choir singing to concentrate instead on barbershop harmonies. It’s been a steady devotion to the Nautical Sounds ever since.
And his cohorts in the Ebbtide Quartet have also been devoted to the musical style for quite a while. Disharoon has been singing barbershop for 17 years, VanArsdalen and Coxe each for eight years, Lobb said.
Among the quartet, Lobb and VanArsdalen hail from Lewes, Disharoon from Ocean City and Coxe from Millsboro. While all four are active with the larger Nautical Sounds group, how the four came together to form the Ebbtide Quartet is a matter both luck, and trial and error, Lobb said.
“We try to sing quartets with different guys every time we practice, every Monday at the Bethany Beach library,” he explained. “We change guys and get an idea which guys can sing in a quartet. Sometimes we even change the quartets, if members leave or if they go to Florida for the winter. We pick them right out of the chorus, and we practice quarteting all the time.”
The method of selecting the practice groupings is literally up to the luck of the draw, Lobb noted. “We deal out a deck of playing cards. Every guy who gets a five sings together,” he offered as an example. The method not only allows the members to mix things up in their quarteting practice, Lobb said, “It’s a lot of fun that way too.”
But the most important thing about the Nautical Sounds quarteting practice, the baritone said, is the experience it gives some of the more inhibited of the group’s members at taking on a share of the limelight.
“Some guys are a little afraid to get up in front of people and sing. As a chorus, it’s no problem,” he said. “This is a way to encourage them to try quarteting and get away from being uptight about singing in a smaller group.”
Through the random draw and some experience with different configurations, a quartet like the Ebbtide Quartet is formed, Lobb explained. When members find a grouping that really works, he said, they often perform on their own. “We’ve been together for quite a while,” Lobb said of the Ebbtide Quartet’s four members.
Music lovers will get to experience the musical chemistry of the four barbershop voices on Wednesday night, with promises of a variety of musical selections to fill Bethany Beach town hall.