Barbershop bliss

They call themselves the Cactus Chords, and they are the only active barbershop quartet in Las Cruces.

The group comprises of four Las Cruces men, all over age 70, each with more than a quarter century of experience singing four-part harmony and even more extensive individual musical backgrounds.

The Cactus Chords are and Dr. John Phillips, tenor, who is a charter member of Cactus Chords, which was formed in 2009 by the late John Roger McCandless, Steve Litts, bass, who has been with the group for seven years, Larry D. Courter, lead vocals, a six-year member and Scott Russell, baritone, who joined two years ago.

As you might expect, Valentine’s Day is one of their busiest days of the year. This year’s venues, which continued well into the evening, included The Las Cruces Bulletin, where the foursome serenaded the staff with “Heart of My Heart” and “My Wild Irish Rose.“

They also perform frequently at assisted-living and independent-living facilities in Las Cruces, as well as hospitals and Mesilla Valley Hospice.

Birthdays and private parties are no strangers to the group. They’ve also sung at the Harvest Festival in Mesilla and a health fair at New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum, as well as local civic clubs, churches and with many local choir groups and bands, including a New Mexico State University choir. They performed the National Anthem for a Las Cruces police memorial service.

In addition to Las Cruces, they also have sung at a hospital in El Paso and at a retirement center and the national Senior Olympics competition in Albuquerque.

The group charges $50 for Valentine’s Day performances, which includes roses, and takes donations for its other appearances. They’ve won multiple gold medals at the county and state level of New Mexico Senior Olympics.

All four of the Cactus Chords are military veterans. Phillips, a New Jersey native and Air Force veteran, is a retired obstetrician and former chief of staff for Memorial Medical Center. Litts hails from Iowa, and is a retired classroom teacher, principal and superintendent. Courter is a native of Indiana, a retired administrator and the Chords’ wardrobe and logo designer. Russell, originally from Michigan, is a retired U.S. naval officer.

In addition to rehearsing at one another’s houses just about every Monday, they do all their traveling together.

“We’re all very compatible most of the time,” Phillips said. “It’s like a marriage.”

“There’s a lot of camaraderie,” Courter said, adding that the first hour of their weekly two-hour rehearsals is usually spent catching up with one other before the singing starts.

For more information, call 605-212-7508, email Steve Litts at s.litts2011@gmail.com or visit www.cactuschords.

The history of barbershop music

For their Harmony University class on the history of barbershop music for the Barbershop Harmony Society (www.barbershop.org/files/documents/education/hob_written.pdf), David Krause and David Wright said the ringing tones that characterize the genre are “most certainly known and observed in the resonant monasteries of the 11th and 12th centuries, where the monks chanted Latin praises to God in unison.”

The two say “There are scattered references in English literature which associate music with the barber and his shop in 16th, 17th and early 18th century England.” It transferred from England to America, “where barbers took up the tradition of improvised singing. The early American barber's music was probably sung or strummed in the South, where life was less stodgy and ‘proper’ than in Puritanical, psalm-singing New England, where barber's music would surely have seemed profane.”

Krause and Wright said African Americans, often excluded from many musical venues in the 18^th-, 19^th- and 20^th centuries, likely contributed to the evolution and popularity of barbershop music.