There’s no harmony like close harmony: Part I
And the best of all is sibling close harmony. That’s where nature and nurture can combine to make different-yet-somehow-similar voices blend in a special way that creates a full and resonant whole that is far more than the sum of its parts.
Close harmony is defined this way:
A chord is in close harmony (also called close position or close structure if its notes are arranged within a narrow range, usually with no more than an octave between the top and bottom notes.
…It can follow the standard voice-leading rules of classical harmony, as in string quartets or Bach chorales, or proceed in parallel motion with the melody in thirds or sixths.
The Everly Brothers (discussed recently on the blog here) combined their distinctive close harmonies with early rock music, a fusion that differentiated them from predecessor sibling groups such as the Andrews Sisters of 1930s fame. The Andrews Sisters almost exclusively relied on parallel melody lines rather than divergent ones. I’ve cued up a short explanation of what the sisters did:
The Boswell Sisters hailed from New Orleans. They were famous during the 1920s and 1930s, and their harmonies were more unusual:
There are several patterns that keep cropping up in the backgrounds of these sibling groups: musical parents and a shared intense interest in music that starts at an early age, with harmonizing that likewise starts early and an almost ESP like connection. Nature plus nurture plus practice seems to create a bond that leads to fame but often also leads to friction and breakups, temporary or permanent.
The Mills Brothers were a long-running act that featured four brothers. For some reason – although they used close harmony as well – with the four Mills Brothers it changes the sound somewhat and makes it less interesting (at least to me), perhaps because the range becomes wider with four rather than three?:
Three somehow seems ideal to me. The trio is like a tripod; unusually sturdy. I’ve said it before and will probably say it again – I’m fairly ignorant about music theory, so I don’t understand the technical points, but I think I know what my ear is telling me. I agree with what the daughter of one of the Boswell Sisters says here:
The Beach Boys were not a trio. But the larger group did feature three brothers – Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson – who grew up sharing a bedroom and singing together in a musical family. This time it was a pretty dysfunctional family, but the music they made featured close harmony as well. Oldest brother Brian was the leader and songwriter, but they all were motivated. If the product ended up sounding casual – after all, they started their career singing fun songs about surfing and fast cars – it was hard work, as this audio of a rehearsal amply demonstrates:
In the end, the finished product sounded astounding, as you can hear on this vocal track from the Beach Boys’ song “God Only Knows.” They’re not actually singing a capella here; it’s just that this track has been isolated from the music tracks for the purposes of listening:
An explanation of their harmonies can be found here:
A standard root/third/fifth harmony (or some inversion of it) can be pleasing. But when you start working additional notes of the scale in, then one or more voices are going to be on notes separated by smaller intervals. If you know what you’re doing (as Brian obviously did), you can get some incredible effects in this way, and you can enhance those effects further if the harmonies “shift” within a passage…if notes come together and then separate again. There’s a warmth to this approach that you don’t get with more conventional harmonies.
I think on some subconscious level, when we hear close harmonies like that, something resonates within us. I personally believe that blending voices together in a group effort to achieve a unified result is one of the finest things human beings can do together. When those harmonies are close, it reinforces the closeness we yearn for in real life with others.
The other element, as many have referenced, is Brian’s falsetto soaring high over everyone else. Males aren’t normally supposed to sing high like that, so when one has the guts to do it, I think some of us respond to that too…the vulnerability inherent in putting yourself up there and out there like that.
By the same token, some are very turned off by it. I’m always surprised when I hear people say they hate The Beach Boys, but I think those high vocals are probably one of the reasons. Some people just can’t deal with it.
Me, I find it moving…
I’m with that writer. The close harmonies seem to tune into something in the brain that resonates, and the falsetto gives the whole thing urgent emphasis.
“Close harmony” and “falsetto” brings us to the Bee Gees. They were also three brothers starting out at roughly the same time as the Beach Boys. I plan to discuss them in Part II.
Wonder how much of the sibling harmonies can be attributed to constant performing together from very young age. Some kind of inate unexplainable factor combined with a practice makes perfect kind of thing.
I mean would Phil Everly and his childhood friend from down the street Don Jones have had the same ability if they had performed together from a very young age? Probably not but it’s kind of an unanswerable question.
There are also a bunch of family acts that are not just siblings like Alabama (three first cousins) and many mixed generational groups like the Carter Family.
Maybe it’s just a family thing.
So it’s also interesting to see what can happen when you play with the close harmony, placing it in another harmonic structure, like in this barbershop quartet arrangement of “God Only Knows” from the brilliant game “Bioshock Infinite.”
A clever arranger, which T-Bone Burnett certainly is, can also take this close sibling harmony and put it in two very distinctive iconic male and female voices to good effect, as in this arrangement of the Everly Brothers’ “Gone Gone Gone”.
The Mills Brothers were one of my Dad favorites. Dad matured in San Antonio and “Across The Street from the Alamo” was a favorite. Thanks for the memories.
I stumbled across the fact that Warren Zevon (half Russian Jew) used to be a band member for the Everly Bros. Talk about musical opposites.
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I was watching a BBC prequel series to the famous Prime Suspect series. This one is called Prime Suspect: Tennison, but was originally called Prime Suspect: 1973. So the creators had to set the stage for 1973 in the opening minutes of the show and they used this song from 1969 to do it.
Can’t Find My Way Home by Blind Faith.
There’s no vocal harmony but it has the incomparable high range singing of Steve Winwood. I’d say he’s a mid tenor but he glides into the upper ranges effortlessly (especially at about 2:30). I was a huge fan of the band in ’69, but there was only the one album.
A newer brother trio AJR ( their first name initials) is hitting big time.
I never get tired of the Beach Boys. Or the Bee Gees.
I recently came across this group called Foxes and Fossils. Great Harmony from the group. The Girls are in their 20’s and their band member dads in their 50’s. Excellent Cover job on Mr Sandman, Click below
https://youtu.be/eFvOCwPFhjA
Tommy Jay, I saw Blind Faith perform when they came to the US in 1969. Steve Winwood is one of the most underrated musicians ever even considering he has had a successful solo career, he is an enormous talent. I have an old video of him performing with his older brother in the Spencer Davis group around 1966. He was 17 or 18 years old and singing like Ray Charles. Incredible.
And The Roches? Hope you’re going to cover The Roches.
Look into the Foto Sisters for really tight harmony . They play multiple instruments . Easy to look at as well .
When discussing harmony, one cannot leave out the stunning beauty of Bulgarian ensemble singing. For example…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B_g_VKS5kc
Bach chorales are how composers have been learning about harmony for the last three hundred years. And if you really want to get blown away by vocal harmony, have a listen to the B minor mass or the opening chorus of the St. Matthew Passion.
One of my favorite things to do is find a two-part harmony recording and sing along, adding the third part. It’s like slipping in a groove. For conventional modern melodies, the soprano takes the melody and the second part is typically what we’d call the alto. The third part is the tenor. Bass, if it comes in, often forms a kind of anchor, but unless the standard 1-3-5 chords add unusual (a 6 or 7 or 9 or something), the bass is always going to be sharing a note with one of the other parts, perhaps an octave removed.
In the recording above, the Beach Boys haven’t decided at first whether the 7th is going to be conventional 7 or 7Maj–a half step difference in the 4th note. They sound sour until they reach a consensus.
The Andrews Sisters pop the tenor part up an octave, so the usual pattern is melody in the middle, and one harmony a close interval below, and the other a close interval above. It will usually be a third or a fourth interval, depending on the chord at that point in the melody and how it has to be inverted so that the tune line stays in the center.
If you really want to make full use of four or more voices and not just double up the parts, you can start fuguing, as the Beach Boys do in the second half of “God Only Knows” in the clip above. That’s when there are independent tunes playing around each other, call-and-response style, like a round. Those are my favorites of all. Think “Good Vibrations,” or Madonna’s “Cherish,” or UB40’s “Red Red Wine, or the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’,” or quite a few Peter, Paul & Mary songs, such as “If I Were Free.”
I appreciate your post.
May I suggest the Barlow Girls?
Beach Boy Mike Love is a first cousin of the Wilson Bros.
FOAF,
Lucky you. I liked the Spencer Davis Group material and usually Winwood would get credit on the radio. I knew of Traffic, but was not aware, at the time, that Winwood was the singer there too.
Poverty was another thing common in singing families..
you left out the Jackson 5, and the Osmonds..
another point is loyalty through hard situtations…
on another note
After that first encounter with Dark Side, I knew that I heard something in the
music that I had not heard in any other rock albums that I had listened to before then. There was a sense of completeness and one-ness that I had, until that point, only associated with the great symphonists of the Nineteenth century. At the conclusion of the B side, I immediately turned over the record and listened to it again. It was not until about five years later that I began to understand the connections I was hearing. In that time, I became familiar with much more of Pink Floyd’s discography. I felt like I was continually uncovering more connections within each album and understanding more about how to listen to them.
This document will cover four albums:
Meddle (1971)
The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
Wish you Were Here (1975)
The Wall (1979)
In the analysis of each of these albums, the primary discussion concerns
harmonic design and the ways in which harmonic ideas develop. Secondarily, melodic and motivic ideas will also be addressed where applicable.
see. Tear Down the Wall:
Long-Form Analytical Techniques and the Music of Pink Floyd
The Dark Side of the Moon became one of the best-selling albums of all time and is in the top 25 of a list of best-selling albums in the United States. Although it held the number one spot in the US for only a week, it remained in the Billboard album chart for 736 weeks from 1973 to 1988.
Quadraphonic sound: Quadraphonic (or Quadrophonic and sometimes Quadrasonic) sound – equivalent to what is now called 4.0 surround sound – uses four audio channels in which speakers are positioned at the four corners of a listening space. The system allows for the reproduction of sound signals that are (wholly or in part) independent of one another.
The Azimuth Co-ordinator was the first panning control for a quadraphonic sound system, at that time a new concept. Pink Floyd became the first band to use it in their early shows.
then again, David Palmer had a sex change… who would have thunk that when listening to jethro tull?
I also was going to mention the Roches. They would start a chord that was out of key and then bend into key. Amazing.
There are so many sibling singing groups or family singing groups that a person could have a blog devoted simply to talking about them.
For whatever reason, I happen to much prefer male singers and especially male signing groups.
As a former Barbershopper baritone, I can attest to the harmonic complexity of the 4-part God Only Knows. Threading one’s way through the bari part, while closely surrounded on all sides by exotic variations on simpler major and minor chords, might be likened to walking a moving tightrope as your alto, lead and base buddies do their best to knock you off. I believe McCartney cited this number as among his very favorites of the Beach Boys, or of any other group for that matter. It’s quite a musically sophisticated composition, and when everybody’s nailing his pitch, those chords literally ring, and you feel that ring all the way down to your gut.
There’s a male family (I believe) group performing as Clamavi De Profundis which has done some stellar stuff. They use the deep registers of the male voice. I first heard them doing a dwarven song by Tolkien
Happened to be listening to a Beach Boys CD called “Hawthorne, CA”, which included a lovely version of the Everly Brothers’ “Devoted To You.”
My late father, a quiet introvert, sitting on the aisle next to my mother in a theater in Chebogan, MI sometime post WWll was kissed on the lips by one of the Andrew’s Sisters as they made there way down the aisle to the stage. Oh the humanity!
I think that the famous old movie theme from “Picnic” was sung in harmony.
Clamavi is terrific. They have arranged–or had someone arrange–Tolkien’s LOTR poetry into music.
Great work.
Chuck; My father, due to circumstances, saw every movie made from about 1930-1945, if only on television years later. He thought Madeleine Carroll was terrific. Seems she paid her own way–or used connections–to get to Europe and visit the troops. Found my father in a hospital one of the times he was wounded and kissed him. Dad figured he wasn’t the only one who’d had that kind of a big day.
The Louvin Brothers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_YT_4bxcWI
Great post. I went back and listened to the Boswells and then placed them in my queue for later on. Yeah, I’m one of those who has never much cared for the falsetto harmonies of the Beach Boys, beginning with when I first heard them as a child. I was just hitting puberty and preferred the more masculine vocals of the Rolling Stones and/or just about anyone else. At the same time, though, I very much liked such females as Sandie Shaw, Dusty Springfield and Dionne Warwick, and loved the Shangri-Las, as well as Laura Nyro later on (particularly with Labelle).
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the Beatles, as certainly John and Paul singing together (plus George) lent all kinds of emotional resonance to what were often quite insipid lyrics, and it was too bad when later on they were less likely to lend their voices to each other’s songs. When they went solo, something that really hurt Paul’s Wings material was the inclusion of Partridge Family type harmonies due I guess to the forced presence of Linda on the choruses.
I too, by the way, very much liked the Roches (though sometimes they were a little too whimsical or playful) as well as the McGarrigle Sisters. And yes, the Bulgarian Women’s Choir was really irresistable for a while.
The Cocteau Twins (which featured multi-tracked vocals of Elizabeth Frazier) also had tremendous appeal for a number of years, though for the most part the lyrics were impossible to understand. This was never a feature that troubled me in the least.
What I’ve never liked, what has never struck me as remotely expressive, is the diva showcase as indulged in by Streisand, Whitney Houston, Patti Labelle, Celine Dion and the like. Melisma to the end of time. Not for me.
miklos:
I left out the Beatles in this post for the simple reason that they were not related to each other. But they did have great harmonies and I think that was a huge reason for their appeal. Some people have pointed out that although they weren’t physically related, the fact that they came from the same town helped their voices blend somewhat similarly to the way the voices of siblings would.
My personal favorite band for close harmony is Crosby, Stills and Nash. They weren’t family and their voices weren’t family close but they made magic. No one is quite sure where they first sang together, however, the story goes like this:
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But wherever it took place, everybody who was there agree on the details: At some point, Crosby and Stills began playing one of Stills’ songs, “You Don’t Have to Cry.” When they were done, Nash, blown away by the tune, asked them to play it again. And again.
“On that third time, I’d learned the words, the melody — I knew what I was gonna do,” Nash recalled. “Whatever sound Crosby, Stills & Nash has was born in 30 seconds. That’s how long it took us to harmonize that way, so much so that we burst out laughing in the middle of the song. Because the Springfield and the Byrds and the Hollies were good harmony bands. We knew what we were doing. We’d been making records in harmony for years. But this was different.” “It was scary,” Crosby said in Zimmer’s book.
“But once we new what we had, you could not pry us apart with a crowbar. We knew we’d lucked onto something special, man. We could hear it plain as day.”
–You Don’t Have to Cry (2005 Remaster) · Crosby, Stills & Nash
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmduVX7_-kE
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I remember when I first saw their debut album in the record bin — three hippie guys sitting together on a funky old couch in front of a funky old house. Somehow it grabbed me and it was a rare impulse buy at that age. Turned out well worth it. There’s a lot of music on that album.
FWIW, Stephen Stills is one of the great all-around talents of rock. He was a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and record producer. He played bass, guitar, and keyboards on that first album. Stills was also the guy doing studio all-nighters to put together that tasty, distinct, perfect CS&N (and sometimes Y) sound.
On his first solo album Stills had Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Mama Cass and Ringo Starr playing with him. Which is to say, Stills had their respect.
Underrated.
Richard Aubrey: Speaking of dedicated WW2 entertainers, surely few if any surpass, or even match, the humbling contribution of singer Jane Froman. Worth checking her out if you’re unfamiliar. NOTHING stopped this study in courage from supporting our troops. Godalmighty could we use more of her breed today.
Le Mot. For sure. Lots of people who got that beaten up would just stay home. It takes a lot of effort just to get up and get cleaned up in the morning.
There are some pieces on Youtube with her, ancient recording deficiencies noted. Quite the range.
Prefer Jo Stafford for that kind of music, though.
Lots of incredible harmony, often featuring family members, in bluegrass and gospel. More than one famous pop act came out of a sibling, gospel act.
I love the Andrews Sisters! I had never heard of the Boswells and really appreciate your sharing this brief introduction to them and their music.
The Mills Brothers’ “Glow Worm” is wonderful.
The Beach Boys’ sound has always annoyed me. I’ve nearly dislocated a shoulder, arm or wrist joint many times, diving for the radio dial the second one of their songs comes on. If I get more than one measure in before changing the station it can ruin the better part of my day.
Linda Ronstadt grew up singing harmonies in a musical family.