BHS’s mid-winter conventions have long been the province of seniors in their golden years to celebrate golden memories and compete among them selves for top quartet honors. Add to that gold (and silver and bronze) medal performances of top finishers of past Internationals. Give a generous helping of Youth Choruses and leaven it with a new Seniors Chorus competition. Cook it all up at a Daytona Beach resort and you have a recipe for an awesome barbershop experience. That was Daytona Beach Midwinter 2023. The Carolinas has been active at midwinter’s in the past, but in this one the time and effort paid off with gold.
The Carolinas ‘Hall of Fame’ quartet Let’s Sing!, put on stage one of their best performances ever to take home the gold medal. Everything came together—great singing, great staging, and great personality— all shown through. Their signature ‘At Last’ was freshened with Tremper taking the final high notes while Mark carried the melody. ‘One for My Baby’ bore the stamp of George Gipp’s coaching with a virtual bar scene setting and poignant, authentic delivery. The audience went from goose bumps to standing ovation for one of the contests gold medal moments.
This wasn’t the first standing ovation of the contest. The Carolinas Statement won the audience and a bronze medal. And they did it with their comedic schtick for ‘Old Bones’ and ‘Old Guys Still Got it’. From Paul Martin’s toilet paper trailing entrance to the final front row cane drop, the audience was riveted with laughter. There wasn’t a dry seat in the house.
On the Youth front, the Wade Hampton singers did the Carolinas proud, earning a superior rating and praise from Marty Monson for their collaboration in creating three new songs for Barbershoppers to perform and enjoy.
The Saturday Night final wrapped it all up with performances by Let’s Sing!, Quorum, Vocal Spectrum, GQ, The Ladies, the Combined Youth Chorus, the All Chapter Chorus, Queens from Harmony Inc and Sweet Adeline’s and our hosts The Heralds of Harmony and Atlanta Vocal Project.
Congratulations to our Carolina competitors: To all the men of the Carolinas Statesmen and our Director Larry Triplett, who chose to spend his Birthday here with us in Daytona. To Ted Leinbach, Wally Miles, Tom Parker and Rob Hawkins for their 9th place finish with ‘Aspire’. To Nate Pendley, and his quartet mates in ‘Hastily Assembled’. To the student singers at Wade Hampton, and the Upstate South Carolina chapter under Larry Gilhousen and our Youth program under Kenneth Tice that supported them.
The singing carried into the night back at the Hilton Daytona Resort as afterglows and tag singing created new personal golden moments and collective golden memories of a fun-packed weekend of fellowship for our entire barbershop family.