Track Five: In the Still of the Night/Classic

Ah, the one that started it all. The day before Valentine's Day, Jacob Stewart got the four of us together with a sheet of paper in his hand. It was sheet music to an arrangement of "In The Still of the Night," a doo-wop style song that he sang in high school. We decided to learn this song and sing it for pretty much all the girls in the ward. So we did. Then, we realized that it was fun singing doo-wop/barber shop together, and the Ninety and Nine was born.

We learned the song in the basement of Wells Hall. Eric was in charge of plunking out the notes on the out-of-tune piano. One difficult aspect of the tune was that, while Jacob knew the tune from high school, he sang a SATB arrangement. We couldn't simplify it to an all-male arrangement due to the bell-tones, so we ended up just singing everything in the octaves as originally written. Jacob Stewart sang bass (which was the melody line), Eric sang tenor, Peter sang alto, and Jacob Broderick sang the soprano line. This was the only tune where Jacob Stewart sang the melody.

Once we learned the song, February 14th came along and we decided to sing for all the girls, using a door-to-door approach. We went through all the apartments in Snow Hall, knocking on the door, asking all the girls in the apartment to come to the door, and then sang the song for them. Then, as we were going from Snow to F. Smith, we saw a couple girls holding some baked goods--we stopped them and sang for them, and they offered us some baked goods. :) Then we went to F. Smith, and sang for all the girls in that hall in the same door-to-door fashion. If the math adds up, that means that that afternoon/evening, we performed that song at least 21 times. What a way to start our performing careers!

Since the song was the first that we learned and performed as an ensemble, it was our "classic" piece, and hence our code name for this song became Classic.