Track Ten: Goodbye My Coney Island Baby/Kazoo

The song Coney Island Baby is one of the most well-known and oft-performed tunes in all the repertoire of barber-shop music. The piece that we performed, which is the one commonly performed, is actually a medley of two barber-shop tunes: Coney Island Baby and We All Fall. In our arrangement, Eric sang bass, Jacob Stewart sang baritone, Peter Steele sang lead, and Jacob Broderick sang tenor.

Some interesting points about our arrangement:

• I like bullet points!
• In the "We All Fall" segment of the medley, we sing about how we fall for girls and follow them to the altar. The exact lyrics are "Then we join the army of married boobs to the altar, Just like leading lambs to slaughter." An interesting commentary on the holy state of matrimony. Of course, in the olden days, "boobs" was colloquial for "guys," not what it refers to today. And, since this wasn't funny enough, we decided to add in a lamb sound effect. Like most animal noises on our CD, Jacob Stewart provided the bleating of the lamb.
• The tag before the refrain, "We all are bound for," did not originally have the lead embellishments that we performed. As it turns out, Eric performed this song in high school with 7 other guys, and we had a visitor from a professional barber shop singer who taught us that tag, and Eric proceeded to teach it to Peter. Eric also does a tag at the same time bottoming out the bass line, but it's hard to hear because it's so low.
• The second time we had the solo lines, "So goodbye, fare thee well, So long, forever," we decided to have a little fun. So Peter and Jacob decided to go really slowly and sadly on their solos. Jacob Broderick held his note out for as long as he could. While he was doing this, the other three pretended to ignore him and just let him sing and hold that note forever. Then, the other three decided to start singing an entirely different song amongst them and pretend to forget about Jacob's fermata. So they sang the introduction to Stand by Me. Only after they got through the whole introduction (which they usually sped up, for Jacob's sake) would they "realize" that he was still holding out his note and grasping for breath dramatically and finish the song.
• The last note of the song is completed by another tag by Eric, this one audible. In some versions the song ends on "Babe" while in other versions, the singers add an audible ending to make the last word "Baby." We decided to sing "Baby."
• We performed this song once at the ward talent show in the Tanner Building. It was a smashing success, and one of our largest audiences. If possible, I'll add a file of the live performance onto this site as an online special!
• I have no clue why we named this song Kazoo. Any ideas?