Roger Payne died last Tuesday. He was a barbershop arranger, competition judge, and tenor in the quartet Reveille.
Reveille was a comedy quartet, and they had some pretty wild schticks (check out the picture from their pirate set via the previous link). This summer on the webcast we saw them do a psycho dentist act where they forced their baritone back in a chair and the lead went to work on him with a cordless drill and I don’t remember what all, it was pretty crazy. My 5 year old nephew Cody wanted to watch it again and again.
AHQ’s connection with Roger is that he arranged Go Tell it on the Mountain (mp3 on that page). I had been looking for a barbershop chart for us to do, and I found it off of his arrangement list. I’m a little fuzzy on the details anymore, but I think I sent off for a preview and we really liked it and ended up buying it.
Great chart, a kick in the pants to sing. We got a lot of mileage out of it too.
We didn’t like the intro though, so I wrote my own. I sent Roger an email about it to ask him what he thought, if he was ok with that. He graciously responded that he fully supported a group’s creativity and right to make a chart their own. He was a good guy.