Creole Cutie

Last updated March 21, 2019

Creole Cutie is a song written for barbershop quartet, originally performed in 1950. It was co-written by Glenn Sudduth and Bill 'Bus' Busby (Sudduth wrote the chorus, Busby later wrote the verses). Its copyright is held by SPEBSQSA (now the Barbershop Harmony Society), as the authors donated the song.

A barbershop quartet is a group of four singers who sing music in the barbershop genre of singing, which uses four-part harmony without accompaniment by any instruments such as piano, a style called a cappella. It consists of a lead, the vocal part which generally carries the tune/melody; a bass, the part which provides the bass line to the melody; a tenor, the part which harmonizes above the lead; and a baritone, the part that completes the chord with the note not being sung by the lead, bass, or tenor singers. The baritone can sing either above or below the lead singer.

The Barbershop Harmony Society, legally and historically named the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, Inc. (SPEBSQSA), is the first of several organizations to promote and preserve barbershop music as an art form. Founded by Owen C. Cash and Rupert I. Hall in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1938, the organization quickly grew, promoting barbershop harmony among men of all ages. As of 2014, just under 23,000 men in the United States and Canada were members of this organization whose focus is on a cappella music. The international headquarters was in Kenosha, Wisconsin for fifty years before moving to Nashville, Tennessee in 2007. In June 2018, the society announced it would allow women to join as full members.

History

Both Sudduth and Busby were members of an a cappella group called the Miamians. The group was having difficulty mastering diction, especially during slow, melodic songs. According to Sudduth, he got so fed up with the director's chiding that he decided to write a song that would require near-perfect diction. One week later, Sudduth returned to the Miamians with the chorus of Creole Cutie. The Miamians adopted Sudduth's song as a warm-up exercise.

A cappella music is specifically group or solo singing without instrumental accompaniment, or a piece intended to be performed in this way. It contrasts with cantata, which is usually accompanied singing. The term "a cappella" was originally intended to differentiate between Renaissance polyphony and Baroque concertato style. In the 19th century a renewed interest in Renaissance polyphony coupled with an ignorance of the fact that vocal parts were often doubled by instrumentalists led to the term coming to mean unaccompanied vocal music. The term is also used, albeit rarely, as a synonym for alla breve.

Diction, in its original meaning, is a writer's or speaker's distinctive vocabulary choices and style of expression in a poem or story. In its common meaning, it's the distinctiveness of speech, the art of speaking so that each word is clearly heard and understood to its fullest complexity and extremity, and concerns pronunciation and tone, rather than word choice and style. This is more precisely and commonly expressed with the term enunciation, or with its synonym articulation.

Busby later asked Sudduth if there were verses to the song he'd written. Sudduth allegedly said "There's no verses, but you're welcome to write them." Sudduth and Busby later donated the entire song to the SPEBSQSA collection.

Performance

The song rose to fame thanks to a barbershop group called The Confederates, in which Busby sang baritone. The group shot to fame and success, winning the 1956 International Quartet Championship in Minneapolis, MN just three years after they formed. As Busby was a co-writer of Creole Cutie, the song became a regular feature in their set until they stopped performing in 1969.

The Confederates were a barbershop quartet that performed in the 1950s and 1960s.

A baritone is a type of classical male singing voice whose vocal range lies between the bass and the tenor voice types. Originally from the Greek βαρύτονος (barýtonos), meaning heavy sounding, music for this voice is typically written in the range from the second F below middle C to the F above middle C (i.e. F₂–F₄) in choral music, and from the second A below middle C to the A above middle C (A₂ to A₄) in operatic music, but can be extended at either end. The baritone voice type is generally divided into the baryton-Martin baritone (light baritone), lyric baritone, Kavalierbariton, Verdi baritone, dramatic baritone, baryton-noble baritone, and the bass-baritone.

Creole Cutie is most known as a challenging song that is well known but rarely performed. It is instead used as a warm-up. Because of this usage, it remains one of the most widely known songs within the barbershop community.

Lyrics

The chorus is as follows:

Creole cutie won't you cuddle up closer

Down by the babbling brook on the bayou

Ding dong dolly with a dimple on her knee

The devil's her eye now don't be shy now

External links

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