The Warblers Club, a Birmingham men’s choir that started at Woodlawn High School in 1929, will sing perhaps for the last time this month.
The Warblers will put on a show at Samford University’s Wright Fine Arts Center on July 12 at 6 p.m.
It may be the last one ever.
“Good chance of it,” said Bob Parker, who has been the director for 17 years. “We used to have over 50 guys on the stage.”
At a rehearsal on Tuesday, there were 17 Warblers practicing harmonies and Vaudeville-style dance routines that will be lit in black light with glowing hats, gloves and shoes.
For the show, there should be a roster of 38 men singing on stage, most of them in their seventies and eighties.
Each year, old age whittles away at the Warblers.
“Just attrition,” Parker said.
The Warblers have tried to recruit new, younger members, and there are a few as young as 38, but the driving force behind the Warblers has always been their connection to the old music club at Woodlawn High School, founded just seven years after the high school opened.
Newer members simply have to be attracted to the nostalgia.
“Sadly, younger guys just don’t want to do this kind of music,” Parker said. “It’s sad, because it’s good music.”
The group has always specialized in the Stephen Foster genre of American music, with a blend of Negro spirituals, Vaudeville hits, patriotic classics, and songs that lend themselves to barbershop harmonies.
“We’re kind of keeping it alive,” Parker said.
Among the songs they will perform on July 12, the Warblers have been rehearsing, “Down in the Valley,” “Coney Island Babe,” “In the Evening by the Moonlight,” “Walk Together Chillun’” and “What Will We Do With a Drunken Sailor?”
They will sing their most popular patriotic songs, “God Bless America” and “Proud to be an American,” which always draws a standing ovation.
They’ll sing “Alabamy Bound,” a 1924 Tin Pan Alley song recorded by Al Jolson and Ray Charles, and “Are You From Dixie?” a 1915 Vaudeville song revived by country singer Jerry Reed in 1969.
Even at their advanced age, coordinated dance moves with glowing blacklight props are a key part of the show. Some of the men are slowing down, but Parker doesn’t relent.
He’s as hard on them as ever in rehearsals at a back room at Huffman United Methodist Church.
“I realize we’re getting older,” Parker said. “Some of you are slow with everything you do.”
He repeatedly ran them through routines to sharpen their movements.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said. “There’s only a week to go.”
Afterward, though, he was easier on the guys. “We’re still doing a good job,” he said.
The club started at Woodlawn High School in 1929 and did annual concerts at the school until it dissolved in 1977, under directors John Light from 1930-47, Amos Hudson from 1948-50 and Joe Turner from 1951-77.
In 1988, the surviving Warblers reunited and did a three-night series of packed reunion concerts at the Alabama Theater from July 1-3, with Turner directing. The reunion was so popular that the Warblers continued to do several concerts a year thereafter. Turner died in 2001.
Parker has kept the Warblers warbling in recent years, with annual summer concerts at Samford University and Christmas concerts at area churches that often draw chartered buses full of fans from nursing homes.
Some of the Warblers are holding out hope for a 2029 centennial celebration show.
“Probably this will be the last show we do, unless we get an influx of some younger men,” Parker said. “If we can hang on and just do concerts until 2029, we can have a 100th anniversary concert.”
Tickets for the July 12 performance at Samford are $30, available at the group’s
website
, Warblers.org
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