Lawsuit reveals divide in barbershop singing groups
Barbershop quartets sing traditional songs in four-part harmony, always a cappella, often dressed up in straw hats, funny vests and bow ties.
Efforts to preserve and promote the uniquely American form of music have been thrown way off-key by a major legal and financial dispute with its largest organization, the Society to Preserve and Encourage Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, better known as the Barbershop Harmony Society, and its fundraising arm, Harmony Foundation International.
Both are Wisconsin charitable non-profit corporations, once headquartered at “Harmony Hall” in Kenosha, but which now operate from Nashville. BHS has been around since 1938, and Harmony Foundation International since the late 1950s. There are Society chapters all over the U.S. and Canada.
According to a new federal lawsuit in Wisconsin, a rogue board member of Harmony “and unknown persons acting in concert with him,” has led efforts to break away, and take many Society assets with it, a move that intensified after the Society agreed in 2018 to extend membership to women.
For decades, the Society and the foundation performed like a smooth duet. The Society supplied an office, utilities, insurance and the Society’s list of some 15,000 members and the foundation raised money from them.
For many years, the members’ philanthropic focus was to support Heartspring, a Kansas school for children with special needs. The Society and Harmony still hold conventions, stage championships, publish music and hold camps for high school singers.
Society “members love Barbershopping and are generous donors,” the suit states, to the tune of about $3 million a year. The issue was how much was supporting the mission, and how much the fundraisers were keeping for themselves.
Over the years, despite the Society’s efforts, membership was dwindling from as high as 34,000 in 1995. In 2012, with the leadership of a dynamic new CEO, outreach and programming expanded and membership stabilized, but Harmony wasn’t delivering enough funding to support the new activities.
In 2018, the Society voted to extend membership to women for the first time.
According to the lawsuit, that didn’t sit well with Gary Plaag, president of the Harmony Foundation board. The Society board had already been urging Plaag, a Virginia personal communications consultant, to make Harmony more efficient by either raising more money or cut Harmony’s costs. From 2015 to 2019, Harmony collected just over $15 million, but less than 40% went to BHS and its chapters, while more than 61% went to Harmony’s overhead — despite it not having to pay rent or utilities.
The Society’s board didn’t share the poor fund-raising metric with the general membership, lest they stop giving so generously.
Plaag declined on Thursday to respond to the lawsuit. Harmony CEO Perry White, in a statement, said the complaint’s allegations have no merit.
“Suffice it to say the Barbershop Harmony Society has been engaged in a year’s long effort to exert control over HFI and this is just the latest chapter in this ongoing saga,” he said.
The lawsuit from the Society and what it calls the legal HFI board suggests Plaag kept the nature and extent of the Society’s demands about funding from HFI’s original board.
Finally, the Society expanded Harmony’s board from nine members to 25, so new board members could override those controlled by Plaag.
Plaag, though, doubled down, according to the suit. He refused to recognize the new members, extended what the Society considers an overly generous contract to Harmony’s CEO and ultimately even renounced the 1959 trust agreement that set out the relationship between the Society and Harmony Foundation.
Then, the Society contends, Harmony began soliciting Society’s members to contribute to Harmony directly, referring to the trust’s endowment as its own. And its staff told some Society members who arranged some $10 million in legacy bequests, who wanted to clearly redirect the money to the Society, in light of the dispute, that the gifts to Harmony were irrevocable.
“Plaag and those acting in concert with him want to use these funds to pay for HFI’s
exorbitant overhead in perpetuity and maintain that they would control these funds without any accountability to honor BHS’s donors’ intent that intended their legacy gifts would benefit BHS and its programs,” the suit states.
Now the Society and Harmony — as represented by the new, expanded board — have asked a federal judge in Madison to find that Plaag has breached his fiduciary duties, that he can’t use Harmony or Society funds to defend the lawsuit, and that the new, larger board, the trust, and Harmony’s bylaws are all legitimate under long-existing documents.
The suit also seeks an injunction blocking use of the name Harmony Foundation, for which the Society owns the trademark, but contends Plaag is using in ways that hurt the Society.
The legal dispute will likely turn on the intricacies of a 1959 trust agreement, and the bylaws of Harmony, each of which have been amended over time. The Society’s position is that it created, and funded HFI, which never did amount to an efficient fund-raising operation, and that now seeks to sustain itself by misleading Society members.
Holly Kellar, the chief marketing officer for the Society, characterized the lawsuit as involving only a “governance disagreement,” that wouldn’t affect members.