Mother's/Father's Day Tag
aka “Wishing You a Happy Mother's (Father's) Day” · Young men's voices version
- Key
- F Major
- Style
- Barbershop
Sheet music
Four-part mixer
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Credits & notes
Arranged by
Joe Liles
Learning tracks
Virtual Singer
Lyrics
Wishing you a happy Mother's Day: Have a great Day! (substitute "Father's" as needed)
Source notes
This Tag and the female version are intended for youth (young men in this case, young women or children in the case of the female version) to sing to mothers on Mother's Day, and/or to fathers on Father's Day. The idea is for Barbershoppers and Sweet Adelines / Harmony Inc. singers to offer to teach this tag to the young men or young women or children in their church congregations or other organizations that would typically meet on Sundays, and then the youth would perform the tag to all of the mothers or fathers of the church or other group on the appropriate day (or the nearest day to it, whenever the group actually celebrates that day). Tagmaster Joe Liles wrote the original tag "Let's All Sing" for the Jan/Feb 2014 issue of The Harmonizer. Yours truly had earlier, two years ago, adapted a tuning exercise from another issue of The Harmonizer (which I'll likely also be uploading) and had the idea of altering its lyrics for Mother's Day. I taught the young men (ages 12-17) in my Church to sing it, and they did as a surprise for the women during the women's own meetings on Mother's Day. Both the young men and the mothers enjoyed it thoroughly (I could see several of the mothers mouthing to each other in surprised shock, "Is that our sons!?". When I saw Mr. Liles's tag, I realized that it could make for an even better, even easier-to-learn-and-teach tag for this purpose. I contacted Mr. Liles and he wholeheartedly agreed to grant permission for this, and also contributed considerably to the new lyrics (even though he credits me for them in the sheet music .PDF, he did at least as much as I did on those). A quick note about the learning tracks: they're done with Virtual Singer, which is low-end synthetic voice singing software. They may not be pleasant to listen to, but the tuning (including Barbershop-specific per-note microtuning) and timing are much more accurate than the average human could do, and the purpose of learning tracks is to teach. For the "Other Parts 1-4" tracks, I uploaded instrumental versions (Bass through Tenor, respectively). These use a "reed organ" sound that has no vibrato (I do add a bit of delayed vibrato in the Lead for both synthetic singing voice and the reed organ instrumental) nor chorus nor other such effects that obscure pitch, is sustained with a subtle attack so that the timing is easy to hear, and is rich in harmonics making it easier to hear the blending of the chords. Having instrumental as well as vocal tracks makes following the Giallombardo Method (http://scotianaires.ca/resources/Song%20Learning%20Method.pdf) more feasible, since one can learn the note pitches with the right brain separately from learning the lyrics with the left brain. The pronunciations in the Virtual Singer tracks were deliberately modified to "voice" the consonants within the phrases, even if they would normally be unvoiced. For instance, "f" becomes "v," "p" becomes "b," "sh" becomes "zh," etc. "H" should be sung normally at the beginning of a phrase, but be sung simply as a brief softening of volume of the vowel when inside the phrase. Barbershop sounds best this way, because tuning is only possible when the vocal folds are emitting pitch, and this only happens on vowels and voiced consonants. The idea is to not allow the vocal folds to stop within a phrase, even for the split-second it would take to utter a brief unvoiced consonant. Of course, the final consonant of a syllable other than the end of a phrase should be sung at the beginning of the next syllable, to maximize the vowel time. This constant vocalizing produces the famous "Wall of Sound" that is a hallmark of the Barbershop sound. Also, dipthongs such as the long "a" should be sung as a pure vowel and not turned until the very end of the syllable, so "day" should actually be sung as "deh-i." Thus, the lyrics (for Father's Day) actually should be sung as: "Wi-zhing you a (h)a-bby Va-ther's Dehy: (Ha vuh grehy dehy!)"