• Tones, Tunes, and Tours (Tigertones)

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Henry G. Parker III '48 arrived at Princeton in the fall of 1946 intent on singing as well as studying. Parker, who had spent the previous two years at Wesleyan University in the Naval Reserve, tried out for the established campus a cappella group, the Nassoons, but didn't make it. His other options? There were none. Unlike today, when numerous male, female, and mixed groups harmonize under Princeton arches, the Nassoons were the only game in town for a young man who wanted to sing a cappella.
"There were many others like me who were coming back from World War II service, who'd been admitted to Princeton earlier but hadn't yet attended," recalls Parker, a retired insurance executive who lives in Madison, New Jersey. "From a music point of view, there were really only a few options-the Nassoons, Triangle Club, and the Glee Club. Hundreds wanted to sing but had no opportunity. So I said, 'The heck with this. I'll start my own group.' And that was the beginning."
Parker, along with a handful of others who were singing together in a Glee Club octet and had failed to make the Nassoons, founded the Princeton Tigertones. (Tigertone legend says the deal was sealed under a table in the taproom of the Nassau Inn. It's a romantic tale-but, according to Parker, not the least bit true.) Now, after 24 albums, dozens of international tours, and thousands of arch sings, the group is celebrating its 50th birthday. It will mark the occasion with a series of performances and gatherings October 25 through 27, during the university's Charter Weekend.
The group might never have gotten off the ground if it hadn't cleared a bureaucratic hurdle in the early going. Once Parker and his dozen new mates worked out their arrangements and got their act together, they sought university recognition. "We wanted to use the name 'Princeton' in the title of the group," Parker says, "but Bill Lippincott ['41, then an assistant to the dean of the college] said we couldn't use it unless we were good. We had to prove we were good."
Not trusting his own judgment, Lippincott chose the obvious campus experts-the Nassoons themselves-to rule on the merit of these a cappella upstarts. So the two rival groups crammed into Lippincott's office, and the Tigertones nervously made their bid. They sang "Coney Island Baby," and rather badly at that.
"We did such a terrible job," Parker remembers. "We were nervous, the room was not good acoustically. . . . The Nassoons said, 'Sure, give them their charter. We won't have to worry about them being much competition.' So we got the charter."
In the five decades since that inglorious start, the Tigertones have played some slightly more glamorous venues, including Carnegie Hall on three different occasions. Over the course of all that singing, they've developed a distinctive personality, defined by their incessant touring, reverence for tradition, and friendships as tight as their harmonies. Indeed, members prize Tigertone camaraderie nearly as much as the group's musical accomplishments. The Tigertone practice room in the basement of Foulke Hall has the look and feel of a fraternity house, with Jack Daniels bottles lined up on the mantle, and, while in their cups, the Tones have been known to engage in such frat-style stunts as singing in their boxer shorts in public. The group also has its traditions and rituals; according to one custom, first-year members-known as "rookies"-carry the albums and compact disks and perform other grunt work on the way to gigs. In another revered tradition, the Tigertones bid farewell to their seniors at the end of every academic year with a traditional marathon sing at Blair Arch, always climaxed with the "The Orange Moon," a traditional Princeton song penned by Kenneth S. Clark '05. Then, according to Tigertone vernacular, a senior passes from the status of "Live Tone" to that of "Dead Tone."
"The fraternal aspect is definitely something that defines us," says Landon Jones '97, the group's president. "We spend a lot of time together. When you rehearse nearly every night and go on long tours together, you're bound to do some bonding. Tradition is big. I can tell you the name of everybody who's been in the group going back about 10 years, and some can go a lot further. And everybody knows a lot of group history and trivia."
A cappella has exploded in popularity on college campuses in recent years, and many groups sing contemporary rock songs, imitating guitars and percussive instruments with their vocals. You won't hear any of that with the Tigertones, who put an old-time emphasis on melody, harmony, and precise arrangements. Sporting bow ties and white dinner jackets as their standard uniform, the Tigertones have a repertoire that stretches back in time. Their 1994 album, Bachelor Days, includes numbers like "My Girl," "I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo," "That Cat is High," and "Run-around Sue." "Coney Island Baby," the song they sang in Lippincott's office back in 1946, has remained in the repertoire to this day.
"It's the music that holds the group together across the generations," says one Tigertone alumnus, Bob Bushnell '59, of Pawlet, Vermont, who like many alumni stays closely involved with the group. "They still do a lot of the same songs and arrangements that we did. I can still join in and sing with them."
Even in their use of the newest technology, the Internet, the Tigertones exude old Princeton. Rolling Stone, in an article last year about noteworthy collegiate World Wide Web sites, recognized the Tigertones' presence on the Web (http://www.princeton.edu/~/tones) but needled them for being a group of "guys with names like Wentworth, Landon, and Geoff crooning in all their preppified glory."
Music, of course, is still the primary concern. The group practices four nights a week and has an active repertoire of 40 or 50 songs. Just making the Tigertones bespeaks musical ability. With a membership of 16, the Tigertones add only four new singers a year, and as many as 60 men audition each fall. The talent and practice are apparent in the polished, professional sound of Tigertone concerts and recordings. Vowels are pronounced with a crisp, uniform precision, and rarely does a voice strain or stray off pitch.

It's a sound the Tigertones have taken far and wide during their five decades. The touring tradition started with Parker and the original cast, who drove around to women's colleges like Smith and Vassar to sing. In the early 1960s, the Tigertones started making annual forays to Bermuda. That tradition ended, but the group made its first trip to Europe in 1987, and the summer tours have become more elaborate by the year.
In the summer of 1995, the group spent six weeks touring Europe and the Middle East after entertaining passengers on the Queen Elizabeth II on the way over-singing for their supper and their fare. Indicative of the anything-can-happen nature of these tours, the Tigertones were invited to a Fourth of July party at the home of the U.S. ambassador to Israel, whose guests included the late Yitzak Rabin, then Israeli Prime Minister. Three days before the party, the Tigertones learned that they would be asked to sing the Israeli national anthem, "which we had never even heard before," says Jones. They arranged and learned the song in time to pull it off for their high-profile audience.
Although the Tigertones have played the likes of Carnegie Hall and the posh Meyerson Symphony Center, in Dallas, they've also done more humble venues. During a tour of Jamaica in 1988, the Tigertones arrived at a school on their itinerary, only to discover it was little more than an open-air lean-to crowded with chickens and schoolchildren. "That was part of the magic of the Tigertone experience," recalls Chat Reynders '88. "You gained perspective when you least expected to. We sang one of our better shows that day."
With all their globe-trotting, the Tigertones have become international ambassadors for the university. It is a role they play without university funding or advising. The group arranges its tours, manages its $35,000 budget (supported mostly by performance fees), and writes its intricate vocal arrangements on its own. But the Tigertones do have powerful allies in the world-their approximately 250 alumni. Among other contributions to the undergraduate group, these "Dead Tones" oversee a Tigertones endowment and serve on an advisory board.
Alumni are also known to make impromptu visits to Tigertone rehearsals and performances, and they often join in with the group. "Ask our alumni what was the defining experience of their undergraduate career, and 90 percent will say it was the Tigertones," says Lewis Flinn '89, who now writes music for television. "There's a real pride in the group and fondness for the members."
David Low '64, of Bethesda, Maryland, has participated in an unbroken string of 34 New Year's Eve parties with his early-'60s cohort. At these gatherings, which have taken place at members' homes up and down the East Coast, Low and friends sing the entire Tigertone repertoire of their era. Low himself, who now organizes music festivals for a career, has missed it only once; in his senior year the Tigertones were in Bermuda for New Year's Eve (the first and last time the annual event happened off the U.S. mainland), and he had to stay home to work on his thesis. "But I've been to every one since," he says.
Upwards of 300 Tigertones and their families are expected at the 50th anniversary celebration, which will include a banquet, several receptions and brunches, a Tigertones-hosted "Tribute to the Arts at Princeton," and, of course, lots of singing. The reunion will conclude with a three-hour concert in Richardson Auditorium featuring Tigertones from Henry Parker to the current group, with each cohort singing songs from its era. Appropriately, the undergraduate Tigertones will leave almost immediately after the concert for the airport. They'll be heading to Los Angeles for another tour.

Tom Krattenmaker, a writer in Yardley, Pennsylvania, is the director of communications at Swarthmore College and a frequent contributor to PAW.