They take their name from a song, "Happiness Is" by Clark Gesner. It's associated with the Peanuts cartoons, and they sing it at their performances.
That tidbit and the rest of the long history of the Happiness Singers can be faintly traced through the archives of the Arkansas Democrat and Arkansas Gazette. But there isn't time, room or patience enough in the universe to make me reprint all the newspapers' minor mentions of this venerable women's chorus.
Item, Dec. 12, 1982:
Pulaski County Medical Society Auxiliary, 11:30 a.m. luncheon at the home of Margaret Ann Morgan of North Little Rock; holiday music by the Happiness Singers.
See what I mean?
Society pages of both papers do document the event that founding members Mary Berry and Jo Neva Light say caused the Junior League of Little Rock to create the chorus.
The papers' April 9, 1972, editions reported on the Junior League party celebrating its 50 years with the Association of Junior Leagues of America. Part of the entertainment was a "mini-musical" performed by Berry, Light, Bev Hathaway, Hollis Kennedy, Dana Judkins, Kathleen Atkins, Miff Montgomery and Carolynn Crews.
They spoofed broadly stereotypical Junior League characters at a terrible meeting. Photos show the young women in costume beside a piano. In the Gazette, each is "Mrs. (husband's name)," while the Democrat provides their given names along with a few character names — "Belinda Belovely," "Melody Plenty." "Lydia Languish" was the pregnant leader of the Planned Parenthood committee; "Emily Efficient" was a driven overachiever. And there was a hippie-dippy protester, too.
Not long after this, Berry and Light remember, they and friends including Hollis and Judy Bechtel persuaded the league to accept the chorus as an approved weekly volunteer service project. League women who liked to sing and could sing would sing, entertaining the halt and the lame or the Fine Arts Club.
The high-water mark of their fame came in the late 1970s and early '80s.
In December 1976, they appeared on the cover of the league's magazine, nine women in sweater vests and pointy-collar shirts, singing their heads off around a patient at Arkansas Children's Hospital. This magazine is not in our archives, but I have seen a photocopy. The teenage patient sits up in bed, under the sheets. She wears a puffy sleeved shirt under a patterned jumper and an expression between dismay and alarm.
The league's big cultural project, Riverfest, still an infant in 1980, was a community recital in sun-baked Murray Park with professional and amateur arts acts. Already it had the school choirs and the karate kids. The next year brought on the aerobic-dance students embarrassed by their leotards who pranced while a perspiring crowd more or less watched.
In May 1980, the singing league members took Stage 2 at 3 p.m., right after the Arkansas Children's Theater Musical Revue.
In May 1981, their publicity photo appeared smack in the middle of the Gazette cover story with the Riverfest schedule. They were the festival's penultimate act at 6:30 p.m. — right before the U.S. Army Band and the fireworks.
"No, we didn't do that again, I don't think," Berry told me last week. "It was too hot."
In December 1981, Democrat columnist Betty Woods saw them at a luncheon in the home of Selma Metzger for the Florence Crittenton Home's pregnant residents.
"It was a bunch of fun," Woods wrote. "There was no piano, just a small organ at Selma's home, but it didn't deter the singers. Liz May struck a chord on the organ and off they went."
May played the organ but the group's director was Becky Slater, music minister of Pulaski Heights United Methodist Church.
Woods quotes Hollis Kennedy as saying that Slater, a member of the League board, had taken over directing the chorus three years before.
"For us," Kennedy said, "Happiness is Monday noon when talented Becky gives us the downbeat and, instead of gulping a hamburger, fries and Coke, we sing, sing, sing. Three part harmony beats a three course meal any time."
Today's Happiness Singers were still speaking of Slater fondly when I met them March 11. Light was laughing about how she had begged May to join them so long ago, when the memory trailed off into sorrow:
"Our lead alto was singing soprano — Mary Berry. And we needed a soprano because Mary needed to go back and be real lead alto because I was an alto and the altos were ... it was iffy. So I called Liz and said, 'There's this group. You just have to join us, we just need you so bad. Oh, we just need you, we just need you, we just need you.'
"And then as it turned out she had to be our director because Becky Slater had that accident ..."
Slater was 37 years old in August 1985 when she was struck by a car while bicycling with her child. She died of her injuries.
Kennedy, a vibrant actress in local theater and on the radio, is also gone now. If you search the archives for "Happiness Singers," you'll turn up her obituary in 2009. And that of Carolynn Elise Crews, who died in 2004, hit by car.
Georganne Ricks died in 2014. Anne Lea Patterson, who played the piano when Light was on vacation, died in 2016. And I am making myself sad.
Here are a few more cribs from Woods' 1981 column:
"The women had a terrible time getting a uniform together. It had to be something they could wear to the office one day a week, every week. Mary [Berry] moaned over one outfit. 'It was so horrible — a blue jumper with a loud red and white polka dot blouse. I'd go into the restroom every Monday and emerge in it. Just like Superman.'
"One time a member was pregnant, so they adopted a jumper. 'All but one wore it belted,'" Mary said.
"Today they're sharp in a dark skirt with off-white blouse and a reversible plaid vest. They bought enough material for new members, but the supply is short. So, if a Happiness Chorus member leaves town, she leaves her vest for her replacement."
Woods described "these songbirds" as having performed at every nursing home in Greater Little Rock, at Easterseals functions, at churches, in schools. And they'd had some weird experiences.
"At a mental institution, an inmate tried to take off with Liz, at another, a patient interrupted the Alleluia Chorus with shouts of 'God is dead. I killed Him.' Once Hollis hit a high note, and a youngster in the first row screamed as he covered his ears."
So? Woods asks.
And then she answers herself: "So the Happiness Chorus sings on."
Email:
cstorey@arkansasonline.com
Style on 03/25/2019
CORRECTION: Carolynn Elise Crews, who sang in the Happiness Singers and died in 2004, was known by her middle name. An earlier version of this story left out her middle name.