Stupid Guest Tricks

So if you haven't seen it, at our Thursday rehearsal last week Vocal Majority learned of songwriter Leonard Cohen's passing, and we went live with a tribute to him, singing our arrangement of his well-known song "Hallelujah." And somehow, unpredictably, it's just seemed to resonate with a ton of people and has had over 2.8 million views (and still climbing) in under 5 days!!

It's a Facebook video, so I can only post the link here, but I'm fairly easy to spot, in my blue shirt on the top row, just to the right of center. Here it is: http://www.facebook.com/TheVocalMajorit ... 646966166/

So as far as I know it's now the top view-getting video of a barbershop-related group in history, passing up the previous top two: the Ambassadors of Harmony's 76 trombones (which won the 2009 International contest, breaking VM's 30-year win streak) and Main Street quartet's Pop Songs Medley from 2015. I bring these up because, just coincidentally, we shared the stage this weekend with both Main Street (all current or former Dapper Dans, btw) and the director of the Ambassadors, Jim Henry, all of us performing for the national convention of the National Association for Music Education. Here's our combined performance of Tribute to World Peace, a medley of Let There Be Peace on Earth, One Voice, and One Song (Main Street is the quartet on the left, and Jim Henry comes on to direct at the end). Enjoy! https://www.facebook.com/donovan.davis. ... 590622557/

Quick update: The views of the video continued to climb, often reaching 35K new views per hour, but the new view rate finally dropped off in the week of Thanksgiving. It's still getting new views, but only around 2,000 per hour. (Until this one, we'd be thrilled if any of our videos got 10,000 views total!)

The current tally? Closing in on 7.4 million views!

It's been fun experiencing the effect of something like this. Our CD sales are through the roof, and we're playing our Christmas shows to capacity audiences this weekend. We normally sell out or come close to it for our Christmas shows (4 shows in a 1,500-seat theater), but we've had to open up obstructed view seats that we normally don't worry about trying to sell.

Oh, and America's Got Talent has been calling. We'll submit some other videos to them, and if they like what they see, they've said they'll fly all 120+ guys to L.A. in the Spring to tape the show.

I wasn't able to link to the video on Facebook, but it's been copied over to YouTube in case anyone wants to see it and hasn't yet:
https://youtu.be/O4NAJ4ZbrjI

It's been a fun ride, but I can't take anything too seriously: