SPEBSQSA (now BHS) was founded in 1938, when Tulsa tax attorney Owen C. Cash ran into a fellow Tulsan, investment banker Rupert I. Hall, in the lobby of the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City, stranded when a storm closed the airport. Striking up a few chords (after tipping the bellboy to find them a tenor singer), the men bemoaned the decline of that all-American institution, the barbershop quartet. Determined to stem that decline, they wrote a humorous letter to friends, stating:

"In this age of dictators and government control of everything, about the only privilege guaranteed by the Bill of Rights not in some way supervised or directed is the art of barbershop quartet singing. Without a doubt, we still have the right of peaceable assembly, which, we are advised by competent legal authority, includes quartet singing.

"The writers have, for a long time, thought that something should be done to encourage the enjoyment of this last remaining vestige of human liberty. Therefore, we have decided to hold a songfest on the roof garden of the Tulsa Club on Monday, April 11, 1938, at 6:30 p.m."

Twenty-six men attended that first rooftop meeting, and their numbers swelled rapidly in subsequent meetings. At the third gathering, more than 150 harmonizers raised such a sound that traffic stopped on the street below. A reporter for the Tulsa Daily World chanced to pass by the scene, sensed a good story, and put the story on the national news wires. The lengthy name and initials, founder Cash's way of poking fun at the New Deal's "alphabet soup" of initialed government agencies, captured the imagination of readers coast to coast, and inquiries came pouring in. Membership grew to more than 2,000 men in that first year, and the Society held its first convention and national contest the following year.