Barbershop is a quintessentially American style of acapella performance, with a history stretching back over 100 years.
On Independence Day, the artform will take center stage in downtown Atlanta, as runners await the start of the 55th Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road. That’s thanks to the four fellows behind the Four Fellers, a local group that has been harmonizing together since 2022 – and the winner of this year’s contest to sing the national anthem at the race’s starting line.
The men behind the Four Fellers’ rousing vocals are Koty Swanson (lead), David Murphree (tenor), Mike Brunson (baritone), and Joshua Pawlik (bass).
Most of the relationships between the group’s members go back several years before the Fellers’ official founding. Those bonds have helped elevate the group’s music.
“We are not only close physically, because we have to be in order to sing, but we are also close emotionally, because you have to be vulnerable with your quartet and your chorus. That way, you can connect on a level that is like no other,” Brunson said. “And that’s really the only way to make great music, is to trust each other implicitly and be vulnerable.”
Brunson lives in Sandy Springs and Swanson lives in Peachtree Corners. Both Murphree and Pawlik are based in Alabama.
This year’s Peachtree Road Race will be the Four Fellers’ highest-profile performance to date, but they already have extensive experience with the anthem, having sung the Star-Spangled Banner at ballparks and arenas in Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee. The group’s audition tape, which was selected as the winner after roughly 35,000 online votes were cast, showed the Fellers performing the anthem for the Gwinnett Stripers baseball team.
The energy of anthem performances is unmatched.
“The anthem just hits different,” Brunson said. “You get this this instant connection with everyone in the stadium, or arena or wherever we are. And I don’t care how big of a audience it is, it feels intimate, it feels close. I feel connected and attached in a special way to every single person that we have the pleasure of singing for. So it’s very, very different.”
According to Brunson, the motivation to compete for the anthem-singing slot at the Peachtree Road Race came in part from the event’s long-standing and outsized role in local culture. Although he has never run the 6.2-mile race himself, many of his family members and friends have.
“To be involved with something so Atlanta, so Georgia like the Peachtree Road Race is just absolutely amazing,” he said.
The group is also looking forward to having a sizable platform to bring more eyes and ears to the living legacy of barbershop singing.
“So one of the things that we want to do as a quartet is we want to not only have fun together, but we also want to show people how much fun barbershop is, and let people know that it’s an art form that has been around since the 1800s,” Brunson said.
He added that performing at the Peachtree Road Race “is going to change our lives. It’s going to deeply, deeply affect us. We are so ready for that. And we’re so ready to bring our very, very best to Atlanta because they deserve it.”
