Those dangerous Irish Tenors

I was shocked to see a headline yesterday on my Google page that pointed to a story on the BBC news site proclaiming that the British were increasing the level of the threat from Irish tenors! Wow. Being a bass myself, I was always a little envious of the publicity tenors always got. You never heard about the Three Basses traveling the world doing concerts. All the lead singers or soloists seemed to be tenors or baritones. What about Freddie Mercury (lead singer for Queen for all those years) and Robert Plant (of Led Zeppelin fame)? Bing Crosby had a pretty deep voice but he was a baritone. Michael Jackson sure wasn't a bass!

Johnny Cash and that guy who sings with the Oak Ridge Boys were the only famous basses I could think of and I couldn't even remember the name of the "that guy" in the Oak Ridge Boys! Oh yeah, the folk singer Gordon Bok (from Maine) is a bass, too. But that's it. Well ... George Beverly Shea (of Billy Graham Crusade fame) is listed as a bass-baritone. So even if he was a bass, he was trying to get some of that higher voice recognition by bringing the baritone label in.

So, being a little mistrustful of those tenors with all the girls chasing after them (my wife is a big fan of Mario Lanza and Tom Jones - you guessed it - TENORS), I was ready to believe that the British were worried about the threat from tenors. Then I looked more closely at the text (in the image above to the right) and realized that the font Google used made "rr" look a lot like "n". So, it isn't the Irish "tenor" threat that has been raised in Britain. It's the Irish "terror" threat. I guess that makes more sense. But I'm still not sure about those guys who can sing so high. Something's going on there I can't quite get. And why do the girls like them so much?