Welcome, friend. We're four brothers from a farm in the hills of middle Tennessee, and for forty years now we have been singing gospel music together in churches, at homecomings, at funerals, at the county fair, at nursing homes, and on the front porch on a summer evening when nobody's listening but the dog. We're not professionals. We've all had regular jobs our whole lives, and we are, between us, a retired rural mail carrier, a retired high school shop teacher, a farmer and a man who fixes furnaces. We sing because our mother taught us to, because the Lord gave us four voices that fit together, and because after all this time we don't know how to stop.

Our nephew Kevin put this page together so folks could find our singing schedule without having to call Vernon's house. We'll try to keep it current. If you'd like us to come sing at your church, or if you just want to say hello, there's an e-mail address at the bottom, and Kevin checks it and reads it to us on Sundays.

All singings are free and everyone is welcome. Where there's a dinner on the grounds, bring a dish if you can and come hungry either way. Dates can change, so if you're driving any distance, e-mail first and Kevin will confirm.

We also sing at funerals when families ask, and we don't charge for that and never have. Just call one of us.

We sing the old songs. Not because there's anything wrong with the new ones, but because these are the ones our mother sang, and the ones people in a country church know by heart, and there's nothing in the world like a room full of people who know the words. Most of what we sing is a hundred years old or more, out of the old shape-note books and the hymnals with the broken spines. Here's a good part of the list, so you'll know what you're getting:

Our arrangements are our own, worked out over forty years. Lloyd, the youngest, sings tenor on top. Dale sings lead; he's the one you'll hear the melody from and the one who talks between songs. Vernon sings baritone and Earl, the oldest, sings bass, and folks tell us they can feel it in the floor. Most of the time we sing without any instruments at all, the way we learned. Some nights Vernon's wife Carolyn plays the piano, and at homecoming Dale's boy brings his guitar.

We close every singing with "Amazing Grace," the last verse without any harmony, all four of us on the melody together, and then Earl sings the last line by himself. We've done that since Mother's funeral in 1981 and we'll do it until there's only one of us left to sing it.

Tuesday nights, Vernon's kitchen, seven o'clock, after supper. We've tried other nights and other houses and it never took. Carolyn puts on coffee and goes to watch her programs in the other room, and we sit around the table, not standing, because Earl's knees, and we sing.

We don't read music, not really. Earl and Vernon can pick out shape notes from the old books, and Dale plays enough piano to find a starting note. Mostly we learn a song by Dale singing the melody through a couple of times until everybody has it, and then each of us finds his part by ear, the way we always have. Lloyd goes high, Earl goes low, Vernon fills in the middle. When it locks in, you can feel it, and there's no mistaking it, and everybody at the table just nods. When it doesn't, we go back to the top of the verse and try again. Some nights a song takes ten minutes. Some songs have taken us years to get right.

Before a singing we run through the list once, straight through, no stopping, to find out where the rough spots are. Then we work the rough spots. Then we quit and eat pie, because you can practice a song to death. Forty years has taught us that the best singing happens when you know the song well enough to stop thinking about it and just sing it to the people.

We are not the best quartet in Tennessee, and we know it. We've heard the best, and it was a wonderful thing. But we've sung together so long that we breathe at the same time without planning it, and there is something in that you can't rehearse into a group. You have to be brothers, and you have to have been at it forty years.

Folks have asked for years if we had a tape, and we finally made one this spring for the 40th anniversary. It's called "Forty Years," and it's 16 songs from the list above, recorded over two evenings in the sanctuary at Pleasant Hill with one microphone in front of us, because that's how we sound and we didn't want to pretend otherwise. You can hear the furnace kick on during "Softly and Tenderly." We decided to leave it.

The cassette is $8, and we sell it at our singings from a card table by the door, where Carolyn keeps the cash box. That's the only place to get it; we're not set up for mail order and at our age we're not going to be. If you come to a singing, find the card table. We made 500 and about 200 are left as of September, so there's time.

Whatever's left after we pay back the church for the tapes goes to the Pleasant Hill cemetery fund, where our mother and father are, and where the mowing doesn't pay for itself.

Our mother, Ruby, sang alto in the Pleasant Hill choir and sang at the sink and in the garden and in the truck, and by the time each of us could talk we could sing a part, because she'd sing the melody and make us find the harmony under it. There were four of us boys, born between 1938 and 1946, on a tobacco and dairy farm about a mile from the church. Our father, Clarence, didn't sing a note. He said somebody had to listen.

The first time we sang together in public was a Sunday evening in June of 1959. Earl was 21 and just back from the Army, Vernon was 19, Dale was 16 and Lloyd was 13 and his voice hadn't quite made up its mind yet. The preacher asked if the Hardesty boys would do a special, and Mother had us sing "In the Sweet By and By," and we did, standing in a row at the front with our hands behind our backs, scared to death. Afterwards a lady told Mother, "those boys have harmony," and the name came from that. We didn't pick it. It stuck.

Through the 60s we sang most Sundays somewhere, and then life got in the way the way it does: jobs and marriages and babies and Vernon's time in the service and a stretch in the 70s when Dale and Earl weren't speaking over something none of us can remember now. We never quit for good, but there were years we only sang at Christmas and at funerals. Then Mother passed in 1981, and we sang at her funeral, and something about that put us back together. We've sung every week since, near enough.

We've never been on the radio, except once on the county station in 1987. We've never made a dime; the tape is the closest we've come. We've sung in maybe 200 churches in this part of Tennessee and a few over the line in Kentucky and Alabama. We've sung at each other's weddings, at Father's funeral in 1993, and at more homecomings than we could count. We're between 53 and 61 years old now, and Earl's knees are bad, and Lloyd's had a bypass, and not one of us has any intention of quitting. God's been good to us, and we've got the songs to prove it.