This story was originally published in 2019, but it has been updated to include information for 2020 singing Valentine’s.

It’s happened at stuffy law firms, in dreary hospital rooms, at busy beauty salons, in the hallway of the U.S. Capitol, even once, memorably, at a police station. Four tuxedo-clad men arrive, rose in hand, and begin to croon.

They might start with “Heart of My Heart” or “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” A crowd usually forms. The harmonies ring through the room. Inevitably, the recipient melts. It’s certainly not your average Whitman’s sampler.

For more than 15 years, members of the DC Singing Capital Chorus have fanned out through the region to deliver a capella singing valentines.

The chorus, which is made up of about 40 members, performs about once a month, ranging from concerts at nursing homes to singing the national anthem at a Nationals’ game. Their marquee show, Harvest of Harmonies, takes place in the fall. But there’s nothing quite like Valentine’s Day, when the group breaks up into quartets to make about 40 deliveries over the course of two days.

“We just have a blast. It’s the most fun we have all year,” says Charlie Carroll, who has been a member for 15 years and previously served as the chorus’s president.

At a recent practice sessions at St. Paul’s Lutheran, where the group rents space in the basement, the melodies echoed through a winding stairwell. Follow the voices down and one finds about two dozen men rehearsing.

“There’s nothing like the sound that you get when you get that harmony going. There’s no instrument—it’s just our voices,” says Marc Wolfson, a tenor who also serves as the group’s vice president of marketing. “When you match it right, it’s what we call ringing the chord. It just sends a chill down your spine.”

The genre developed in the late 1800s as a tradition among black men who would gather at barbershops and sing sans instruments. “They would take the songs that were popular at the time—-the top 40 today, they would take those songs and they would sing them and put their own harmony to them,” according to Wolfson. It caught on more widely around the turn of the century, likely popularized by minstrel groups, before falling out of favor in the 1920s as radios went mainstream.

The Barbershop Harmony Society was formed in the late 1930s to keep the tradition alive, and the Capital Chorus was one of its earliest chapters.

Fred Peters, a 101-year-old lead singer with mischievously bright blue eyes, has been there for much of its history. He says he’s only missed one Harvest of Harmony in his 63 years with the group. And he still goes out to sing love songs on Valentine’s Day. As for his favorite tune? “I love them all,” Peters says. “Just like the ladies.”

Many barbershop groups around the country (and several others in the D.C. region) also deliver singing valentines, but there are some particular challenges to federal Washington.

“One time we delivered to [the U.S. States Citizenship and Immigration Services office]. I wasn’t sure how easy it was going to be to get in. …. And at first they were like, ‘maybe you can sing through the security checkpoint,'” recalls Bryan Close, who coordinates Capital Chorus’s singing valentines program. They made it past the barrier after some cajoling. “That’s actually the number one thing we have to check. Is there security? How easy is it to get in?”

Practically no matter where the quartets go, the surprise inevitably draws a crowd.

“It’s always a big scene. You go into an office building, and it’s like an event. People start gathering around. Almost every time I’ve delivered, we’ve ended up with a crowd of like 30 people, or like every single person in the office gets out of their cubicle and walks by,” says Close.

He’s a “third-generation barbershopper” who joined the group four years ago, after singing with a chapter in Utah. While his colleagues might be more likely to request time off for Thanksgiving or Christmas, the civil engineer is always clear with his boss: he’ll definitely be out of the office on Valentine’s Day. Close and his wife defer their own celebration until February 15.

Over so many years of delivering valentines, the men (the Barbershop Harmony Society recently started accepting female members, but none have joined this particular chapter yet) have a trove of stories.

There was the time a dentist left a patient in the chair to hear them perform. The time they sang to a prominent NPR reporter on Capitol Hill. The time they sang to a woman on behalf of her fiancee who was on active duty overseas. The time they were called up to a bedroom (they sang and dashed real fast).

One delivery left a particular impression on Alan Snyder, who’s been with the group for about 34 years. Sometime in the early 1990s, his quartet arrived at a government office to deliver a valentine to a woman from someone with an unusual name that didn’t obviously indicate their gender.

“From the beginning, we say ‘this is from so and so to so and so.’ She kind of starts to cry and [her friends] start to cry and they’re hugging each other … We don’t know whether our singing made her cry or what it was,” he recalls. It turned out, the woman’s girlfriend had sent the singing valentine, and it represented something of a public coming out of their relationship.

And then there was the police sergeant that thought his deputies were playing an elaborate prank.

“He was so pissed. He figured the other guys were all sitting there. He thought for sure this was a setup,” recalls John Taber, who has been singing with the group for about 10 years. “We weren’t even sure if we were going to get to sing because it looked like he might just throw us out.”

But they managed to get a performance in, and then handed over the card. It was from the officer’s wife.

Ned Duffy, a longtime member who retired last year, was a part of that quartet and he recounted the same story via email. When the cop realized it was his wife’s doing, Duffy wrote, “he melted like a July snowcone.”

The D.C. Singing Capital Chorus will be delivering Singing Valentine’s on February 13 and 14. For $60, they will deliver two or three songs, a card, and one rose. Upgrade to a full bouquet of roses for $110. More details can be found here.