The Worst Album in My Collection: Brothers Sing On!

October 21, 2026 by Shawn Collins

When I was the recording secretary of the Delta Psi (??) chapter of Pi Kappa Alpha (?KA) at the University of Maryland, I ordered supplies from the national headquarters and noticed they had a record album, Brothers Sing On, for $1.

The cover looked so cheesy that I couldn’t resist getting a copy.

The record came out in 1964 for the Pi Kappa Alpha 96th Anniversary National Convention. Even then, I have to imagine this twelve-track LP looked and sounded outdated.

It took a while for Brothers Sing On to arrive to me. They probably had to dig through some dank basement to find a copy, because who was seriously ordering this in the early 1990s?

After I got it, I couldn’t listen to it, since I’d moved on from records in high school and only had a cassette and DVD player. But when I went to my Dad’s house to visit a while later, I had to bring it along and put it on the turntable.

Let me preface this by saying I bought a lot of music when I was young. I literally spent all my money on recorded music or concert tickets, so even though I had steady jobs from the time I turned 15, I never had enough money for a car.

I didn’t get a driver’s license and a car until I was 23, because my hunger for music was so strong.

Anyhow, I bought all of the music I could get my hands on. When I was low on cash, I’d go to the cut-out bins at record stores and buy cheap tapes for less than a dollar based on the covers and song names.

Most of the time, these were awful picks, but I kept doing it. I also published a music zine in high school, and I got review copies from so many bad punk bands. Still, nothing in my whole music collection (including the really bad stuff that I tossed in the trash over time) was ever as bad as Brothers Sing On.

Maybe I would have appreciated some of these tunes if our fraternity chapter sang any of these traditional songs. But when we serenaded sororities, the songs we sang were pretty vulgar and inappropriate. It’s a good thing we threw awesome parties, because our songbook was very lacking.

To give you an idea of how these songs sound, the singers were undergrads and alumni from the Pi Kappa Alpha chapter at Birmingham Southern College, and they sounded like a 1940s boy band singing in the style of a barbershop quartet. It makes Lawrence Welk sound like death metal.

Here is how the liner notes of Brothers Sing On introduce the record:

Fellowship is the hallmark of Pi Kappa Alpha. It flows into deep and abiding friendship and brotherhood.

Singing is man’s natural expression of fellowship. Chapter and group singing are both a cause and a result of fraternalism. Since 1868, the bonds of brotherhood in Pi Kappa Alpha have been strengthened and hearts made glad by the chorus of voices lifted in songs of fellowship.

This recording will bring many moments of listening pleasure. It is also designed to make participants out of all of us. This singing, by the men of a single chapter, demonstrates the musical potential in every chapter. Our many beautiful Pi Kappa Alpha songs can come alive only as we sing them.

A singing chapter lives in harmony. Listen and sing the songs of brotherhood!

It’s no wonder college fraternity membership declined significantly in the late 1960s and 1970s, with this corny stuff going on and anti-establishment sentiments among college students.

If anyone wants a copy of this record, Columbia Special Products released it (Catalog No. 99021); you may be able to find one on eBay. But don’t come for mine—these wax tracks will stay with me to the end.

Related