Jay Mednikow had considered the usual hobbies of the Southern gallant, but riding around on golf carts or horses didn’t much appeal to him.

With three kids and a huge jewelry business to attend to, there wasn’t time for a lot of country club outings.

He just wanted to sing. Music was a reasonable escape from the world. The anti-work. A cathartic expression of the soul. It made him happy. It made his wife happy.

So Mednikow did what any man of means would do in his circumstance.

He founded his own vocal group to sing the music that made him happiest.

This weekend, when his ensemble, DeltaCappella, takes the stage at the Orpheum, the performance marks what could possibly be the beginning of a national movement.

Mednikow, 44, attributes his place at the headwaters of harmony in part to confluence of good timing and having the right people show up at his audition.

“My goal in the beginning was to get a group of guys together and make good music,” he said. “My only fear was that we wouldn’t be good enough to satisfy my desire to make decent music.”

Unplugged

And what is this new trendsetting music?

It is, surprisingly, one of the oldest genres in the world.

A cappella, or “in the manner of the chapel,” is a singing style that applies to any vocal arrangement with no instrumental accompaniment. The term describes anything from a Gregorian chant to a barbershop quartet.

But the kind of a cappella music that Mednikow wanted to perform was the kind he’d sung while at Harvard and Duke Universities.

“I missed the a cappella jazz groups from college,” Mednikow said. “My original thought was to create something similar here because there wasn’t anything like that going on.”

As Mednikow researched the how-tos of starting his own arts organization on the Internet, the name of one national expert kept popping up in his googling.

Deke Sharon is known among a cappella aficionados as a top arranger and educator in the genre. He was also one of the first writers of what is known as “contemporary a cappella,” a style born, he says, in college dorm rooms in the mid-1980s out of the glee club tradition.

“I was at the New England Conservatory and I decided to make a vocal arrangement of Peter Gabriel’s ‘In Your Eyes,’” he said. “You know how complex the instrumentation is on that. Well, when I wrote out the parts, I selected some voices to be the percussion, some to be the synthesizers. Basically I used the human voice to create a wide variety of sounds. That was the underpinning that was previously lacking from a cappella arrangements of modern pop music. When we performed it, the audience went bananas.”

Soon other vocal groups were experimenting with new arrangements, exploring pop and rock alongside traditional genres. In addition to revamped versions of classics such as “Moon River” or “In the Still of the Night,” the contemporary a cappella movement today covers everything from Nirvana’s “Nevermind” to Styx’s “Mr. Roboto.”

In the 1990s, when Sharon founded the “Collegiate A Cappella News,” and later the Contemporary A Cappella Society there were about 200 groups performing on college campuses. Now there are more than 1,000.

Mednikow brought Sharon to Memphis, where they worked on creating a local singing group that might appeal to community singers familiar with the college tradition.

The process of starting a new group from scratch inspired Sharon. Last year he created a new organization called the Contemporary A Cappella League, whose purpose is to encourage others trying to form singing ensembles. Sharon estimates that more than 5,000 a cappella singers graduate from colleges each year with virtually no opportunity to perform in their own communities.

The first national conference of the Contemporary A Cappella League is in Downtown Memphis this weekend, with workshops and singalongs bookending Saturday evening’s concert.

“It’s interesting to have our first conference here in Memphis not just because the history of this city as a musical birthplace, but because it’s one part of the United States largely untouched by a cappella music,” Sharon said. “It’s a sterile petri dish. If we can do it here, we can certainly do it in Boston or New York where there is a much bigger tradition.”

DeltaCappella has been together for about a year and a half, performing for some private functions and a few concerts.

Sharon says that 27 new groups have already assembled, with more contacting him each week.

Ten Grammys Later...

Ask Claude McKnight if a cappella music is a fad or a gimmick and he agrees, to a point.

“Anytime something becomes popular, you’re going to get a lot of people coming out of the woodwork to try it out,” said McKnight, who lives near Nashville. “But the successful ones have something that sets them apart.”

For 20 years, he’s sung lead tenor with the internationally renowned vocal sextet Take 6, who are headlining Saturday’s concert at the Orpheum.

He says that his bandmates each have a different way of displaying their ten Grammy Awards, which speaks volumes about the group’s dynamic.

McKnight keeps his in a display case in the living room.

“We never really ascribed to the rules early on,” he said. “A lot of a cappella groups go for the smooth, unified sound. For us, the more vibrato and passion we put into the arrangements, the better. That is one thing that has set us apart.”

Take 6 has also recorded everything from jazz standards to straight up gospel music.

“We have very different backgrounds musically,” McKnight says. “Knowing different styles of music has served us well.”

The group will conduct a free masterclass on Saturday afternoon at the Orpheum. Arranger and singer Cedric Dent will also lecture on the history of gospel music on Sunday at the National Civil Rights Museum.

McKnight says that reaching diverse audiences is the primary reason the group has sustained its popularity for 20 years.

“We do performing arts centers, we do symphony dates, we do black churches and white churches,” he said. “We never set out to be the Grammy boys. We just wanted to make good music.”

“I said: 'Ma’am, I am tonight.../ ”

DeltaCappella isn’t exactly what Mednikow had envisioned.

Some of the best auditioners weren’t cut out for tight jazz harmonies. Some couldn’t read music. The repertoire took shape not by executive decree but by suggestions and consensus.

Indeed, Mednikow says the biggest problem he has is picking the songs. There are so many to choose from.

The group’s diversity has shaped the current repertoire. The 14 men range in age from the 20s to the 50s, and its multicultural make up has inspired forays into rock and roll (such as Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars”) and soul music (Lionel Richie’s “Easy”).

“I was completely amazed by the diversity of the people who came out,” Mednikow said. “I was expecting to replicate what I did in college but it came together as something else.”

The group members include an Internet consultant, a former medical doctor, a few church music directors, a research analyst, a fundraiser for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital and music educators.

Michael Ching, artistic director of Opera Memphis, took on the role of the group’s musical consultant, and has since been inspired to write an a cappella opera.

There are occasional artistic flare ups, brief disagreements on how notes should sound and phrases should end.

But rehearsals are also lively, like when resident cutup Kip Long pinches his nose and demonstrates his impression of a bagpipe, or when Rodney Williams, who sang with Mednikow at Duke, dances to “Rubberband Man.”

“If you want to say we have a Southern brand, it’s that we all have day jobs and connect with people from this part of the country,” said Dan Beard, a bass who makes floorboards rattle when he opens “The Ballad of John Henry.” “I’m an old jazzer myself.”

On a recent Sunday night, the group hit Beale Street to drum up interest in their concert. They walked into Silky O’Sullivan’s bar and gathered around the microphone.

The tourists were dazzled by DeltaCappella’s “Walking in Memphis.” Songwriter Marc Cohn writes a line about being asked if he “were a Christian child,” and he replies, in the spirit of the moment, “Ma’am I am tonight!”

If DeltaCappella prove anything in their drive to find an audience in this town, it’s that no style of music is off limits.

— Christopher Blank: 529-2305

A cappella this weekend

These events are open to the public:

2:30-4 p.m., Saturday: Free master class with Take 6 at the Orpheum -- Members of the singing group Take 6 demonstrate how to create original a cappella arrangements.

7:30 p.m. Saturday: Performance by Take 6 and DeltaCappella at the Orpheum theater -- The 10-time Grammy-winning vocal group performs alongside a newly formed group from Memphis. Tickets $10-$40. Call 525-3000.

2:30 p.m. Saturday at the National Civil Rights Museum: Take 6 member and professor of music Cedric Dent lectures on the history and development of gospel music. Free.

For information on the conference and to view videos of Take 6, click here to visit vocalsymplosium.com.