Warren Moise

Hubba, Hubba, Hubba, Swish Boo Hoo Hoo

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the setting of the first incident

Chapter One ­– Gloomings

In December of 1974, my senior year of college, I lived with another English major on Fairfield Road in Columbia, South Carolina, at least a ten-mile trek from campus. Neither of us had cars, so we rode city buses to class and back home to our not-exactly-quaint two-bedroom house jammed between two rundown convenience stores [see above].[1] The buses quit running at eleven PM, which meant occasionally having to hitch a ride late at night.[2]

Otherwise, riding the buses wasn’t all that bad because poverty can seem somewhat romantic to bookish people just starting out in life. On these trips, I encountered scores of ragtag citizens, some of them interesting folk with tales to tell. Of course, the bus stopped whenever someone wanted to get off, which you signaled by pulling a metal wire that triggered a bell. Smoking was allowed everywhere back then – even in medical waiting rooms – so the buses reeked of exhaled tobacco whose fumes had permeated the Naugahyde of the brown saggy seats. Of course, the fewer the passengers, the quicker the ride and vice versa. Predicting the duration was imprecise; you had to allow for sufficient time.  

Anyway, it was the second week in December during exams, and I was sitting on the living room sofa reviewing my notes before trudging off to the chilly bus stop where I would dance around like a boxer to keep warm, vapor streaming from my mouth.  

Suddenly, the backdoor flew open, the screen door banging, and in stormed a young married woman my housemate had been seeing, a petite, bordering-on-beautiful woman in her early twenties.  She was a student in my TS Eliot seminar, so I knew her from class, though not socially, despite her affair with my housemate.

She was weeping. “Where’s that son-of-a-bitch?” 

I don’t mean to brag, but I tend to be calm in crises, or to put it perhaps more accurately, I tend to transition into a robotic fallback mode of affectless inaction.[3]

“I think he’s in the bathtub,” I said matter-of-factly, and, boom, she charged into the bathroom where the two engaged in some high-decibel communication, if you want to call hurling epithets,  demanding answers, and shouting recriminations communication.

I gathered my books and put on my coat to exit this beyond-awkward situation when she came back in sobbing, my housemate following, completely naked, dripping, his face lathered for shaving. 

They stood there screaming at each other as I squirmed on the sofa, my mental condition oscillating between amusement and horror. It’s like I had been caught in a collaboration of an SJ Perelman and Edward Albee production entitled Who’s Afraid of Harpo Marx. My housemate eventually went back into his room, threw on some clothes, and left, and once he was gone, his now-ex threw her arms around me, relating through sobs the rather sordid turn of events that I was sort of hip to because I had warned my housemate that his blabbing to her husband that they were having an affair seemed like a really bad idea.[4]

I comforted her as well as I could and then asked if she would mind giving me a lift to school, given there would be no way I’d get to the exam on time if I rode the bus. During the trip to campus, I continued in my role as counselor, and when I finally entered the classroom to take the exam, I had an adrenaline rush-and-a half, just the thing for someone who had spent a semester with Prufrock, Gerontion, and Madame Sosostris.

What I didn’t know was that my housemate would leave Columbia that very day, not take any of his exams, and end up moving in with his parents, in other words, abandoning college his senior year with only one semester to go. Before all this happened, we had decided not to stay in that house, had agreed to find separate living arrangements, so I wasn’t exactly left in the lurch. My sophomore roommate Warren Moise and I ended up renting yet another two-bedroom clapboard house in a mill village a mile or two even further away from campus, which, as it turned out, ended up being a mistake, a mistake costing me money I didn’t have.

[1] This seemed ridiculous, two rival commercial establishments sandwiching a residence. Ironically, I don’t remember patronizing either. There was a much cheaper Winn Dixie on Fairfield within walking distance. 

[2] In fact, one such occasion turned into a nightmare, which I have written about here [mature audiences only].

[3] The narrative to the above link above leads to offers an excellent example.

[4] I’ll forego the chore of untangling the love-fraught threads of why my housemate had chosen to kamikaze his relationship in an act of revenge. 

Chapter Two – I Think They Done It to Pick on Me and Warren or “Please Don’t Murder Me”

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Robert Mitchum as the Reverend Harry Powell in Night of the Hunter

It never occurred to me that two long-haired college students moving into an otherwise blue-collar community would be frowned upon by our neighbors, whose bumper stickers proclaimed them to be followers of Jesus. However, the admonition to “love thy neighbor” hadn’t exactly taken root with those brethren. And it wasn’t as if Warren and I were throwing raucous parties. Who in his right mind would drive all the way to podunkville to get hammered and have to negotiate the multiple lanes of North Main Street to arrive home safely?

Warren played in a rock-n-roll band and was often on the road, so I ended up frequently staying at the North Main house by myself, especially on weekends. Because he had provided the security deposit, Warren had earned the better bedroom. My bedroom, which was on the side of the house, had its own outside entrance that led to a small, sagging porch.

Not long after we moved in on a weekend when Warren was out of town, my girlfriend Margaret and I had gone to bed after a quiet Saturday evening of listening to LPs in the living room. 

Around three a.m. a thunderous crash shattered our sleep. Someone had pounded once on the exterior door about ten feet from the foot of the bed. Margaret let out a startled cry, and I leapt out of bed to throw on some clothes. Instead, of opening the pounded-upon-door, I slipped around to the front of the house, sliding along the façade, trying to keep out of sight. Once I got to the corner, I peered around to see if the Reverend Harry Powell or John Wayne Gacy was standing there, but to my great relief the porch was empty. I went back inside through the front door and then went back to the bedroom and opened the bedroom exterior door to inspect it for damage. It was okay, a mere fist, not a hammer, had produced that sleep-shattering explosion of sound. 

Now slumber was not an option. Margaret had gotten dressed, and we fretted about, my going outside numerous times to check on things. When we finally decided to try to go back to sleep, I walked out on the porch one last time.

In the dark unseen someone was whistling a tune. Calmly whistling a tune.

***

Of course, when Warren returned later in the day, I told him of the incident, which made us both uneasy. About a week later when I arrived home after classes, I discovered the house had been broken into, vandalized. Books, clothes, bed linens were strewn everywhere, the stereo and record collection gone, but nothing else was missing. I walked into the kitchen where the vandals had opened containers and dumped all the food on the floor, including slices of bread. To top it off, a pile of human feces had also been deposited smack dab in the middle of the room.

Obviously, we had been visited by the “unwelcome wagon,” and their message was clear: “We don’t want your kind around here.”

Thinking back on it, I find it remarkable that we didn’t call the police on either occasion. Back then, if you had long hair, the police thought of you as the enemy. It was a lighter-shade-of-pale approximation of being Black, though, of course, not as profoundly prejudicial. 

Happily, coincidentally, I bumped into my friend Jim Huff not long after, and he asked if I knew of anyone looking for a place. 

Yes, as a matter of a fact, I did. 

As it turned out, he had found a four-bedroom mansion on Greene Street for rent, just up from Five Points, within easy walking distance to the Humanities Building. 

So, so long, Night of the Hunter; hello SLED.[1]

Warren and I two years earlier

[1] I.e., the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division

Chapter Three – Here We Go Again

1830 Greene Street, right center

What a change in abodes, from the mill village vandal-plagued clapboard cottage we’d been run out of in North Columbia to the semi-stately, just-slightly-gone-to-seed edifice located on respectable tree-lined Greene Street!

Our new house, located at 1830 Greene, had been the boyhood home of the fellow who owned the real estate company that rented it to us. He took special care of its yard, bringing in crews to mow the front lawn and attend to the terraced gardens in the back where on a monthly basis they trimmed the shrubbery that descended the hill in tiers. Without those tiers, it would have been a very steep hill, difficult to negotiate. At the very bottom, tucked in the southeast corner, a hammock hung between two large trees.[1]

[1] BTW, one of our next door neighbors was the Columbia artist Blue Sky. 

The back patio was sheltered by a roof supported by six or so arches and boasted a giant brick barbecue pit. The patio’s concrete floor had a shuffleboard court painted on it, but we never found discs or cue sticks. There was also an unheated room under there, a sort of basement that Chris Judge, a local rock musician rented for a second or two.

The deal was that only four people would be living in the house, but I think at one time eight were staying there. My bedroom, long and narrow, was off the living room and had been used as a conservatory. The back wall featured two large windows looking out over those terraced gardens in the rear of the house. An air-conditioner, the only air-conditioner in the house, had been built into the wall between the two windows. 

My old bedroom (the air conditioner has been removed, and trust me, there was no overhead ceiling fan). There was also another door opposite to the one shown that led to Warren’s bedroom

I only knew a few of my housemates, Warren, of course, Jim Huff and his high school buddy Phil Compton, a non-student cartoonist/artist Richard McCarthy from Beaufort, but the rest, John Robinson, and a couple of the others, I hadn’t met.

To move my furniture from North Columbia, I had borrowed by mother’s college roommate’s husband’s pickup, which allowed me in one trip to transfer my meager belongings – a bed, desk, chair, typewriter, books, knickknacks, and clothes. I had parked the truck in the driveway, and when I was trying to back up on Greene to leave, a car on the street stopped to let me out, then pulled in after me. 

Margaret accompanied me on the trip to return the truck, and my mother’s former roommate, Jean Holler, was nice enough to give us a ride back. I’m fairly sure I didn’t have a key yet, and we hardly needed to lock the house anyway because with so many residents, someone would likely to be home.

Upon my return, after I turned the handle and pushed the door open, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The house had been trashed, just as the bouse on North Main had, with shit strewn everywhere. I marched straight to my room, which was also a wreck. Even the air-conditioner filter had been removed and flung on the bed, the clothes I had carefully put away scattered everywhere.

“Wow, Margret,” I said. “Those mill people really must hate our guts.” I actually thought I was being stalked by the xenophobes who had robbed us in our previous house.

I went upstairs, which was in the same condition. Not a soul was home, yet every light was blazing. 

We didn’t have a phone, so I couldn’t call the police, though it seemed high time. As we were standing around contemplating our ill luck, Jim Huff showed up with the news that everyone in the house except for him, Warren, and me had been busted by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Department. They had stormed in with assault weapons, and after a mad-dash search, found two separate nickel bags of marijuana and a couple of hits of speed, not exactly a lot of dope given that seven or so students were living there. 

As it turned out, the car that had let me out was SLED, so Margaret and I had just escaped arrest. Even though neither of us was holding, the law said if there was any dope in the house, it belonged to everyone.

The timing of my departure and SLED’s arrival was suspicious enough to have one of the housemates I didn’t know accuse me of being a narc. His parents made him immediately move out, which, despite the loss of rent revenue, suited me. I’m fairly certain I raised my voice in response to his accusation, an ugly scene too vaguely remembered. 

The actual scoop was that the University’s newly installed president William Patterson had decided he was going to distinguish himself from his predecessor Thomas Jones, whom many believed mollycoddled the rioters who had taken over the University in May of 1970, so President Patterson and the Governor orchestrated a widespread raid to send a message the times are a’ changing – back.

So our house was only one of several that had been raided that night. Dozens of students were hauled in for meager stashes of cannabis. It made the front page of the State newspaper, but so far, I’ve come up empty in my google searches.

As it turned out, at least in my experience, Law and Order looked a lot like disorder. 

Q. What’s the difference between vandals breaking into your house and a SLED raid?

A.  SLED doesn’t shit on your kitchen floor.

So thus began my last semester of undergraduate school, a busy semester indeed. I was taking Shakespeare’s Comedies, Shakespeare’s Tragedies, Latin Literature in Translation, Music Appreciation, and French 101 as an elective.

Ah, those were the days, my friends, I thought they would never end.

I-and-I circa 1975

Shagging Revisited

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Early in July, my good friend and former college/grad school roommate Warren Moise wrote an article for the Charleston Mercury describing his former existence as a beach musician in the 60s and 70s. He admitted in the article that he had never learned to shag, which for me was a shocking revelation.

No, British readers, not that kind of shagging!

We’re talking about the venerable North and South Carolina dance known as “the shag.” According to the website NCPEDIA, the shag might trace its evolution back to early settlers of the Carolina in an attempt to preserve their European musical lineage. According to the article, in the 1920s and 30s, the shag evolved as dancers adapted it to swing music and jazz. However, the dance really came into its own in 50s and 60s with the advent of Beach Music, a genre made famous by such groups as The Drifters, Tams, and the Embers and performed at beach pavilions up and down the Carolina Coast.

Essentially,  the shag is a two person hand-holding shuffle that allows room for much improvisation. Knowing how to shag is almost a social necessity if you live in Charleston or Myrtle Beach. Nevertheless, like Warren, I, too, never learned how, essentially because I didn’t have the inclination.

Folly Beach, where I live, used to have a shag dance club on Center Street where old people attempted to keep the fires of their youth ablaze, and you can still see lots of shagging at the Sand Dollar Social club on weekends.

Curmudgeon that I am, I saw members of the old shag club as victims of their youth, incurable nostalgia-holics stuck, like a stylus on a scratched record, in a repetitive rut, so I wrote the following rather acerbic poem. 

If you look closely, you can detect the traces

Of teenagers drowned in the puddles of their faces.

Perhaps this is beauty’s curse, the clinging,

King Canute by the seaside singing:

Stop in the name of love. But the aging process

Stops for no one. There’s no recess

In decay’s school day, no stopping the seasons,

Even if you’re sockless and sporting Bass Weejuns.

Miles Davis’s Restless Musical Journey

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Illustration by Oliver Barrett of The Atlantic

Although I’m not a musician, I seem to find myself hanging with them an awful lot.  For example, in college I roomed with Warren Moise and accompanied him and his band Wormwood on many a gig.  When Warren decided to drop out and make a go at being a professional musician, he invited me to join Wormwood as soundman or light man or something or another, but I stuck to the unglamorous academic life of a sophomore living in Tenement 9 in the so-called Horseshoe of the University of South Carolina.[1]  Later Warren later returned to school, became a lawyer, but still writes songs, like this one recorded by the Band of Oz.

the-band-of-oz-super-summer-surfside

The next year I moved off campus with another musician, Stan Gibbons, who played bass for a rock cover band called Buddy Roe. After Buddy Roe broke up, Stan got into jazz, and it was he who turned me on to the Miles Davis album Bitches Brew, which I didn’t dig, and believe me, I got to hear it on numerous occasions, like non-stop for a couple of months. I still don’t dig it, but now that I’ve finished Ian Carr’s two-inch thick (658 pages) Miles Davis, The Definitive Biography, I have come to appreciate why Davis became such a restless innovator and to see his refusal to settle for the profitable status quo as a mark of heroic artistry.

Born to upper middle class parents, Miles Dewey Davis III grew up in East St. Louis where his father practiced dentistry.  Although he grew up in a household awash in music, it was classical music that his African American family embraced. His sister played the piano and his mother the violin.  As Carr puts it in the biography, “After Emancipation, it was the professional men and ministers of the church who were the heads of the new black society, and they were at pains to get rid of any customs that were too ‘negroid’ or which harked back to slavery.  It often happened that leading black citizens became the most fanatical imitators of white society. ”

However, that great corrupter of youth in those days, the radio, turned Miles onto Louis Armstrong, Buddy Bolden, and Roy Eldridge, so he took up the trumpet, played in the school band, but also at social clubs.  By the time he was sixteen and still in high school, he had joined a music union and came under the tutelage of Clark Terry.  This was in the 40’s.  Once he graduated, he talked his parents into letting him go the Juilliard instead of Fisk University.  At the Juilliard, he lived what Carr calls “a Jekell and Hyde” existence, trafficking with classical music by day and jazz, particularly bebop, by night.

Bebop was the first jazz innovative movement Davis got into.  Soon, he found himself attending Charlie Parker gigs, and in 1945 he joined Charlie Parker’s group. During this period, he shared the stage with such greats as Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane.

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Trane and Dizzy

So began his career, a career that featured a series of departures that usually irked the mainstream jazz community.

Weary of bebop, Davis and cronies Gil Evans and Jerry Mulligan among others started experimenting with the idea of having their instruments imitate human voices, creating  more melodic jazz than bebop.  After this so-called “birth of the cool” phase, Davis, now hooked on heroin, played what is called “hard bop.”  He signed with Prestige records and locked in a room by himself kicked his H habit cold turkey, .  Next came modal jazz, and in 1959 Davis released Kind of Blue, which is the best selling jazz album of all time.  In the 60s as rock replaced jazz as the cool pop music, Miles embraced the sound of the guitar, and “went electric,” much to the chagrin of jazz purists, and hence Bitches Brew.

 After Wynton Marsalis publically criticized Miles for abandoning “real jazz,” Miles responded:

What’s [Marsalis] doin’ messin’ with the past?  A player of his caliber should just wise up and realize it’s over . . . Some people, whatever is happening now, either they can’t handle it or they don’t want to know. They’ll be messed up on that bogus ‘nostalgia’ thing. Nostalgia shit!  That’s a pitiful concept.  Because it’s dead, it’s safe – that’s what that shit is about!  Hell, no one wanted to hear us when we were playing jazz. Those days with Bird, Diz, Trane – some were good, some were miserable . . . People didn’t like that stuff then. Hell, why do you think we was playing clubs?  No one wanted us on prime-time TV.  The music wasn’t getting across, you dig!  Jazz is dead![2]

Point taken: innovation is often frowned upon, misunderstood. Why, after all the success of Born in the USA, did Springsteen follow that up with Nebraska?  Why did Dylan abandon acoustic folk for the electric guitar, and why does he constantly reconfigure his songs so that at a concert he might be halfway through “Blowin’ in the Wind” before you recognize it?

Maybe because for them it has gotten old, stale.  You don’t have to like the new product; I much prefer Kind of Blue to Bitches Brew.  However, unless you’re a great musician, you probably should keep your mouth shut and let the masters do their thing.

It’s your thang, do what you wanna do.

I can’t tell you, who to sock it to.

[1]You can read about my travails with my roomies here, a situation that had me literally threatening to hang myself to university officials.

[2]I suspect Miles used a different mode of expression at Juilliard.

 

What a Dump!

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kitchen-design-altrinchamaltrincham-road-wilmslow-northern-design-awards---friday-22nd-m4pgid2jI’ve lived in some spectacular dumps in my life, especially during my days as an undergraduate and graduate student.

For example, my bedroom in my first off-campus apartment was more or less the kitchen, the bed separated from WW2 vintage appliances by a breakfast bar. My housemate Stan had found the two-room apartment in late August in a subdivided two-story house on Henderson Street just up the hill from the Nursing Building that was under construction.

Actually, I had the premier sleeping spot because Stan’s bedroom was also the “living room,” the room you stepped into when you entered the apartment. Stan was the bassist in a band called Buddy Roe, and his post gig “friendships” offered me many opportunities to catch him and a companion in flagrante delicto as I returned from classes at the unholy hour of nine, ten, or eleven a.m., not to mention noon, or one, two, or three p.m.

I don’t know why we never figured out a sign on the door might have prevented my intrusions. Then again, a sign that read “Do Not Disturb” would more or less proclaim to the other occupants what was going on, but that still seems preferable to having your coitus interrupted.

Gas stoves, one in each room, provided the heat, and lighting those suckers for the first time proved a real adventure. One night I inadvertently destroyed Stan’s 300-plus LP collection. Need I mention that there were no sprinklers or fire escapes, that the wood was rotting, that the entire mold-ridden structure smelled like a cross between the River Styx and a long-enclosed attic?

where the Henderson Street house once stood

where the Henderson Street house once stood

Two years later, bulldozers would raze our Henderson Street house for a new university parking lot.

That year in my Milton class I met my next-to-be housemate, who enjoyed much nicer digs on Confederate Avenue. Mike not only was an excellent scholar, but he also owned furniture that looked downright bourgeois, so at the end of the spring semester, I returned to Summerville and put him in charge of finding us a place, which he did, seven miles from campus in a sturdy two-bedroom cottage nestled squeezed between two convenience stores on Fairfield Road, a four-lane highway.

Although the “space” was nice, as they say, getting to and from school meant riding city buses, and when the buses quit running at eleven, that meant hitchhiking or stumbling seven miles on foot through one sketchy urban area after another.

Praise Darwin, I survived.

Warren back in the day

Warren back in the day

That December, Mike left school suddenly after the first semester, so I teamed up with former sophomore roommate Warren Moise, and we moved into a miniscule mill house up North Main, even further away from school than Fairfield Road. The bad news was that the neighbors hated our long-haired asses. Once, in the wee hours when I was alone, someone banged meancingly on a side door of my bedroom that led outside.  I went out to investigate and heard someone whistling a tune. The Night of the Hunter meets Animal House. A couple of weeks later, a crew burglarized us, poured our food out onto the kitchen floor, and as a final, sociopathic touch, shat thereupon.*

We got the message.

Coincidentally, my former next-door neighbor from Henderson Street, Jim, was recruiting people for a great house he had found just off campus, so Warren and I went in with six others and rented 1879 Green Street, a veritable mansion compared to my previous domiciles. (It was a good bit seedier than it appears in the photo below courtesy of Google maps). Of course, only three were supposed to live there, but we never got caught. The house did get busted in a citywide drug sweep our second night there, but I wasn’t at home so could save my pre-trial intervention card for a later date. I will say, however, the officers from SLED left the joint looking a lot like the burglars had the mill house.

The very best news was that in my third year on Greene Street, I met Judy Birdsong, who, of course, lived in a nice apartment on Deerwood Drive, so my days of dire poverty were coming to a fruitful end.

The good news is that living in dumps is sort of romantic when you’re young and don’t know any better — and as long as you’re the only vermin living there.

*Forgive me; I’ve been abridging and editing Chaucer

 

1867 Greene Street

1867 Greene Street

South Carolina’s Musical Heritage

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To say South Carolina is a colorful state is like saying Orson Welles had a weight problem, Yul Brenner was follicularly challenged (better add a reference someone under 60 might recognize) or Justin Bieber isn’t what you would call winsome.

Damn right we’re colorful – got a Asian-Indian-American governor against immigration, a black senator backing legislation that makes it more difficult for blacks to vote, a white not-so-closeted gay senator against marriage equality. Got a state university that houses its “Honor College” in a building named for former governor/senator who went by the moniker “Pitchfork Ben” and was an outspoken advocate of white supremacy and lynch laws.

hunleyfuneral11We put on elaborate funerals for found Confederate bones, wear seersucker suits, interbreed, whoop it up all the time (cf. Southern Charm). In fact, I hear James L Petigru’s quote that South Carolina’s “too small to be a republic and too large to be an insane asylum” so often it’s almost become a cliché.

Given our eccentricities, it follows South Carolina boasts a bumper crop of potent popular music, and it does — to a certain extent.

* * *

Each year the magazine The Oxford American puts out a Southern Music edition that comes with a cd featuring an eclectic selection of songs from the South. The last few years, the editors have featured the songs of one state; e.g., Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee have all had cds devoted to their home grown music. Because of the rich treasure trove these states possess, the editors have refrained from choosing the states’ most famous or most accomplished musicians but have opted instead for a [redundancy alert] smorgasbord of arcane eclecticism. For example, you won’t find Iris DeMent or Robert Lockwood, Jr. on the Arkansas cd; however, Suga City makes the cut.

Iris DeMent

Iris DeMent

Whenever the Oxford editors get around to culling some tunes for the South Carolina cd, they’re not going to have a profound number of musicians to choose from, but damn, they’re going to have some true masters who hail from the Palmetto State. The problem, I suspect, will be which James Brown or Dizzy Gillespie tune to showcase.

What follows is my South Carolina cd with the caveat that I ain’t no expert and will no doubt omit some obvious choices. Also, I’m not listing the musicians/songs in the order that would appear on the cd but in the order they occur to me.

* * *

One gripe I have with the Oxford cds is that they can sound a bit too archive-y, if you know what I mean. I like listening to cds in the car on the way to work, not necessarily listening to them as an exercise in musical scholarship. Therefore, I’d match the following SC musicians with these songs.

Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs – “Stay” [Lancaster, SC]

The Swingin’ Medallions – “Double Shot of My Baby’s Love” [Greenwood]

The Marshall Tucker Band – “Can’t You See” [Spartanburg]

Eartha-Kitt-Bad-But-Beautiful-375528Because Eartha Kitt’s “C’est Bon” has already appeared on an earlier Oxford compilation, I’d go with maybe “I Want to be Evil” or “Je cherce un homme.” {North]

Of course, the geniuses Dizzy Gillespie [Cheraw] and James Brown [Barnwell] have left profound bodies of work. I’m too lazy to even try to come up with representative songs. It’s no fun, too fraught with danger.

 * * *

Okay we have 6 songs so we need at least 14 more. SC beach music needs more representation than the Medallions, so Bill Pinckney’s Drifters [Daizell, SC] is an obvious choice. Let’s go with “There Goes My Baby.”

Chubby Checker - Twisting USA Album CoverChubby Checker [Spring Gulley] checks in [forgive me] with “Let’s Twist Again” because it’s such pure rock-n-roll, but “Limbo Rock” would be a close second.

As far as country/Americana goes we got Bill Anderson [Columbia] “Po Folks” and the country swing of Uncle Walt’s Band [Spartanburg] featuring Champ Hood, David Ball, and the late Walter Hyatt. “Gimme Some Skin” would be my choice.

I love gospel, and we have an impressive number of groups to choose from, but in deference to my pal Jo Humphreys, I’m going with the Brotherhood Gospel Singers [Mt. Pleasant] “Mary, Don’t Weep.”

Now, it’s blues time. The Reverend Gary Davis’s {Laurens County] “You Got to Move” or “Prodigal Son” will be familiar to Rolling Stone aficionados. Pinkey “Pink” Anderson {Laurens] certainly deserves the nod above Drink Small [Bishopville].

Though I’m not a big fan, it would be churlish not to include Hootie and the Blowfish [Charleston]. You choose.

Now for some lesser known South Carolina artists. Julius Cobb’s {Greenville] soul ballad “Great Big Change in Me” with its horns and killer vocal (featuring talking) is an obscure gem (and my former roommate Warren Moise once played keyboards with one of his bands). You can listen to “Great Change in Me” HERE.

Even though they’re from North Carolina, we could sneak Jump Little Children into the mix, but why do that when you could include The Fire Apes’ [Charleston] “Let Me Know” or “Lori.”

killerwhales_largeEver heard of the Killer Whales [Charleston]? Well, I have, and their cover of the Melodians’ “Johnny Too Bad” adds a much needed Caribbean lilt into the mix.

How bout some jazz fusion funk via Alphonse Mouzon [Charleston? “Funky Snakefoot” will do in a pinch.

Okay, I’m down to two Do I want to throw a bone to the younger set with a selection from Iron & Wine or add a couple of unrepresented country crooners like Josh Turner?

Naw, I’m going with the Blue Dogs’ “Walter” [Charleston] and Danielle Howle’s [Columbia] “Oh Swear.”

Jim Crow

Jim Crow

By the way, if you’re reading this before 15 November 2014 and are in the Charleston area, come out and see two of my favorite acts at the Folly Beach Front Porch Festival, i.e. Jim Crow going solo and Po Dunk led by brother/frontman John Fleming Moore. It starts at 2 at various venues in walking distance of Center Street.