My dad used to say he was one drink away from a drunk all the time. Although he would give in to the temptation once in a while, he always took care of his family and always provided for us. He was an affectionate, responsible father, and his love for music was passed on to his only son.
My dad couldn’t play an instrument, but he loved to sing. He was a welcome sight at any church in the country. While most churchgoers did little but pay a timid lip service to the worship music, my dad sang the old songs with an exuberance and a decibel level that was downright infectious.
I proved myself to be a chip off the old block when my daddy attended a Wednesday night prayer service at a holiness church across the street from my grandmother’s house in Wilmington. The congregation was good people who loved the Lord and didn’t mind letting the world know about it in song. I was sitting in my grandmother’s front porch swing when they went into a rafter-shaking rendition of “Power in the Blood,” and I joined in by singing at the top of my lungs.
“Oh, would you be free from the burden of sin? There’s power in the blood, power in the blood.”2 I was swinging and singing along with all my might when I saw my daddy come out of the church and make a beeline across the street.
“Charles, you’ve got to stop. Everybody in the church is turning around to see who’s singing so loud!” All this from all the way across the street. I was about eight years old.
It was while I was going to school in Valdosta, Georgia, that World War II finally ended. The little town went wild. The sidewalks were full of people. The streets were full of cars, drunk people, sober people, people laughing and crying, and horns blowing. I don’t believe the people in Times Square in New York City celebrated any harder than the good people of that little South Georgia town.
Our long national nightmare was finally over, and America would get on with the business of becoming the greatest nation the world had ever known.
America would soon face the Cold War and the Korean War, but the technical and industrial advances we had learned during World War II would soon be put to use in a peacetime setting. The results would be the most advanced and productive nation on the planet.
There was also a dark side to the advances that were made during the war, as the nuclear genie was let out of the bottle and would forever cast its ominous shadow on civilization around the world. It had ended the war with Japan practically overnight, but the awful specter of nuclear destruction would forever haunt planet Earth.
I went to third and fourth grades in Baxley, Georgia. The summer between grades I got my first job, carrying water in a tobacco warehouse for the princely sum of around nine dollars a week, which I thought was pretty good money for a ten-year-old.
There was one movie theater right across the square from where we lived. Admission for kids my age was nine cents, and I was there just about every time the picture changed. I made friends and loved living in Baxley, Georgia, but about the time I finished fourth grade, we moved again.
I won’t bore you with any more of the vagabond nature of my early school days. But I did spend all four of my high school years at Goldston High School in Goldston, North Carolina, located three miles up Highway 421 from where we lived in Gulf, or “The Gulf,” as many of the locals called it.
Gulf had a post office, a brick mill, a general store, and a couple of small gas station–type places, as well as the General Creosoting Company, where my dad worked.
Now, Gulf might have been a one-horse town, but we rode that old horse for all he was worth. We had a swimming hole in the Deep River, a baseball field with the emphasis on field, and plenty of woods to squirrel hunt in.
Gulf was to play an intricate and lasting role in my life as the years there unfolded. While in Gulf I drank my first beer, had my first real girlfriend, took my first trip to the Grand Ole Opry, and made friendships that lasted more than sixty years.
Goldston High School was actually an elementary, middle, and high school combined. With all twelve grades under one roof, the student body constituted a little more than three hundred, and with the rare exception of a few people like me, they went to school together for all twelve years. It was small by any standard. We didn’t have some of the advantages of larger schools, but in my book the advantages far outweighed the disadvantages.
Some of the kids would show up for registration on the first day of school and not return to class for two weeks or so, or however long it took to get the family’s tobacco crop harvested and to market. I can’t imagine a larger school tolerating it, but that was how life was in a farming community, where feeding a family took priority during the first couple of weeks of school.
I played center on the football team my senior year and formed a lifelong passion for the game. I learned a lot about life by going out for the football team. I have little or no natural athletic ability and only made the team because I wanted it so badly and put all I had into it.
The late summer workouts in the hot, humid Carolina afternoons, the daily practices, pounding away at tackling dummies and blocking sleds, and the soreness and discipline all paled in comparison to running onto a football field and facing off with another bunch of kids who had worked just as hard as you had and were ready to go head-to-head to prove which team wanted to win the most.
The prize was indeed worth the effort. I found out how gratifying it is to compete hard and, whether win, lose, or draw, know that you had given it your best. Competition is good, and the only way to win is to try a little harder than everybody else in the game. The sooner young people find that out, the better off they’ll be.
I really loved my last couple of years in high school and playing on the Goldston football team. Pittsboro, the county seat of Chatham County, was the largest town and therefore the biggest school in our football district. Being a larger school gave it a larger pool of potential athletes and made it the dominant football power. Therefore, they were the big boys in our neighborhood.
On a fall Friday afternoon, our little rag-tag single wing went up against the mighty Pittsboro team, and against all odds, we won. There is no feeling in the world like being a giant slayer, and I think we all learned a lesson about never giving up no matter what. To win against such superior odds is a feeling like none other, bordering on euphoria. I took my football jersey home and wore it around all the next day.
No description of Gulf, North Carolina, would be complete without at least a cursory mention of Richard Moore’s store. It was a combination grocery, hardware, drugstore, and farm supply; it stocked just about anything you might happen to need.
You could buy anything from a candy bar to a mule collar at J. R. Moore and Son. You could get five pounds of finishing nails or a hundred pounds of hog feed. There were blue jeans, plow line, pocketknives, boots, shotgun shells, nuts and bolts, shoestrings, kitchen matches, straw hats, bib overalls, and flashlight batteries.
There was a big hoop of cheese, and you could buy the whole hoop or Mr. Richard would carve you off a nickel’s worth. There was hand-cut bologna and a sure-enough potbellied stove with a collection of old boys who sat around it and solved the world’s problems on a daily basis.
There were some world-class characters around Gulf, also. I would like to just name a couple.
There was Frank Walden, who walked down the side of the road laughing and talking to himself and could quote the Bible, chapter and verse.
There was also Uncle Bud, who lived alone. He smoked Granger pipe tobacco rolled up in brown-sack paper and claimed to be a statue, or a “statue of the nation,” as he put it.
Then there were Charley Brewer and Alford Davis. They built a cubby hole to sleep in on the back of their pulpwood truck and drove it to the Grand Ole Opry.
I was really happy in Gulf, and the memories from that part of my life are vivid and warm. We had a real home there. I liked the school and the slow pace of life, and I made friendships that have lasted more than six decades.
Suppertime was always a special time
of day for me. The sun would be going down, and smoke would be rising from the chimneys of the cookstoves. The family would sit down at the table, and you’d get a warm, the-hunter-is-home-from-the-hill kind of feeling, a feeling of security and togetherness, of really being a family.
I had a lot of friends. There was Jimmy Phillips, Tommy Wilkie, and Ernest and Ralph Willett, but my very best friend was Russell Palmer. We did everything together and occasionally got into a bit of trouble.
We had a 1948 Ford coupe for a family car. One night well before I got a driver’s license, Momma and Daddy went somewhere and drove Dad’s company pickup, leaving the keys to the Ford on the mantelpiece. I grabbed the keys and took off up to Russell’s house. We proceeded to cruise the Chatham County back roads for an hour or so, after which I dropped Russell off, drove back home, put the keys back on the mantelpiece, and was sitting there the picture of underage innocence when my parents came home.
Well, unbeknownst to me, my parents had come back home in my absence and had been out looking for me. That’s the night that the ship hit the sand.
In those days, I’d usually spend part of the summer on my Uncle Edgebert’s farm in Bladen County, where I helped harvest the tobacco crop.
Growing bright leaf tobacco in those days was physical labor on a grand scale. From the time the young plants were pulled from the plant beds and set out in the field, it was pretty much a sunup until sundown proposition. It had to be hoed, suckered, fertilized, plowed, and, finally, harvested. Harvesting was done by picking one leaf at a time, stringing it on sticks, hanging it in a barn to be heat cured, taking it out of the barn and off the stick, grading and tying it in small bundles, and finally hauling it to market.
But it wasn’t all work and no play. At precisely the stroke of noon on Saturdays, my cousin Murray and me would drop what we were doing, go to the house, clean up, and head for Elizabethtown to spend the rest of the day eating junk and seeing every movie available in the town’s two movie houses. Murray’s older brother Walton said that Murray and me would go to the movies if all they showed was a pile of horse manure on the screen. He was probably right.
In those days, almost everybody in Bladen County was in town on Saturdays buying the week’s groceries, getting haircuts, visiting, or just goofing off like us. Rural small-town Saturdays were a social event, a country boy’s delight, an institution, and a long-lost piece of Americana gone the way of modern times and fondly recalled.
I learned a lot about hard work those summers on my uncle’s farm. I learned what it’s like to get up at two o’clock in the morning to take the cured tobacco out of the barn and turn right around and spend the day filling it back up with green tobacco. I learned about holding up my part of the job and taking pride in doing it well.
I learned a lot about personal responsibility. For the farmers of that day, there was no safety net. They were at the mercy of the elements and market forces. There was nobody that was coming to bail them out if the crop failed. They just had to tighten their belts, go deeper in debt, and pray that next year would be better.
I don’t even remember when I started smoking cigarettes, but it was at a very early age. Carrying a pack around in my shirt pocket became as natural as putting on my pants. It would take me many years to truly learn the dangers of smoking and finally kick the habit.
On one of those days I spent in Bladen County, Murray got hold of a plug of chewing tobacco, and we took off back in the woods to give it a try. I stuck a big chunk of it in my mouth and was chewing away, thinking that the warnings I’d heard about how chewing tobacco would make you deathly sick were way overrated. I was chewing and spitting and having a fine old time one minute. The next minute I was lying on my back, as sick as a dog, the world spinning around above me. I was throwing up and so dizzy I couldn’t tell up from down.
Although I stayed with the cigarettes, I swore off chewing tobacco. It was to be many a day before I worked up the nerve to try chewing tobacco again.
The summer ended and I headed back to another school year, a little older, hopefully a little wiser. Little did I know that something exciting was about to happen to me, something that would affect my outlook, concepts, and horizons, and I would never look at the world the same way again.
CHAPTER 3
THAT’S A BIG OL’ WORLD OUT THERE
The first time I ever saw a picture on a television set was at Russell Palmer’s house when I was about fifteen years old. TV sets were expensive in those days, and Russell’s family had one of the few in our neighborhood. Every night his buddies would crowd into the Palmer family room to watch television. I don’t know why they put up with us, but they did.
There was never any question about what to watch since there was only one channel. It was from Greensboro, about sixty miles away, necessitating a tall antenna that the wind would blow around sometimes. Somebody would have to go to the attic and turn it in the right direction while somebody else watched the set and relayed instructions.
“Go a little farther. No, that’s too far. You’ve gone past it; turn it back.”
One of my favorite shows was Your Hit Parade, a weekly Saturday night show where the top ten tunes in the country were performed on live TV, starting at number ten and working down to number one.
There were the Friday night fights, wrestling matches, Dragnet, and of course Ed Sullivan and Jackie Gleason. For the first time, us folks in the boondocks got a live look at what was going on in the rest of the world.
Television has become a taken-for-granted, mundane appliance these days, where you can zip through two-hundred-plus channels and find something to your liking. But in the early days, especially in the rural areas, the choices were limited and the whole country was watching the same shows.
One appearance on a show like Ed Sullivan could mean overnight stardom, and performers who were little known were catapulted to instant national status and success.
Upstart rock and rollers like Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard started appearing on television alongside Frank Sinatra and Pearl Bailey. And as Bob Dylan would so succinctly put it a few years later, “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
The most amazing show-business phenomenon I’ve ever witnessed was the meteoric rise of Elvis Presley.
The first time I ever heard his name was on Ernest Tubb’s Midnight Jamboree, a live radio show that took place directly after the Grand Ole Opry and broadcast on WSM. It originated at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop on Broadway around the corner from the Opry and featured guests from established stars to up-and-comers.
I was listening the night Elvis was on, and the first thing I thought was, what kind of name is Elvis Presley? Sounds silly. Then he sang one of my favorite Bill Monroe songs, “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and, from my point of view, murdered it. I never expected to hear from him again.
How wrong can you be?
Elvis joined a country package tour with Grand Ole Opry stars Hank Snow and the Louvin Brothers and had the lowest billing on the show, his name in tiny print at the bottom of the show placards. But after a couple of performances, for all practical purposes, the rest of the entertainers could have gone home. The crowds came to see Elvis and made it difficult for anybody else to perform. They screamed “Elvis, Elvis, Elvis” until the other stars just gave up and brought him on.
The rumor mill went wild about this young singer with the guitar and sideburns. Little was known about him other than that he was tearing up crowds wherever he went. But what really got his career in high gear was one appearance on the Dorsey Brothers’ television show. After that night, Elvis Presley became a household name and the public could not get enough of him.
Nobody has ever impacted the entertainment business like the kid from Tupelo, Mississippi. He was the first true modern superstar. He lived the Cinderella story and took us all along for the ride. He played out our fantasies for us, buying a Cadillac for every day of the week, giving fabulous gifts to anybody he wanted to, buying his mom a big hous
e in Memphis, and causing young girls to swoon and faint just by walking onstage.
The world was changing right before our eyes, as the East Coast, West Coast, and all points in between were tied together by this emerging monolith known as television. It seemed that one day we were just a sleepy backwater and the next day the whole world was coming into our living rooms. We knew what the people in Los Angeles were wearing, what weather was expected in Chicago, and what Times Square looked like on New Year’s Eve. For the first time, we saw football games, presidential inaugurations, and the World Series in real time.
The sleepy giant known as the South was coming of age. People in the other part of the country were able to see Dixie for the vibrant, culturally rich place it was rather than the backward, slow-talking caricature many of them perceived it to be. Television expelled stereotypes and exploded myths as articulate Southerners came to the fore in entertainment and national politics and the rich legacy of the music of the South and the artists who created it were going mainstream.
The world was changing fast, and I was just about to do the same thing.
CHAPTER 4
THREE CHORDS THAT CHANGED MY LIFE
Meanwhile, back in The Gulf, I was about to go through a life-altering experience. It happened one afternoon when I went to Russell Palmer’s house and found him messing with a guitar. When I say “messing,” I mean that he knew about two and a half chords he could haltingly string together.
As long as I had known Russell, I had no idea he had a guitar he’d forgotten about stashed somewhere and that he could actually play it a little.
It was an old Stella with a neck about the size of half a fence post, and the strings were rough and rusty, but little did I know that that old beat-up Stella guitar was going to change the course of my life. I had always had a fantasy and a burning desire to play a guitar, and here was my best friend who knew two and a half chords and was willing to teach them to me.
Never Look at the Empty Seats Page 3
