Never Look at the Empty Seats

by Charlie Daniels

  The schools claimed to be “separate but equal,” and at least the part about separate was true; equal was just a cruel lie. The black kids got the older school buses, the used books, the hand-me-downs, and the runaround. The white kids got the cream, and for some reason we all thought the black kids should be perfectly happy with whatever crumbs were thrown their way.

  We never equated their emotions with ours. We thought they had a different set of values and priorities.

  Every restaurant, every theater, every bus station, and every drinking fountain was designated black or white. There were three public bathrooms, white men’s, white ladies’, and colored. Sometimes there would be a sign in front of a business saying “White only.” Black people were relegated to the back of the bus and special places on trains and were expected to use the back door when coming to a housekeeping job. They lived in their own shabby part of town referred to as “Niggertown.”

  I never went to school or church or sat in a movie theater with a single black person. It’s hard for me to accept the fact that in my young life I was a part of a system that repressed a whole race of humans and that it came so naturally.

  Although a lot of people would think that our attitudes were engendered by hate, that really wasn’t it. Hate didn’t enter into it. It was just an inbred sense of superiority that actually made you think you were created on a higher plane than black people. And it passed down through the generations like bad blood, indoctrinating children from the cradle until the conviction of racial superiority became as natural as walking.

  It wasn’t something you even thought about; it was just an automatic instinct that governed your actions in all situations, as if you were programmed.

  There were devout Christians who could quote you chapter and verse of the Holy Bible who couldn’t or wouldn’t accept the fact that the Scriptures said that God is no respecter of persons. Evidently, they thought that heaven must be segregated.

  Looking back, it almost seems unreal. But it was real, all right; I lived through it.

  I was working my day job and desperately trying to get something going musically. So far, all I had done was jam in somebody’s living room. There just wasn’t much going on at the time in Wilmington, North Carolina. Fraternal clubs like the Elks and Moose only had entertainment a few times a year, mostly on weekends or New Year’s Eve, and the occasional school dance.

  When the Sandy Brothers came to town and started their television show on WMFD TV, it caused quite a splash. WMFD was the only television station in southeastern coastal Carolina at the time, and people all over the area watched it.

  The Sandy Brothers were head and shoulders above the rest of the country bands in the area, much more professional and polished. Leslie Sandy was a fine musician who had played with Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys. He played fine guitar and was a good fiddle player. His brother Eldon played mandolin and brother Coolidge was on guitar. The same Jerry Clark who played steel guitar with the Misty Mountain Boys for a couple of months rounded out the band.

  One Saturday night I went to the television studio to watch them do their show. One of the musicians didn’t show up, and Leslie asked me if I wanted to fill in. Of course I wanted to fill in. The next day, I was amazed at the number of people who had seen me on The Sandy Brothers Show. I was learning about the power of the tube.

  Jerry Clark left the band, and a piano player named Terue Davis took his place. I just kept hanging around, occasionally filling in on TV and going along on their road shows once in a while. I loved it. They weren’t paying me anything much, but I didn’t care. I was playing with the top band in the area.

  As band members came and went, I did more and more with the Sandy Brothers. I started feeling I was important enough to become a full-time member and finally worked up the nerve to ask. I put the question to Leslie, but he wouldn’t give me an answer right away. He told me he would talk it over with the rest of the guys and I should come by his place the next night and he’d let me know.

  I went to Leslie’s that night fully expecting to become a member of the band. After all, I played guitar and fiddle, sang, and could help out with the emceeing if needed. I had been loyal. I’d been there any time they’d needed me.

  I drove up to Leslie’s door, and he wasn’t even home. He had left a note on the door telling me they wouldn’t be needing my services anymore. I was bitterly disappointed, but I remember standing in Leslie Sandy’s yard that night and thinking, Before I’m finished, everybody in this state is going to know my name. Little did I know, I was setting my sights way too low.

  In the summer of 1956, I ran into Billy Shepard, a guitar player I had seen around town. He told me about a singer named Little Jill who had an offer for a six-night-a-week gig in Jacksonville, North Carolina. They were trying to put a band together, and was I interested?

  Guess what my answer was.

  CHAPTER 7

  PAYING DUES ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN

  Jacksonville is about fifty miles from Wilmington and is the location of Camp Lejeune, home of the Second Marine Division. The gig would pay fifty dollars a week. It would require a round trip of one hundred miles a night, six times a week. This meant I’d be getting home after midnight, sleep a few hours, and go to my daytime job. So, what else was new? Bring it on.

  You have to recognize opportunity, no matter how subtle the knock. Everything doesn’t happen at once. One thing leads to another as the building blocks of your life start to take form. This was one of those times, and I just knew it.

  We would be playing at Marvin’s Western Bar four hours a night with a singer and a three-piece band. Little Jill was on vocals. Billy Shepard and I played guitars, and we had a drummer named Steve Kelly. It was the first band I played in with drums, and it really made me want to rock. Fueled by a bunch of hard-partying US Marines and copious amounts of Marvin’s Old Mill Stream whiskey, we got pretty wild at times.

  Little Jill, who actually hired us all, left the band, and Steve the drummer quit. We hired a drummer named Tommy Clemmons and a bass player named Norman Tyson and proceeded to rock Jacksonville.

  We were actually hired as a country band, but things on the music scene were heating up. I was falling head over heels in love with rock and roll. I would just lose myself in the music at times, jumping around that little stage with my eyes closed, busting guitar strings, and singing “Be-Bop-a-Lula” for all I was worth. The US Marines just loved it.

  They were a great audience. They were young, and many of them had just come out of boot camp at Paris Island. They were out to show the world how to party. Sometimes they’d get a little too exuberant, and it would result in fisticuffs. That’s when the bouncers would move in. The last thing you wanted to do was cause trouble at a beer joint in Jacksonville, North Carolina, where the bouncer could well be a third-degree black belt karate expert or at least a talented street fighter.

  We once had a bouncer who would put a sleeper hold on the rowdies and drag them out the door.

  The only thing that was served at the bars in Jacksonville was 3.2 beer. The hard stuff had to be hidden in the back room and was illegal to even have in the place. But the legal drinking age was eighteen, and 3.2 percent beer was enough to get their motors revved. We all had a rocking good time.

  I learned early on that I wanted to be an entertainer. Musicians come and go, but if you’re able to entertain along with the music, there will always be a place for you. If you can make someone smile, it adds a lot to the show. It would be many years before I qualified as a real entertainer, but I was working on it.

  For the first time in my life, I met people from all over the country. Marines from Boston, New York, California, Montana, Maryland, and all points in between came to Marvin’s Western Bar to watch the chubby kid with the thick glasses get down.

  The North Carolina ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Commission) slapped Marvin’s Western Bar with a sixty-day suspension of license for some real or imagined infraction of the rules
, and we were out of a job. But not for long. We moved across the street to a larger beer joint and a thirty-dollar-a-week-apiece raise.

  The place was called S and M. I never knew what the letters stood for, but it was to be home to our band for a couple of years. The years 1956 and 1957 were intense periods of learning for me. I was onstage six nights a week, becoming more proficient on my guitar and finding what songs went over best in what order. I had stopped playing my fiddle. It just didn’t fit into any of the music we were playing, and it would be a few years before I picked it up again.

  I’d always wanted a Cadillac, and I finally got one. It was a black 1948 fastback with seven busted pistons. I had to get a bank loan to get it fixed. When I got it out of the shop and got it all polished up, it was a slick-looking piece of transportation.

  I was getting up early six days a week for my daytime job, hurrying home every afternoon to shower, dress, and drive fifty miles. I would play four hours, drive back, and fall in bed exhausted after midnight.

  I had no social life. On Sunday, my only day off from either job, I’d stay in bed all day. Sometimes I’d sleep until after dark Sunday night, when I’d get up and maybe go to a movie and then crawl back into bed until early Monday morning, when I’d start the whole thing over again.

  Sometimes we’d play a service club on Camp Lejeune on Sunday afternoon. It was extra money and a lot of fun, but it meant working seven days a week. It was tough, but I was young and committed and jumped on any opportunity that presented itself.

  My heart was in the music but not in my job at Taylor Colquitt. I was, for the first time in my life, making a living from my music. Actually, I was making more money from my playing job than I was from my day job. I had found something that I really wanted to devote my life to, and it had nothing to do with telephone poles and creosote.

  It’s funny how sometimes things come about as negatives and turn into positives. In the early summer of 1958, business had slowed down considerably at Taylor Colquitt; they were going through some layoffs. Guess who they were going to lay off in my department? My black coworker Louis Frost, who knew ten times more about the job than I did or ever would.

  The corporate decision was made on race alone, and it just wasn’t right. In fact, as is the case with most of these kinds of decisions, it was downright bad business. I saw a chance to do Louis and myself a big favor. I said, “Lay me off. I’ve got another job.”

  So I left and Louis stayed, and a little piece of justice occurred because of my daddy. I had been on what was called straight time. In other words, I was paid a set amount regardless of what hours I put in. Louis and all of the other black employees were paid an hourly wage. If it rained or whatever and they couldn’t work, they didn’t get paid.

  When I left, my daddy told his boss Mac Folger that Louis should take over the job I had left and be put on straight time. Mac Folger said, “Carl, we can’t do that. We don’t do it for any of our other colored employees.”

  Dad said, “Mac, let’s do something right. I’m willing to stake my job on this.”

  The result was that Louis got the job, went on straight salary, and worked there until he retired many years later. I’ve always been proud of my daddy for having the courage to do the right thing.

  Finally, and at last, I was exactly what I wanted to be, a full-time professional musician with no other means of income and no other ambitions that didn’t pertain to music.

  We had named the band “The Rockets” a year or so before. Though we were playing copy music, we started to develop a style of our own. Billy Shepard had a unique way of playing a boogie rhythm on the bass strings of his guitar. Norman Tyson had got rid of his big doghouse bass and got a Fender electric and amplifier that gave the music a thicker and hotter sound. Tommy Clemmons was on drums. I took care of vocals and lead guitar. We were young and rowdy and energetic, and it all came out in the music.

  I bought an alto sax, learned a few finger positions, and added it to the show. I’d get up on the bar and walk around it blowing that horn and going through all kinds of contortions. It was actually pretty terrible, but with a driving rhythm section and a room of hard-partying US Marines, it was one of the high points of the night.

  Then, for some reason that was never clear to me, Tommy Clemmons decided to join the army and we had to start looking for a new drummer.

  In those days, rock music was fairly new, and most of the drummers old enough to play in a place that served alcohol had come out of jazz or big band dance music. It was tough finding a drummer who would just play the back beat and simple cymbal rhythms the music required.

  There was a kid in Wilmington I had known since he was four or five years old. Even at that age he would take a pair of drumsticks and beat out a rhythm on anything you held in front of him. His name was Tony Hinnant. He was a teenager now, and he had gone on to play in the New Hanover County High School marching band and various combos around town.

  When I approached him, he really wanted the job. The trouble was that he was only seventeen years old and had a year of school left. We decided that since he’d soon be eighteen, we’d just take a chance on him being underage. It was almost summertime, and we’d worry about the new school year when it started. In the meantime, Tony would finish out his junior year going to Jacksonville with us six nights a week and hope that the ABC guys wouldn’t ask for his ID until he turned eighteen.

  We bought plaid dinner jackets, tuxedo pants, cummerbunds, and bow ties that we would occasionally wear onstage. And we were packing ’em in.

  I think we were the ones who got the closed-door policy instituted at the S and M.

  In the summertime, the front door to the club would stay open and the music would pour out into the street, letting any and all know there was a live band. It would stay open until you couldn’t pack another customer into the place.

  I remember one night, when we were peeling the paint off the walls with our decibel level, a gentleman from some civic group or some such who was having a meeting down the street came to the S and M and asked Smitty, the club owner, to close the door. He said that the music was interfering with their meeting.

  The closed-door policy stayed in force thereafter.

  CHAPTER 8

  SOMETIMES FATE JUST WALKS RIGHT THROUGH THE DOOR

  It was a night in the summer of 1958, and The Rockets were at the top of our game when a very strange-looking person staggered into our lives.

  His name was Bud Morris. He was as drunk as Cootie Brown, and what he was doing in Jacksonville, North Carolina, I’ll never know. But there he was in the S and M bar, telling me how great The Rockets were and how we were wasting our incredible talent in a jerkwater town like Jacksonville. Due to his vast experience in show business, he knew just what we needed to do. The first thing was to get the heck out of Dodge, and he was the man who could facilitate such a move.

  I was no stranger to such talk. More than once I had an inebriated US Marine or civilian tell me how well connected he was and how he could point the way to fame and fortune for The Rockets, only to disappear back into the woodwork, taking his fabulous connections with him.

  Bud was staying at a small hotel next door. Somehow he convinced me to come by his room after work and let him tell me what great things he could do for the band. I don’t know why I even went. As I said, I’d been approached by bogus blowhards before, but even as drunk as he was, there was just something different about this one.

  I sat and talked with him for a while, and even in his snockered condition, it was apparent that he was no stranger to show business. He had a brother named Rod Morris I had heard of who was a Capitol recording artist, and I had to admit two things. He was really taken with our band, and he did know a lot about the business, which I knew next to nothing about at the time.

  I listened for a while and said goodnight, figuring I’d seen the last of Mr. Bud Morris. Little did I know that he would play a meaningful part in my career for years to come and
would turn out to be one of the most colorful and resourceful characters I ever met.

  Bud was a rambler and an alcoholic. But even at his most inebriated he never had a hair out of place, and his suit was always pressed.

  When he started sobering up, he found himself hungover and broke. So he went to the local chapter of AA to find some temporary work to help him get back on his feet. The only thing he knew how to do was something related to show business. So the local AA guy called Smitty, our boss, and asked him if he had anything his broke AA brother could do to make a couple of bucks.

  Well, Smitty, being the good-hearted fellow that he was, told them to send him on down, that he’d find something for him to do. It turned out that he would be the master of ceremonies for the band each night, which was kind of weird, to say the least. All we did at that time was flood the place with loud rock music for forty-five minutes, tell the US Marine audience we were going to take a fifteen-minute break, and come back and do it again.

  Add Bud Morris, and it went something like this. Bud, all dressed up in suit and tie, would step to the mic and say something like, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We welcome you to the S and M Lounge for an evening of fun and entertainment. We thank you for coming and know that you will enjoy our show. Now, to get things underway, here is The Rockets and their rendition of the Chuck Berry classic ‘Johnny B. Goode.’”

  He made a few attempts at comedy, but it fell pretty flat on a room full of young US Marines. But it became evident that this was not his first encounter with an audience. As I talked more with him, I found out that he did indeed have a lot of experience in show business, and he had been around the block with traveling variety shows and big bands.

  He never lost his fascination with The Rockets. And in a few weeks when he drifted on, he promised he would call when he landed on his feet. I paid no attention to him and thought I’d finally heard the last of him.