I had always absorbed ideas from whatever I was around—minstrel shows, circuses, preachers, gospel music, records—but now I started to pay attention to the way professional musicians performed on stage. A lot of big R & B shows came to Greenville, South Carolina, and I went to as many as I could to study them: Bill Doggett, Faye Adams, the Clovers, the Moonglows, Joe Turner, anybody who came through. They all had something to offer. Bill Doggett played a strong, bluesy organ. Faye Adams, who had a big hit then with “Shake a Hand,” sounded like straight gospel. With “One Mint Julep,” the Flames already had the Clovers’ thing down. I also liked the way the Moonglows, who had “Sincerely,” sang harmony. But as a showman, Big Joe Turner impressed me because he didn’t waste any time on stage. “Shake, Rattle and Roll” and all of the other songs came one after the other. He really took care of business on stage, and so did the band who backed him, Paul Williams and the Hucklebucks. But I still think that the best showman of them all was Louis Jordan, even though I saw him only in movie shorts.
The best group we ever saw in Greenville was Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. They had “Work with Me Annie,” “Annie Had a Baby,” and “Sexy Ways,” all hits even though most radio stations wouldn’t play ’em because they thought the songs were vulgar. Really, the Annie records were just good fun, and so was the Midnighters’ stage act. For instance, while the piano player was playing, his pants would drop and he’d have on longhandles, like a clown.
The Midnighters were the first professionals we’d ever seen. We traveled sixty miles to the Greenville Textile Hall and stood down front for their show. When they really got the crowd worked up, Bobby and I clasped hands real strong and I said, “Okay, one day we’ll be up there, and somebody else will be down here looking up at us.”
It was just one of those things that beginners say when they see someone they want to be like, but we still couldn’t get it out of our minds. When we got back to Toccoa, at about two in the morning, Bobby and I went to his house and stayed up the rest of the night playing the piano and talking about our ambitions. We went through the usual stuff about getting rich and doing a lot for our parents, and for the first time we became close; we pledged that we were going to succeed as entertainers, no matter what. After that night, we were like brothers.
We had a chance to show our determination when the two of us did a tea party at a little restaurant downtown in the middle of the block. Tea parties were actually coffee breaks in the afternoon, when little cafes and places like that had some entertainment. The parties lasted only about thirty minutes, but they were a good way for a group to get exposure. This particular tea party was an audition that Bobby and I did by ourselves. We auditioned that way a lot; the two of us would give a short performance, then whoever we were doing it for decided whether to have the whole group in later on.
I had trouble sneaking away from my job the day of the gig and we were almost late, but we made it. We went in the back door of the restaurant—we weren’t allowed to go in the front—and auditioned, with Bobby at the piano while I sang “Good Lovin’” without a mike. I danced and sang lead, and he did all the background vocals, jumping from voice to voice. During the bridge, when I started doing splits, slides, and the camel walk and Bobby jumped up and kicked away the piano stool, the crowd stood up, clapping and hollering and making all kinds of noise. Cars stopped on the main street outside, and people started jamming in. I danced over to Bobby and yelled to him during a spin: “We got ’em!” He beat on the piano harder and he was already pounding it pretty good.
The man paid us $5 apiece, even though it was an audition, and gave us the date for the whole group on the following Wednesday. Come Wednesday, we went in there with our mike, our guitar, and our big raggedy drum and cymbal, and we saw that the place was packed with college kids who were home for the summer. Their parents, who’d been at our audition, had told them about us. There were so many people trying to get in that the manager finally opened the doors to the sidewalk and the police blocked off the main street. A lot of ’em had never seen a raw R & B performance with singing and dancing like ours before. We did our whole show, and we killed ’em. I mean we just laid ’em out. Afterward, the man who owned the clothing store next door to the restaurant approached us.
“That was a good show,” he said. “I caught your act over at the high school, too, but what really impresses me is that you at least try to look clean up there.” On stage we always wore starched blue jeans and white, short-sleeved shirts. “I have some things I don’t stock at the store anymore, and I want to donate them to you.” He took us next door and gave us each two pairs of pants and two shirts. The pants were very shiny, like mohair. He fixed us up with some loafers, too, but we had to pay for them as we went along. I think he saw something in us that made him want to help us.
The biggest benefit from the tea party came after the kids went back to school in the fall and we started getting booked by the fraternities at all the different colleges. They’d call Barry Trimier, and we’d sneak away from our jobs and go. We played at the University of Georgia, Clemson, the University of Tennessee, Austin Peay, all those places. These were some of the biggest crowds we’d ever played for, and they treated us very well.
We were still traveling in Guy Wilson’s station wagon, but now we had our instruments plus all the people—it seemed like about twenty—that we took along. We laid the guitar across our laps; someone held the tom-tom; somebody else hugged the amp, and we tied the field drum to the roof. As soon as the gig was over we piled back into the car and raced to Toccoa because we still had day jobs to get to. Sometimes I was so tired I would almost nod off standing up at work. I managed to hang on that way until we made our second round through the fraternities. They had liked us so much that almost all of them booked us again as soon as they could. Word spread to other campuses, and we began to get gigs at places that were so far away we had to sneak away from work in the middle of the day. Sometimes we were so tired after driving all night that we’d lay low the next day and miss work entirely. Before long, I got fired, but before my parole officer could get upset, I found another job, this time as a janitor at Toccoa High School.
In the middle of all this, my first son, Teddy, was born. That meant the world to me because with him I was starting the family that I had never had myself. It was hard, though, because I didn’t really have any models from my own raising. I was trying to be a husband and a father, hold down a janitor job, and make it as a singer, all at the same time. That can be a lot of strain. Sometimes you struggle so hard to feed your family one way, you forget to feed them the other way, with spiritual nourishment. Everybody needs that.
The Flames and I were still staying on top of the latest records, doing material by all the other groups, when a friend of ours named Williams said something that set me thinking. “It’s fine when you sing them other people’s songs,” he said, “but when the audience hollers, they’re hollering for that song. You got to get some songs of your own.” I had written a few tunes, such as “Goin’ Back to Rome,” and I was always hearing fresh tunes in my head, but I hadn’t really thought of myself as a songwriter. It was just something that I did in odd moments. But after I thought about what Williams had said, I started to concentrate more on the music running through my head.
At that time we were doing an Orioles song called “Baby, Please Don’t Go.” The background vocals for it included the word “please” repeated several times. With that as a starting point, I wrote “Please Please Please,” writing down the words and picking out the chords on the piano, but not writing down the chords. The next day I taught the song to the group and worked out an arrangement by humming the solos. The first time we sang it in public the crowd went wild. They asked for it over and over again. After that we always had to sing it at least three or four times a night.
We were working really regular now, at juke joints, colleges, and schools. We’d moved into South Carolina and North Carolina, getting known in a wider and wider area. In Greenville we played a place called Latham’s and we were becoming well known there. When the R & B acts came to Greenville, we went to the shows ready to get up on the stage and try to cut ’em, but they wouldn’t let us on. People talk about jazz musicians having cutting contests, but singing groups used to do the same thing. At a lot of little joints we jumped on the stage during intermission and did a few numbers, letting the audience decide the act they liked best, us or the one that was booked there. We cut the other acts every time because we were hungrier than they were.
We gained so much local popularity and respect that we were able to achieve a kind of racial milestone in Toccoa: playing at the Ritz, the town’s movie theater. After he lost his job at Troop’s photo shop, Bobby had gone to work at the Ritz as a janitor. He kept pestering the manager to let us play during intermission. Like everything then, the Ritz was segregated, whites downstairs, blacks in the balcony. The manager worried that a black group performing would upset the whites and set off an incident. Bobby reminded him that we had played the restaurant in the middle of the block, and it had gone off fine. The manager pointed out that there hadn’t been blacks and whites together at the restaurant, but Bobby kept after him until he gave in.
We were a little nervous when we set up, but once we started performing we got over it. A lot of the whites had seen us before at the restaurant and at Stephens County High, and they already dug us. The black folks had heard us all over, and most of them were our friends. The people who hadn’t seen us before listened out of curiosity at first, and then they dug us, too. There wasn’t anything resembling a racial incident. A few years later I remembered that when promoters tried to make me play segregated shows.
We became regulars at the Ritz. We played, the audience threw nickels and dimes on the stage, and we picked them up. But the jealousy in the group started all over again because Bobby and I were still doing most of the singing. Several times some of the fellas didn’t show up for the Ritz gigs, and it looked like we were falling apart again. This time even their parents could see it was foolish, and they called a meeting. We all sat down at Bobby’s again, but this time the parents did the talking. Nash’s mother said, “If y’all are going to do anything, all this arguing has got to stop. Either stop or, starting tonight, Nash isn’t going out anywhere anymore.” Mrs. Keels said, “And Sylvester is going to start doing his work at home.” They really laid it on the line to their own kids, and I was kind of grateful because it took care of the problem right there.
As soon as we got our personal problems worked out, we started having trouble with our churches. We were all churchgoers, me especially because it was a condition of my parole. Our churches were opposed to the kind of music we played. They thought it was sinful, the devil’s music, so each of us was hauled before the conference at our various churches and threatened with being thrown out. Maybe some of the deacons didn’t want us to see them in some of the juke joints we played. The parents stopped them from throwing us out, and no matter where we were on Saturday night, we didn’t let anything stop us from getting to church on Sunday morning.
When that blew over, Barry got a new car for the funeral home, a big black Ford, and we started traveling to gigs in that. There were still eight of us and all our stuff, but at least we were in a new car now.
We made a trip to Atlanta and dug the scene on Auburn Avenue where all the clubs like the Royal Peacock, the Poinciana, and the Zanzibar were located. At the Royal Peacock we heard Billy Wright, who at that time was the most popular performer in Atlanta. He had a big, luxuriant pompadour and he still sings real good today, but he’s never gotten his due. We also appeared on Piano Red’s radio program on WAOK. Red, whose real name was William Perryman, was an albino with red hair. He played boogie piano and later had a few R & B hits on Groove records. We were on his show along with a group that later became the Penguins and had a smash hit with “Earth Angel.”
From our first pitiful rehearsal we had progressed to that—being on the radio in the big city. We had worked out our problems in the group; we’d managed to keep ourselves from being thrown out of church; we were riding in a new car, even if it didn’t belong to us; and we worked five or six nights a week all around our area. We had achieved the local popularity we’d been working for.
But local popularity can hold you back. You can get so popular in a place that you won’t leave. That’s the position we were in. We had conquered everything in sight, and there didn’t seem to be any challenges left. Then Little Richard came to town.