"I
GREW up in Detroit, the son of a Baptist preacher. I've got four
brothers and two sisters. My father worked at Ford Motor Co. and my
mother was a custodian at an elementary school.
"One of my earliest memories was going
to work with her one day. I was about 5 years old, and I helped her
mop the hall. You know those big industrial mops? It was much too big
for me to push, but for the next two or three years, I told everybody
how I helped my mom at work.
"We lived right in the city. I lived
through the 1967 riots. There were tanks running up and down my
streets. It was like a war zone. I saw people snatching stuff, but I
stayed away from that. They took you to a detention camp, and I wasn't
about to go there. I let other people do the looting, and I watched
all the action. There was wonderful action all around, better than
television.
"At that time, I was an angry young man.
My mother, whom I adored, died of cancer when I was 10. Then my
father, the Baptist preacher, split to find someone else to live with.
He left me and my little brother with my grandmother. My grandmother
was the other woman in my life that I adored. She lived to be 100. She
was a very strong and powerful woman. The black community is
matriarchal anyway. The men talk and have all this bravado, but it's
really the woman who runs the family.
"My grandmother worked for a Jewish
family, the Aarons. The Aaron kids loved my grandmother so much that
they called her Grandmother. Most of my clothes were hand-me-downs
from the Aarons, so I had some really nice clothes.
"I was angry at my father, and at God,
and that's when all my fighting started at school. I started dabbling
in alcohol and drugs at 10 years old. In Detroit, there were drugs
everywhere. I got the money from the Social Security checks from my
mother's death. I tried acid, hashish, cocaine, heroine, opium,
mescaline, speed. I didn't do enough to get addicted. When people got
ready to get really heavy into anything, I would say no, I'm not going
there.
"My mother still had a great influence
over me. Those morals of right and wrong were still a heavy weight on
my back. So I couldn't go too far into anything, although I did drink
way too much. That was probably my Achilles' heel and the thing that
stopped me from being a drug addict. It was easier to get alcohol and
drink than it was for me to hang out with the scum on the corner
selling drugs. I didn't want to be part of that element.
"Then I joined the high school choir,
and that slowed me down because it was something I really loved for
the first time in a long time. I didn't want anything to take away
from the joy, because just singing was a high for me.
"In high school, I got introduced to
classical music, especially a black classical composer named R.
Nathaniel Dett. He wrote this wonderful oratorio called ‘The
Ordering of Moses.' Martin Luther King Jr. had just been shot, and I
heard this wonderful music and wanted to be a part of it, so drugs and
alcohol started to fade. I auditioned for a trip to South America and
went on this musical tour, and that was the end of my drug use,
totally. If you get caught with drugs in South America, they throw you
in prison and forget about you. I did continue to drink. I drank a lot
of rum and Cokes in South America.
"Martin Luther King was my hero. The way
he lived his life reminded me so much of my mother and her belief
system. He wanted to do all these things nonviolently. People who
wanted me to hang with them were preaching hate and ‘whitey.' Music
was my way of escaping being around them. Whenever they wanted me to
do something I didn't want to do, I could say I had a choir rehearsal
or voice lesson. When I got back from South America, they knew how
serious I was, and they stopped messing with me.
"I wanted to be a musician and an actor,
but my brother talked me out of that. He wanted me to do all these
macho things. So I went in the Air Force, then did all these macho
jobs. I was never really happy. My dad died in 1981, and that's when I
decided to do what I wanted to do. I could see that life is not a
forever thing, so I stopped drinking and went to Bible college and
started studying music.
"I play guitar, bass and a little piano,
and I sing. I didn't take lessons until I was 30. Everything else I
learned by ear. My mother played piano by ear. Everybody in my family
either sang or played some kind of instrument.
"Dr. William J.L. Wallace, who was
president of West Virginia State College and pastor of two churches on
the West Side, saw me in Pittsburgh and asked me to come to West
Virginia to help with his churches. He said he would also get me into
college. So I went to State, took music and counseling, and started
doing shows for Kanawha Players and the Light Opera Guild, and life
was good.
"I went back to Pittsburgh to do a
couple of years of drug and alcohol counseling, then came back to
Charleston in 1988 to work in the Southway substance abuse unit at
Thomas Memorial. Then I became a substance abuse counselor at the Job
Corps. My mother always told me to use your experiences to help other
people.
"In '94, I was the voice of the plant in
‘Little Shop of Horrors,' and Larry Kopelman of the Esquires saw me
and brought me into the Esquires. The rock 'n' roll stuff is fun.
"I went to Marshall to get my master's
degree in jazz studies and started playing with the faculty jazz
ensemble. I've played with Bob Thompson, Terry Gibbs, Joe Pocaro and
Wynton Marsalis. Wynton was coming to Parkersburg to give away some
awards, and the arts group hired a bunch of us to play. Wynton said
he'd play a number or two with us. He ended up playing with us for
about an hour and a half.
"After I got my master's, I continued to
work at Marshall as an instructor for a jazz improvisation class, but
adjunct professors don't have benefits. I saw an ad in the paper for
an actor to play Scrooge at Sunrise. I got the role. They asked me
back the next month to do a presentation on music and sound. Then they
hired me full-time, and I've done all their plays ever since.
"I'm happy here, but being a religious
person, I believe I can do all things through Christ. I'm still like
Martin Luther King. Even though he said he had a dream, he was not a
dreamer. He worked to make his dream come true. I have a dream that I
can do Broadway or movies or something, so I'm preparing myself. I do
commercials and call out numbers for the lottery on television and do
voice-overs. I keep my hand in each pie, and that sharpens me. If I
ever went to New York, I could do voice-overs, acting, music, musicals
or sing for commercials. So I wouldn't have to starve to death.
"When I tell people I'm from Detroit,
they say, ‘What are you doing here?' I'm sure the Lord moves me to
different places and different stages in life, so I can be where I'm
supposed to be."
