news-record.com

John Coltrane stands tall in High Point. Charlie Poole hovers like mist over the Smith River in Eden. And Etta Baker hangs in Greensboro on Steve Terrill’s wall right near his front door.

Coltrane is jazz. Poole is country. Baker is Piedmont blues. And that’s just for starters. When it comes to music, North Carolina is as diverse as South Elm on a Saturday night.

Take a drive. You’ll see.

Tiny hotbeds of music, all with their own sound, exist every 50 to 60 miles. You’ll find sea shanties on the Outer Banks, cowboy punk in Chapel Hill, old-time in the mountains and a musical legend in Deep Gap.

That’s a guitarist named Doc. But don’t take it from me. Take it from someone who knows. Jeff Place, the “walking archive’’ of music.

He’s the archivist for the Smithsonian Institution, and he says our state has more musical diversity than any other. Ask him why, and he’s got no idea. But he has two words for it: “Holy cow.’’

“It just fascinates me,’’ Place says from his Washington office. “And it’s not musical product. You hear all these labels talk about music, and they make it sound like they could be easily just selling shoes.

“But this is something artistic. It becomes a part of people’s lives, and the energy coming out of these people, you can feel the love. That’s a treat for me.’’

Jazz fans camp in front of Coltrane’s statue in downtown High Point. Some even park their car in front of his boyhood home off East Washington Drive to catch the spiritual vibe of a man known as Trane.

Country fans converge on Rockingham County to dissect the legacy of Poole, a textile worker and bootlegger who became one of the greatest musicians of the early 20th century.

And music fans have begun to trickle into a converted jail in Kannapolis. Every week, 40 to 100 people visit the N.C. Music Hall of Fame to get the 411 on all kinds of performers, including The “5” Royales, an old R&B group from Winston-Salem.

“How many kids have heard about The “5” Royales?’’ asked Bill Kopald, the former local TV anchor who has helped organize the museum. “I told a 22-year-old about them, she found them on the Internet and said, 'Oh my God.’

“You see, the masses have no clue. You could go on the street, ask who Kate Smith was, and you might as well be doing 'Jaywalking’ with Jay Leno.’’

By the way, Smith made “God Bless America’’ popular. Nicknamed the “Songbird of the South,’’ she lived in Raleigh.

Who knew?

The hall of fame opened in June, and its first induction will be in a month. But it won’t be easy. Kopald says the museum has more than 400 names of people with roots in North Carolina who have reached the big time in music.

Like Baker.

She’s the soft-voiced gardener from Morganton who became the “matriarch of Southern music.’’ She could dance her long, delicate fingers across the neck of a guitar and play the most beautiful Piedmont blues you’d ever hear.

In the painting of Baker on Terrill’s wall, her song titles surrounding her like a halo. A dozen steps away, in his front yard, he has a gift from Baker herself, something straight from her garden: hollyhocks.

And they’re in bloom.

You can see Terrill and his old-time band, The Hushpuppies, Saturday in downtown Greensboro. Place, too. He’ll play host for Smithsonian Summer Saturday, an event created by the Greensboro Historical Museum and Greensboro Public Library.
 

The free concert, covered by a $25,000 grant from Greensboro’s Cemala Foundation, is bent on broadening the museum’s audience and capitalizing on its recent affiliate status with the Smithsonian.

Smithsonian Summer Saturday will bring people together to hear the divergent strains of Music North Carolina.

And they’ll come. Drawn by the timeless power of passion.

Holy cow, indeed.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com