Celebrating the Jam Room Recording Studio’s 25 year contribution to the Columbia, SC music scene.
Multiple stages Multiple musical genres Main St., Columbia, SC
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He’s a local icon, or at least a fixture. Friends who’d gone to the University of South Carolina or who were from Columbia had his work displayed in bathrooms and breakfast nooks. My barber had a particularly enthusiastic and brightly colored chicken that dated all the way back to ‘87. And when Leah and I were house hunting, almost every house we toured had at least one chicken staring back at us. His stuff seemed to be everywhere. They defied color logic and defined a room. I was interested in the Chicken Man, but I wasn’t sold. A few years went by and I saw more and more of his artwork. It began to grow on me. The unknown man behind the work had grabbed my imagination. I wanted to know who he was. I saw him more and more on the side of the road. First on Huger. Then on Harden. Sometimes there was a crowd. Other times he sat alone. But he always seemed happy. Leah convinced me that we needed to buy at least one of his paintings and when we saw Lee in the neighborhood park, we’d decided that we were going to actually get one. I just wasn’t sure where we could put it. We spent the rest of that day discussing where we could hang a chicken. By the time we walked away from our neighbor’s after party with two of his paintings under our arms, I wanted to know who this guy really was. The man was forever jovial. He was this presence in town that sat on the roadside and sold paintings
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of chickens to college students and a younger generation of South Carolinians. They were paintings that didn’t require much technical precision. But the art displayed around the chickens was of a different nature. There were buildings, landscapes, and portraits, and they all showed a dedication and a soulfulness that only came from someone who had poured themselves into them. And yet they sat. Countless patrons walked up and asked for their own unique version of a chicken or a palmetto tree. All of his other art went unnoticed. I was intrigued. As a writer, I wanted to find out if this was what it took to be successful. To make a name for yourself. Did we have to abandon our dreams of becoming the next great folk artist or writer in order to achieve a sustainability that provided for our family? And if we did abandon that dream for a commercial or popular brand of ourselves, was that going to be enough? Or would we still risk sitting on a roadside wondering where the money for the next bill was going to come from? All of these questions were weighing on me in the months following my encounter with this cheerful man who had convinced me to buy two of his paintings. I took all of these questions with me when I asked him if I could sit with him for a day. He was receptive to the idea, as long as I considered adding another painting to my collection. I agreed.
Lee was born in Edgefield, SC, and started painting when he was twelve. As a child, he painted pretty much anything that came to his mind. Despite several assumptions around Columbia about him being a self-taught folk artist, Lee studied at both the Gertrude Hebert Institute of Art in Alexandra, Virginia, and the Rose Hill Art Center in Aiken. Until he moved to Columbia eleven years ago, he lived and painted in North Augusta, where his painting was more of a side project and his days were spent working various jobs ranging from road construction to farming. He tells me, “There weren’t always the chickens.” It wasn’t until sometime in the midseventies that he stumbled upon the chicken idea. “I met this guy, who asked me why I never painted no chickens?” Laughing he said, “I’d told him I had me some bantam chickens, and he said I ought to paint em.” Lee was convinced nobody would ever buy any chickens, but at the time he felt like he didn’t have anything to