52
2012
NORTH CAROLINA L ITE R A R Y RE V IE W O N L INE
number 21
CELEBRATING bland simpson: 2011 recipient of the presentation remarks by Jerry Leath Mills Eastern North Carolina Literary Homecoming, 23 September 2011
Roberts Award for Literary Inspiration
I’ve been asked to include in my remarks an indication of why Bland Simpson merits the Roberts Award for Literary Inspiration. This is easy to do, though hard to do in adequate detail in less than an all-day session. And for me, it is a very good time to be doing it: just a couple of weeks ago, I read the manuscript draft of Bland’s forthcoming book, his eighth book to date, and was led by that reading to consider the remarkable trajectory of his career over the forty years I’ve been the beneficiary of his friendship. I’ll mention a few points on that trajectory tonight. Each of these points will illustrate the literary inspiration that this award is all about (in Bland’s case, it includes musical inspiration as well), but not just the inspiration. I think the notso-secret secret of Bland’s achievement is his ability to combine inspiration with creative energy, the force that turns idea into act and translates private impulse into public art. When Bland gets a notion, he does not fool around. And, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Falstaff, Bland has been not only inspired but the source of inspiration to others. A list of writers, musicians, and students on whom his influence has settled would require yet another of those all-day sessions to cover. First, I’d like to point out that Bland is here tonight as a result of a long-ago decision to defy fate. By the time he finished high school in 1966, his family, friends, and he had accepted the assumption that his destiny was to become a lawyer. His father was a lawyer, his grandfather was a lawyer, and both of his sisters became lawyers. Bland began and finished his college career as a political science major. Not long after he matriculated at UNC, he ran for and was elected President of his freshman class. (The university yearbook for that year contains a photograph of Bland, among the other class officers, looking every inch the budding politician, spiffily attired in sports jacket and necktie, in the era of the 1960s, when seeing an undergraduate in coat and tie
was as startling as spying an Eskimo in a bikini.) Later in college, he teamed up with cartoonist Bruce Strauch to write a column for the Daily Tar Heel that was chiefly, though not entirely, political in nature. But at some point, maybe early in 1968, Bland’s love of music and his continued interest in mostly self-taught piano performances led to a major burst of inspiration: he would become a singer-songwriter. Did he then change his major? Did he sign up for formal piano lessons? Did he start filling out applications to Julliard and the Berklee School of Music? No. He took the more inspired course of sticking out his thumb on a cold December day and hitchhiking up to New York State to visit, unannounced, with Bob Dylan. After a half-hour conversation with that Minnesota-bred singer in sub-zero weather on the front porch, Bland left with the encouragement and confidence he’d gone there to find. He was exhilarated and focused, though no doubt feeling, as he negotiated on foot the long and icy driveway through the woods, not unlike an Eskimo himself. The next year Bland moved to New York City and went to work on his songwriting career, soon landing a contract with Columbia Records for his first album, Simpson. It was a mostly solo album, but included bits by an old Chapel Hill buddy, Dave Olney (thereafter famous for his Nashville group, Dave Olney and the X-Rays). Back in Chapel Hill a year or so later, Bland combined with Jim Wann, Mike Sheehan, John Foley, and Jan Davidson (now the director of the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC) to form a group known as The Southern States Fidelity Choir. Soon, Simpson and Wann were at work on their first big musical dramatic hit Diamond Studs merging with the then recently formed group The Red Clay Ramblers. After opening in Chapel Hill, Diamond Studs played off-Broadway in New York to rave reviews and packed houses from New Year’s Eve of 1974 to mid-July of 1975 before going on tour.
Jerry Leath Mills introduced NCLR’s publication (in 2005) of the title song of Bland Simpson and the Coastal Cohorts’ King Mackerel and the Blues Are Running. He also published a humorous personal essay in NCLR 2008.
Bland simpson’s NCLR contributions also include a story in 2005, an essay in 2008, music on the 2008 humor issue CDs, and an article on musicians’ theater in 2009.