Blues Legend Drink Small
Performs at Eval Center
Photo: Drink Small jams at the SCVRD Evaluatiuon Center.
It could have been Lincoln Center or the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
Instead it was the cafeteria at the S.C. Vocational Rehabilitation Department’s Evaluation Center and the audience couldn’t have been more appreciative.
Drink Small, a South Carolina blues legend also known as the Blues Doctor, shared his magic recently with SCVRD clients, jamming on his electric guitar to the delight of all who listened.
“Most of my music is impromptu,” the 74-year-old bluesman said, slowly strumming his battered instrument. “I just make up songs.”
Earl Smith, a client from James Island, sat in on the session along with Jeremy Meed of Beaufort.
Photo: Earl Smith (right), playing a borrowed guitar, jams with Drink Small at SCVRD’s Evaluation Center. “This place does wonders,” Smith said.
Smith said he’s been playing blues all his life until an accident several years ago left him with a brain injury and unable to play.
This night, he borrowed an acoustic guitar and had no trouble keeping up with Small.
“It’s the first time I’ve really been able to play since the accident,” he said with a wide grin.
Meed, who is self-taught and has only been playing for a couple of years, was a bit shy about participating.
“Do what you can. We ain’t playing for no money,” Small encouraged. “It ain’t going to bite you, just excite you.”
With his toes tapping, his gray hair tucked under a black beret and his fingers flying across the strings, he treated the audience to renditions of “Charleston Woman Blues,” “Thank You Baby,” and “New York City Blues” before launching into “Wheelchair Boogie,” written especially for SCVRD clients.
It had them dancing in the aisles.
Photo: Christy Hernandez and Jeremy Meed tear up the dance floor during Drink Small’s performance at the SCVRD Evaluation Center.
Christy Hernandez of Goose Creek, a student at the Information Technology Training Center, glowed as she and Meed delighted the crowd with their moves.
“I’m glad you’re here tonight to see me so happy,” she later told Jim Williams, the center’s project manager.
Small improvised several of what he called “Us Tunes” with Smith before wrapping up the session with “You Don’t Have to Be Funky.”
There’s too much water
You don’t have to be funky
Going around here
Smelling like a donkey.
The opportunity to sit in with Small left Smith “almost speechless.”
“This is the first time I’ve really been able to play since the accident,” he said. “This place does wonders. With this experience, I think I’ve got a pretty good future.”
It was Small’s fourth performance at the Evaluation Center, courtesy of Andrina Washington, a rehabilitation aide, and Sharon Sandland, a staff nurse.
Washington said she met Small about 15 years ago when he played for the community at her mother’s restaurant in Columbia. Since then, they’ve become friends and she frequently cooks “traveling food” for Small and his three-member band.
Sandland said Small broke his back as a child and couldn’t work in the cotton fields. He taught himself to play at age 10 on a guitar he built himself. He also plays a mean boogie-woogie piano, she said.
Ironically, Small, a Bishopville native, “is better known and more appreciated outside South Carolina” than in his home state, said Clair DeLune of WUSC’s Blues Moon Radio Show.
He plays in the Piedmont blues, or ragtime, style of Pink Anderson, Blind Boy Gary Davis, Nappy Brown and Pegleg Sam Anderson.
Small keeps a fairly busy schedule, playing five or six gigs a month. He’ll be playing May 9th at the Dorchester Library in North Charleston, May 12th at the Bluegrass & Blues Festival in Lancaster, May 19th at the Columbia Crawfish Festival, May 24th at the Hunter Gatherer in Columbia and May 28th at Cumberland’s in Charleston.
“He’s a South Carolina treasure,” DeLune said.