Eventually the dots connect

May 29, 2003

Dear Julie,

At our niece Darci's senior recital last weekend in Neosho, she danced her solo to the Rolling Stones' decidedly downbeat "Paint It Black." She waved a red scarf in the air as she danced. It reminded DC of the red quilt Darci was twirling outside the cabin on the Castor River a few years ago just before our dog Hank bit her on the backside.

The connections that occur in DC's mind sometimes baffle me, but this one made an odd kind of sense.

Someone calculated that the nieces' Uncle Paul has attended 17 years of dance recitals. We gave him a gift for his dedication to the art.

The recitals are held in a community college gym with no air conditioning. The littlest girls and their costumes are invariably cute, the medium-sized girls show signs of promise and the big girls usually demonstrate that years of dancing can result in poise and in some cases agility. I have come to think of the recitals as witnessing the dancers' baby steps into adulthood.

Darci is the youngest of the three nieces, so this annual spring pilgrimage to western Missouri has now come to an end. That's a bittersweet transition to me. On returning home to Cape Girardeau we learned of another passage.

A message from my mother told me that Willie Bollinger had died. People in Cape Girardeau have been listening to Willie sing for a long time. My mom used to talk about hearing him sing early every morning when he had a job as a garbage collector.

He sang so sweetly for all kinds of local bands since then.

In college I joined a soul band Willie sang for. Willie and the band weren't a perfect fit. He was a generation older, an R&B singer who came of age in the 1950s. Smokey Robinson was his hero. Willie wore expensive and elaborate stage costumes. Now it was 1970, and the rest of us were college students into worn jeans with patches, long hair and anti-establishment rock 'n' roll. We were too naive to play Stones music and too cool to admit it.

Willie was tall and handsome, too, and had done some prize fighting as a young man. When he sang "My Girl," women listened. That poise and stage presence the dancers are learning, he had in his bones. He had it made. He also had a family to support.

He told us stories about some of the big-time package shows he had performed with years earlier as Willie and the Challengers and the recording sessions he had taken part in at the legendary Sun Records in Memphis. We were too young and too arrogant about our own musical tastes to know what he was talking about and what to believe.

He did have a salesman streak. Once Willie booked us into a show at an armory south of here. A poster outside listed all the acts who were to perform. One of them was Sam and Dave. Not the "You Don't Know Like I Know" Sam and Dave. This Sam and Dave meant me the saxophone player and Dave the organ player.

A few years ago, I happened to pick up the phone when a musicologist from Memphis called the newspaper looking for information about Willie Bollinger. He was amazed that Willie still lived in Cape Girardeau. He was phoning because he was beginning to produce CDs of rhythm and blues recordings that came out of Memphis in the 1950s and 1960s. Willie was here all right, he said.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.