Cedric Burnside Wants to Help Out

Cedric Burnside, grandson of R.L. Burnside and this year's Blues Music Award winner for best drummer signed four sticks for us to raffle or auction off to raise money for the TBS and the Floyd Council Memorial Fund.  He puts on a hell of a show besides...

Knotts and Watson

There are two other funeral homes in Sanford that used the White Oak cemetery as a "potter's field" after 1965: Knotts and Watson.  I reckon on monday I'll call both of them and see if either one has a legend for the White Oak cemetery.

Horton Funeral Home

I called and spoke to the woman who's running the L. Horton Funeral Home in Sanford.  This was the family funeral home that buried Floyd 34 years ago.  She is adamant that they have no surviving records of him nor do they have a legend of the White Oak cemetery.  I wondered aloud how they can keep from burying people on top of each other if they still use the cemetery but don't know who's buried where out there.  She is not the first person to imply that maybe they haven't been so careful over the years about who's buried on top of whom... 

She gave me some names of persons in the family who are no longer associated with the business but once were and might remember something - haven't been able to reach either of them so far...

NC Cemetery Commission

The North Carolina Cemetery Commission insists that they don't have any records regarding the White Oak Cemetery...

I'm muttering foul, foul things under my breath.

White Oak A.M.E. Zion Church

http://www.deadbluesguys.com/  Go check them out so I don't feel so bad about stealing their pictures.

With the help of Susan Patterson, the City Attourney for Sanford, I found Reverend Laura Brown.  Laura Brown is the current pastor for the White Oak congregation.  Since they don't have their own church, they're sharing with two other A.M.E. churches in Sanford until they can get the resources together to re-open the White Oak church.

Laura Brown is one of the nicest ladies you'll ever meet and I hope she accomplishes everything she sets her heart to in life.  She was, however, full of disappointing news.

For a start, it turns out that the church was basically abandoned.  They locked the doors and went home.  No one took any of the paper work home with them, furniture was not stored, hymnals were not shelved - whomever was the last one out the door simply turned out the lights, turned the key in the lock, turned on his heel and went home.  Over the years, vandals destroyed or scattered all of the records, the furniture, the bibles...they smashed the windows and punched holes in the floor.  Rev. Brown told me that if the roof hadn't leaked, they probably would have stolen that too...

So, I had been thinking that maybe Floyd was a member of an A.M.E. congregation and wrote letters as if that were possible.  I wrote letters to the pastors of Fair Promise, Love Grove, New Hope, Poplar Springs and St. James A.M.E. churches.  I am no longer surprised that I haven't heard back from any of them.  I'd hoped that someone there might have remembered Floyd or that the church might have inherited the records from White Oak, but the records were never removed from White Oak until vandals scattered them so they couldn't have had any knowledge about those records.

This was my best hope for finding a legend to the cemetery.  Rev. Brown is also trying to put together a legend for the cemetery from people's memories - mostly to accomodate the members of her congregation who have purchased plots there but now don't know where those plots are...

If you happen to know anything about this cemetery, e-mail me and I'll put you in touch with her.



Moncure Road used to be called Osgood Road.  The good news is that it's also called SR 1002 - which means the DOT can put a highway marker out by the cemetery if they choose to...



 

     Assumptions are dangerous. So. I assumed that because Floyd was buried in an A.M.E. cemetery he belonged to an A.M.E. congregation. However, the Watts, Horton and Watson funeral homes all tended to put their indigents in the Potter’s field at the White Oak A.M.E. cemetery. I’m getting ahead of myself…

     On Wednesday I drove to Sanford. I visited the cemetery again and had another good long look for Floyd (and got chigger-bit as hell in the process). Then I went and visited about every municipal building in Sanford. Maybe it just felt like all of them. Every person I met who worked for the city or Lee County was as pleasant, helpful and easy to get along with as you please. I was treated particularly well by Gene Hathaway in the Lee County Mapping Department and by Susan Patterson, the city attorney.

So this is what the current state of the story looks like:

     I had it in my mind to track down the current owners of the land the church and cemetery set on and the current (and perhaps former) owners of the land adjacent (in the event that an accessible memorial required right-of-way or other neighbor-navigable support). Also, I hoped maybe to find an old-timer who might have known Floyd – or at least of him. Gene Hathaway helped me by making me a map of the church, cemetery and neighbor-property lots and he found the deed for the church-land for me.

     We struck gold! As it turns out, the land the cemetery lies on was deeded to the city of Sanford in 1965 – nine years before Floyd’s death. Remember about the assuming?

     Immediately I assumed this meant that the city would have to have a record – somebody would have bought the plot Floyd was lying in, if Floyd himself, financially flush and looking to the inevitable (if unfortunate)future, hadn’t bought it for himself – so there would be a deed or at least a receipt book. At the very least, the city would have a cemetery legend – some kind of map of the grave plots so that no one was ever buried on top of anyone else…

     I made an ass out of me – sort of. It turns out that the city was, in fact, deeded the property in 1965 – shortly after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. This being the south of J. Strom Thurmond & George Wallace and generally a place with a white population who was unsympathetic to outsiders telling them…well, anything really…toxic politics rapidly ensued. The black folks who had been maintaining the cemetery (all of this according to local legend, now) wanted the city to maintain it and saw the victories of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act as a sign that it was time to flex a little local muscle and assert their rights to some of the same privileges and advantages the folks in town were enjoying. After all, the city was maintaining the white cemeteries well enough. So the Harringtons deeded the 23 acres south of Osgood road to the city. The city got out of the cemetery business and sold of their cemeteries (white and black) to a cemetery commission for $15,000.00 dollars. The cemetery commission took over the two white cemeteries in town and ignored all the rest of them. Since 1965, the city of Sanford has maintained that they are not in the cemetery business and so, even though the city holds a deed for the White Oak cemetery, they’ve never maintained it, never kept documents about or for it and they’ve never mapped it or sold plots (which would really require a map) for it.

Somehow, people still got buried there. The map is out there for the finding…

Fundraising 02

The Questell Foundation has offered to donate $200.00 towards Floyd’s stones. Together, that makes four hundred dollars we’ve raised to mark his grave.

In order to do my part fundraising-wise, I’ve done a portrait of Floyd which will be available on an over-priced t-shirt at Reverbnation (link will follow when I figure out how to size the image properly for the t-shirt people). Remember, the money is for a good cause. I will also be selling prints on high-quality acid-free wheat paper at the Hayti Heritage Center on August 20 – most of that money will go to Floyd, getting the damned prints made is going to be expensive. You can contact me at thbullfrogwillardmcghee@yahoo.com if you’d like to buy a print and can’t make the Hayti.

I’d like to have a Floyd Council Blues Festival down in Sanford to coincide with placing the stone. We’ll see if we can make that happen.

Tomorrow, I’m going back to Sanford to check with the county clerk’s office to see who owns the land the cemetery is on and who owns the land adjacent. If I can’t find his grave and our best deal is to place a marker somewhere close – like it is with Fuller’s memorial – it may become necessary to buy the land the monument will sit on.

I’ve been to the cemetery and had a good long look for myself. Seemed like the right place to start. I would have felt plenty stupid if it turned out that he had a stone the whole time. Let me just say…and I say this as a person from West Virginia who has seen some of the roughest and most neglected - or alternately, some of the most badly coal-company-abused cemeteries you can find anywhere in the world…this cemetery is in pitiful shape. It WILL take a brush hog to clear his grave if we can find it on a map – since we’re already raising money to put a stone in the cemetery, I’m thinking some part of this project should include cutting down trees and clearing some land and making the cemetery generally accessible again for everyone. Regardless, he may yet have a stone out there and I just couldn’t find it…

Since Floyd was buried in the White Oak A.M.E. church cemetery (at least, according to his death certificate he was), I’ve assumed he was a member of that congregation – therefore I wrote the pastors of the five A.M.E. churches in and around Sanford and asked them:

1. Are there any members of their congregation who might remember/be related to Floyd Council and may I be introduced to them?

2. When White Oak A.M.E. became defunct, did they inherit that church’s records and possibly the cemetery map?

I wrote the two Councils in the Sanford white pages and asked if they were related (not to each other – to Floyd). If so, can I come speak to them? Maybe they have a story to tell or a photograph I haven’t seen (I’ve only ever seen two pictures of him – in one of them his features are indistinct; in the other he looks jolly but sort of goofy) or maybe they actually attended his funeral and can point me to the right spot of ground…won’t know until I get some answers back.

I called the Sanford Public Library and set the reference librarian to work trying to find anything in the fiche that might help and through him contacted the Lee County Historical Society and set them to work looking through the archives for the White Oak records. Everyone I talk to I ask to keep an eye out for an old timer who might have been to the funeral and might have personal knowledge of the location of his grave.

Fundraising 01



Me and Nat Reese in front of the Rialto Theater, Raleigh, NC June 24, 2010.

     We auctioned this poster on the night of the show.  Everybody who played signed it:  Nat Reese, me, Tad Walters, Kelly Pace and surprise guest star John D. Holeman.  Kim Pearce won the auction.  Her winning bid was two hundred dollars. 

     She turned around and gave the poster back to us so we could auction it off again.  Kim Pearce is nine kinds of cool.

     It'll be available again soon...

Floyd should have a memorial-something at the very least. I thought for a while that he should have a highway marker, but the DOT won’t place a marker in a cemetery with a single noteworthy grave (I’m certain every person in that graveyard was noteworthy somehow to someone, but try telling that to the sign people) and they won’t place a marker on a road that isn’t part of the numbered state highway system. I may have misread my map, but I’m pretty sure Floyd’s buried on a county road and not a state road. Either way, I wrote them and asked them to consider putting a marker out there by Floyd’s grave.

I’m amenable to putting a bust or a tasteful statue in Sanford where he died or in Chapel Hill where he lived most of his life, but that would still leave his grave out there naked. It’d be all right with me if we could figure out how to do both.
Fuller's got a plaque that says, "Buried nearby."  Of course they paved over half that cemetery too...

Ideally, someone somewhere inherited the records from the church and those records include a map of the plots sold out in the cemetery. If I could find that map, I could find Floyd and we could just buy the man a dignified set of stones and set them out there at his head and feet.

I can’t believe that Pete Lowry and Bruce Bastin didn’t find the information if it was there to find and I can’t figure out how to get a hold of either one of them – hell, Pete Lowry might be dead for all I know (he’s not, he lives in Australia now) – so I reckon I’ve started going over ground others have already covered…

Triangle Blues Society Article - Good Overview for this Blog



Floyd Council's Death Certificate - Stolen from the good people who run the Dead Blues Guys website



     Hold your arms out in front of you, bend your elbows a little and touch your fingertips together to make a circle.  There are trees that big around growing up out of the middle of some of the graves in the White Oak A.M.E. church cemetery down in Sanford, North Carolina.  Floyd Council is buried in an unmarked grave in that cemetery.

     Blind Boy Fuller only ever let two guitar players back him on his recordings: Gary Davis and Floyd Council.  Gary went on to make hundreds of recordings.  Floyd only ever recorded six commercial sides by himself.  He appeared as accompanist on fifteen of Fuller's commercial recordings.  Long after he'd had a series of strokes he recorded six songs in his home for, I think, Pete Lowry's Trix label, though they apparently weren't worth releasing - twenty...uh...seven total recordings...twenty-one recorded in his prime.

     Floyd Council was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on September 2, 1911.  He lived around Chapel Hill most of his life.  He was a truck driver.  He played with the Strowd Brothers - they called themselves the Chapel Hillbillies.  Record companies promoted him as "the Devil's Daddy-In-Law" and "Dipper Boy."  His earliest recordings were released under the name "Blind Boy Fuller's Buddy."  All of those were record company gimmicks.  He was called "Mr. Floyd" locally and though strokes started slowing him down in the sixties and had rendered him effectively unable to play by 1970 he was considered until the end of his life one of the finest guitar players in the Piedmont.  He died in Sanford, NC. on May 9, 1976.

I am annoyed that he's lying in an unmarked grave.

So this is what I’ve decided to do about it...

This is the first entry in my blog about Floyd Council, the great and unheralded piedmont bluesman from Chapel Hill, NC.  The Triangle Blues Society, the Questell Foundation, Reverend Laura Brown of the White Oak A.M.E. Zion Church, Me, Tad Walters, Lightnin’ Wells, John D. Holeman and most of the radio stations with blues programming in the triangle have made up our minds to raise up enough money to clean up this cemetery, put a marker out there for Floyd and maintain the damned thing for future blues fans to find, see, enjoy and pay their respects to…

I’ve spent six months trying to figure out what specific patch of ground Floyd’s buried under down in Sanford and I’ll keep looking until I’ve turned over every rock, slid down every poison-oak-covered embankment, climbed every tree, swum every ocean (as the song says) and run out of places to look.

We’ll put some kind of memorial out there to Floyd one way or the other by the end of next year.  To do that, we’re gonna need money.  We auctioned off the enormous poster that hung outside of the Rialto Theater advertising the Nat Reese show this past June to a wonderful woman named Kim Pearce.  She bid $200.00, won the auction and then turned around and donated the poster back to us so we could auction it off again.  Buddy Guy signed a genuine Fender Stratocaster pick guard for us which we will be auctioning off in the near future.  All the winner of that auction has to do is screw it down on the front of a genuine Stratocaster guitar and he’s the proud owner of a Buddy Guy hand-signed Strat.  Alvin Youngblood Hart signed a poster from his recent show at the Berkeley Café which will be auctioned at some point and Cedric Burnside (this year’s Blues Music Award winner for best drummer) signed some sticks for us which have been raffled and should also appear in future auctions/raffles.  The Questell Foundation pledged two hundred dollars.  I’ve contributed some art work and designed a t-shirt with a drawing of Floyd and the legend “Get a Piece of the Rock.”  Very droll, I know.  Very soon there will be a link on the Triangle Blues Society’s website so you can buy those shirts from them – you could buy one from my Reverbnation page right now, but that’s a little creepy – I want you to know deep down in your heart of hearts that when you spend this money it’s going to Floyd’s memorial, so I want to get all that stuff off of my sites and onto the TBS’ site as soon as possible.  Finally, disc jockeys at WNCU, WXDU, WFSU, WSHA and WKNC have generously agreed to contribute time on their radio shows for me, Tad Walters, Lightnin’ Wells and John Holeman to come on and talk about Floyd Council and play his songs – we’ll record these programs and take the Floyd Coucil and Pink Anderson tracks from them and release a little download-only-record on the internet…the name of the record, hilariously, will have something to do with Pink Floyd and we’ll use all the proceeds from those downloads to buy Floyd the best memorial we can afford.

We can do this together.  We are a community of blues musicians and blues lovers and we should look out for our own.  We are the Piedmont Blues and we should look out for our own. If you’d like to keep up with my quest to discover the precise location of Floyd Council in the White Oak A.M.E. cemetery, you can subscribe to my blog:  Floyd Council’s Blues at http://floydcouncilblues.blogspot.com/ and you can always get more information through the TBS website at www.triangleblues.com.

Finally, I’d like to tell you a story.

In 1985, a smelly gutter punk rocker named Stevie Tombstone put together a swampabilly rock band and named it after himself: the Tombstones.  After kicking around the scene for six or seven years and playing some big gigs with D.R.I., Stray Cats, Bad Brains et.al, Stevie got signed to Relativity Records.   He took his up-front money from Relativity, bought a gravestone for Robert Johnson, loaded the stone and Robert’s friend and travelling companion,  Johnny Shines up into his car and rode down to Greenwood, Mississippi where they placed the stone in the yard at the Payne Chapel Missionary Baptist Church near Quito, Mississippi.  This was in 1991.  Robert Johnson had lain in an unmarked grave since August of 1938.  Stevie got knocked around a good bit in the press and people around Greenwood still talk about him and sneer at the audacity of what he did.  When I visited the site in 1997, I was told that the band was from Sweden by someone who spat on the ground after he spoke their name…

That same year Columbia Records, still drunk from all the money and the Grammy award Robert earned for them, lo, those many years after his death put a hideous one-ton obelisk in the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery in Morgan  City, Mississippi.  That’s gratitude…

Perhaps the most reputable site for Johnson’s grave is on Money Road at the Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church about two miles outside of Greenwood, Mississippi.  This site is closest to the place where Robert died (at the Stars of the West Plantation) and there’s an eye witness.  Rosie Eskridge was discovered by blues historian Steven LaVere.  She asserts her husband “Peter Rabbit” dug the grave and buried Robert under a pecan tree in that cemetery.  The Mississippi Blues Commission thought the evidence for this location was compelling enough to place their highway marker there…of course, it was promptly perforated with buckshot and subsequently stolen by rabid fans.  Carrie H. Thompson, Robert’s sister, contributed a little scrap of paper with a prayer scrawled in Robert’s own handwriting which was faithfully reproduced in the stone that sets in this graveyard.  It says:

Jesus of Nazareth.  King of Jerusalem.  I know that my redeemer liveth and that he will call me from the grave.

Floyd doesn’t need the mystique that comes from dying young and having three tombstones – he just needs one.  Let’s get him one…working together instead of against each other…

If you have any information about Floyd Council – photographs, a diary, the phone number of his nearest relative, a guitar he played, an anecdote, story or recollection of him…let us know.  If you have an idea about what his memorial should look like, let us know.  If you want to organize a fundraiser to help Floyd’s Memorial Fund, let us know.  If you want to buy something from us, participate in an auction or raffle, or make a donation, let us know.  If you happen to know exactly where the Horton Funeral Home planted Floyd in his cardboard box coffin under that Potter’s Field outside of Sanford, let me know – I’d appreciate you…

Fundraising

     There are numbered 30x20 fine art prints of this poster for sale signed by me and Nat Reese.  Two hundred bucks and it's yours.  Outside of the printing costs all the rest of the proceeds go to Floyd Council's Memorial Fund.