Inductees cover music generations at Museum of Gulf Coast
Published 4:22 pm Thursday, May 10, 2018
By Ken Stickney
For Smiley Lewis, Charles Brown and Don Rollins — three stellar musicians with Gulf Coast ties — it might have felt like old times: an appreciative crowd in a packed house.
The three were inducted into the Museum of the Gulf Coast in Port Arthur on Wednesday afternoon with the encouragement of enthusiastic supporters, including two surviving members of Brown’s family — he died in 1999 — and a contingent from Vidor, where Rollins leads the school system’s fine arts program.
Among Rollins’ supporters were his daughter, Ashley Rollins, who teaches oboe in metro Dallas, and Dr. Jimmy Simmons, former Lamar University president and Rollins’ teacher in college. Rollins is a 1983 Lamar graduate.
Rollins entered the music section of the museum as a widely respected songwriter whose work has been covered by country stars like Ray Price, Randy Travis, Reba McEntire, Faith Hill and Ronnie Milsap as well as, most recently, Judy Collins.
He co-wrote “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,” which Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett turned into a country and crossover No. 1 in 2003, and for which Rollins won a Grammy.
“He’s an extremely talented musician, a fine classical saxophonist,” Williams recalled of his pupil. “He was a real force on the saxophone.
“I didn’t know he was going to be a songwriter.”
In fact, Rollins remains a force on the sax, and has played behind The Temptations, The Four Tops, Martha and the Vandellas, Little Anthony and the Imperials and Bobby Vinton.
“It’s dangerous to give me a microphone,” Rollins said as museum director Tom Neal inducted him, thanking “anyone who ever shared a stage with me” and added, “Anyone who ever tried to teach me — God bless you.”
Charles Brown’s career enjoyed two peaks and valley. A Texas City native, born in 1922, he enjoyed popularity as part of the West Coast Blues movement in the 1940s and 1950s, playing primarily in the Los Angeles area but enjoying national hits.
His popularity dimmed in the late 1950s, but his career revived when Bonnie Raitt began playing with him in the 1980s and ‘90s. He resumed recording, won wide acclaim, including Grammy nominations for his later work, and was inducted into both the Blues Hall of Fame in 1996 and Roll and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999.
A cousin and niece, Martha Darden and Paula Edwards, traveled from Texas City for the induction and recalled family gatherings with their famous relation.
They recalled gatherings in Texas City when Brown would visit and bring friends like singer Etta James when they used to perform in Houston and Galveston.
For DeQuincy native Smiley Lewis, born in 1913 as Overton Amos Lemons, the induction marked belated recognition for a blues guitarist and singer who rode the rails as a boy to New Orleans, made his name as a musician on Bourbon Street and whose regional hits became national hits for other, more renown artists like Fats Domino and Elvis.
“He was paid little,” Neal said in recollecting Lewis career, which ended with his death by cancer in 1966. In fact, he oftentimes played for tips and took the bus to his gigs. But he nonetheless enjoyed numerous regional blues hits, like “Tee Nah Nah” and “Shame, Shame, Shame.”
Lewis is buried in his native DeQuincy, but the museum could find no living descendants or family in that Louisiana town.
