Menu
Sandy Williams takes listeners on musical tour of Anderson Street
A tribute show to Four Freshmen founder and Greencastle native Bob Flanigan became a little bit more for fellow Greencastle product Sandy Williams recently.
A collaboration between guitarist Williams and singer David Poncé, with help from bassist Jack Helsley, the Lunchbox Series concert at Music on the Square was crafted as a tribute to Flanigan, whose collaborations with fellow Hoosiers Ross and Don Barbour and Hal Kratch introduced a new approach to vocal group music in the 1950s and 1960s.
While Williams recently told the Banner Graphic he was “oblivious” to Flanigan’s music and impact as “a young rock ’n’ roller,” a brief break from the music suggests Williams should give himself a little more credit.
Williams took a few minutes between songs to recall his own youth in Greencastle in the 1960s and 1970s. This little trip from west to east on Anderson Street spanned genres from classical to jazz to R&B to pop to rock, of course.
“Anyone here live on Anderson Street at some point in their life?” Williams asked upon taking the mic. “All right — you’re part of the Anderson Street Gang.”
There was a lot of music just from one end of Anderson Street to the other, kind of amazing, really.
Starting down at Meharry Hall in East College, you might go hear composer Don White (a 20th-century composer who taught at DePauw for 30 years) or Aaron Copland and the DePauw Symphony playing music by these people.
Maybe take a detour to Bowman Gym to hear Ike and Tina Turner.
Moving down Anderson Street to the basement of the Phi Delt house, where a lot of rock ’n’ roll fun jams happened.
A little further east to 523, the house I grew up in, my mom might have a guitar out. Dad was playing the stereo that he built … there was a lot of soldering going on at my house. I still have the little tube stereo that I built in sixth grade. It still works. You kind of get to where you like the smell of solder, I don’t know what it is.
Then one of the greatest guitar players from Chicago lived in the basement of Mary Jane Black’s house, right by the park entrance — Frank Portolese.
At this point, Williams got a little choked up recalling his own home and the jazz guitarist’s time in Greencastle. Only Portolese was not at that point one of the greats of Chicago jazz guitar. He was a DePauw journalism student who loved rock ’n’ roll and was just in the process of discovering jazz guitarists like George Benson and Joe Pass, choosing later to follow in their path.
Perhaps it was the influence of Portolese that sent oblivious rock ’n’ roller Williams toward his own genre-spanning career.
I’d sit by my window and just wait for Frank to walk by and follow and try to see what he was listening to.
Then I would head up Anderson Street and there would be the Wood house. Any Woods here? John Wood? John’s dad (also named John Wood of John Wood Combo fame) gigged here for, 70 years and knew Flanigan.
And a little farther up the street was 614. Does that ring a bell for anyone? The Hardwick house. Tom played bass in the John Wood group, and Julie was really a gifted musician and singer. She raised five wonderful children, musicians Dick, Steve, Denny, Janet and Jimmy.
Quite often, we’d go into the Hardwick living room and Tom would be up in his easy chair, but Julie liked to sing sometimes. Here’s a song that Julie really sounded beautiful on…
With that, Williams, Poncé and Helsley lit into “Mood Indigo” a Duke Ellington song that Flanigan and the Freshmen recorded in 1954.
It was the only time during the one-hour concert that Williams took the mic, otherwise leaving the talking to Poncé, who not only sang other Freshmen hits including “It’s a Blue World,” “Day by Day” and “Angel Eyes,” but also told stories about Flanigan, many of them gleaned from Ross Barbour’s memoir “Now You Know: The Story of the Four Freshmen.”
Poncé even had a couple of copies of the book — including an individually numbered special edition of the book signed by Barbour’s wife — that were raffled off to two lucky attendees.
After a singalong of The Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl” (a group and song heavily influenced by Flanigan), the trio played an encore of “It’s Alright with Me.”
The show concluded with one last story from Poncé, revealing that Flanigan perhaps didn’t have the same fond memories of Greencastle as Williams, or was at least wanting to impress bandleader Stan Kenton, to whom he was recalling his hometown.
“There’s nothing to do here,” Flanigan told Kenton. “People go down to the bakery and smell hot bread or go watch the barber give haircuts. They couldn’t afford a town drunk and so people had to take turns.”
Perhaps it was Bob Flanigan who was oblivious to the Greencastle musical upbringing that Williams discovered a few decades later.
