On Sunday we will say goodbye to our good friend, Earl Gibson. Earl was a fixture at Hammerstone's for many years. I used to joke that I had never been in a Soulard bar when Earl wasn't there - and was only a slight exaggeration. Click on the image at left and I believe you can read his obit as it appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.Earl was a very frail African American man in his late '80s, but he entered like royalty. Everyone knew Earl. And to know Earl was to love him. He would eat some kind of a crazy meal (like hot dogs and cherry coke), say hello to everyone (and I mean everyone), get up and sing "It's a Wonderful World" and bring down the house. He had a virtual set he would do with Eric Brooks (a/k/a, the Human Jukebox) after the Voodoo set.
Earl had been a member of the Inkspots as a young man, and he must have been something then. I can only imagine.
Earl passed away in October, and Hammerstone's is having a fund-raiser to buy him a headstone tomorrow (Sunday)--Pearl Harbor Day. For Earl the Pearl.
To paraphrase Al Pacino--"Say goodbye to my little friend." We miss you, Earl.
2 comments:
This was a really nice night. My last memory of Earl is of him at Hammerstone's wearing a great big Obama pin on his dapper jacket.
Dad and I remember the Inkspots from our youth and we really liked them - although we did not know their individual names. They were very popular with our age group.
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