Sketch by Rhett Thurman, Former President of the South Carolina Watercolor Society

    Walter Rhett reviews connections between Charleston past and present for the city's only electronic serial journal, founded, published and edited by him. Rhett is a lowcountry native, raised in Summerville, a farming community and urban village 25 miles from the city.  Today, July 9, (1951), is his birthday. Educated in the public schools, Rhett was the first African-American male to graduate from Summville High School, in 1968.  Before spending two years at Summerivlle High, where he played trumpet in the marching band, once hearing a person yell "Nigger," in the quiet just before the band's half-time performance, and once in a Christmas parade being pointed at and meet by hate stares--an angry look of solid rage that burned the air between him and its senders, before these community confrontations of race in his young adulthood, Rhett attended Alston schools, the segregated but unique classrooms where surperb black teachers taught math, English, Literature, Social Studies, World History, Algebra, Biology, Chemistry, enabling students to master these concepts and develop relationships with children from all walks of the community in a way that race was a place of pride within their humanity.

      Rhett made first seat, first trumpet for the all-district band his senior year, while playing Eb horn in the Summerville concert band.  He was the first African-American student to be selected as a first seat player, and for his achievement, he was given the opportunity not to go, since participation in the band meant staying over night, in local homes.  Finally, an African-American family housed him, and in later years, stayed in touch with his family.  For the encore of the concert, the band practiced "Dixie." On the day of the concert, at the recognition of the opening strains, the entire audience stood up!  Rhett's family or he had never been present before in an all-white audience hearing Dixie, and so they stood as well, creating a laughing memory and family joke of how the Rhetts stood for Dixie!  (Well, we didn't know, and didn't think to protest, and Moma said at first she and Mrs. Fields thought they were applauding for the band!)

      Rhett also organized the city-wide celebration for the assasination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Summerville, arranging it on Friday afternoon, when he returned from the District band practice.  Calling the city, and several black ministers, and Majorie Singleton (Edwards) to sing, Rhett arranged for the celebration.  The pastor at First Baptist, the town's largest white congregation, turned down the invitation to participate.  The celebration made the editorial page of the local paper the next week, with special mention of Rhett.

     Acquired skills in food service, Rhett worked in the summers and through his college years as a waiter and banquet captain and maitre' de.  Fromn the Ocean House in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, to Colonial Williamsburg, to French Lick, Indiana, and Mackinaw Island, Michigan, to the fabled Homestead Hotel, Rhett worked in Dining rooms, and ocassionally on room service. 

     Attending college at Ohio State, Rhett worked for the Columbus Sheraton, which hosted the major society and political functions in the state's capital city.  He opened and established the banquet depratment of the Holiday Inn across from the Ohio State, of which John Glenn was an investor.  Here he hosted receptions for the annual Ebony Fashion Fair.

     At Ohio State, Rhett fellow students included Jim Cleamons, an All Big Ten point guard, drafted by the Lakers, and now Phil Jackson's assistant (Cleamons and Jackson played together on the New York Knicks), Archie Griffin, two-time Heisman award winner; Sharon Farmer, Director of Photography for the Clinton White House (both terms), Michael White, former mayor of Cleveland, and many other notables.

     He completed undergraduate studies at Ohio State and completed further graduate and professional studies at Ohio State, Johns Hopkins, New York University, and the University of the District of Columbia. 

     He and his ex-wife were married on John Coltrane's birthday (The fall equinox), and she later became the media director for the Congressional Black Caucus.  They maintain a cordial relationship, and share a fierce pride in their one child, Damali, who works for the band of New York.

     Rhett structures his life around knowledge.  Among his important discoveries:

• Music ----- the interviews of jazz drummer and bebop founder and originator, Kenny Clarke, which definitely cite the Charleston guitarist, Freddie Green, as the co-player who helped Clarke develop the unique, arythmic ensemble style of off-beats, shuffles, rim taps, and power rolls that Clarke later used in Harlem in the quintet that featured be-bop founder and greatest soloist, Charlie Parker.  Freddie Green, well recognized by Count Basie and other musicians as having the great sense of time of any musician in any era, was considered the key member of the "All-American Rhythmn Section," the name given to Count Basie's 1936 rhythm secion which features, Basie (piano), Green, (bass), and Jo Jones (drums).  the Basie Band created the first great nation-side dance craze in America, with the creation of the American dance music performed by big bands called "Swing."  Freddie Green's impeccable time, his ability to locate the beat in a way that the body of the listener was almost compelled to move, to enter the time and add to this new dimension by the inner music of dance, which uses blood, muscle, and bone to perform a "music" that turns the ear into a stage, a mere platform of celebration, a background for the spirit that leaps forth, relaesed by the beat.  Movies and videos capture the infectiousness of swing, the amazing foot steps, patterns, physical leaps and lifts, splits, partnering, extensions, and shimmy that swing released.  Freddie Green as the rhythm guitarist in America's greatest Swing band, was at the very center of this music and its national craze.  But for Freddie's time keeping abilities to have also fostered and nurtured the complex rhythms of be-bop places him on a point in time where as one musician said, "It was if God said let their be rhythm, and out came Freddie Green."
• Music -------- the discovery that the beat which underlines swing, be-bop, the Charleston, originates with the Jenkins Orphange Band, Charleston's first community band, which performed standard repretorie, and early jazz.  Freddie's ear and technique were trained in this elaborately rich environment of sophisticated rhythms, all emanating from a community base, anchored in the church, but funneled back in time to the rice fields, the long roads, the praise house, and the front porch.  The beat that Freddie Green adapts so skillfully that he must be recognized as one of the master drummers/musicians who, as did the African orginators, performed rhtymns on stringed instruments like the kora, or in Freddie Green's case, the acoustic guitar.  The source beat that Green adapts into an American sound that propells swing, rhythm and blues, and rock in its variations, has its home in the Sunday services of the lowcountry rural churches.  This beat involved hitting the thighs of the legs with lifted hands, shifting and moving side to side.  This beat is a resting beat, an Andante beat, that is a very subtle back beat, lacking the explosive power of the clapped hands.  This beat involves from the need to keep the fingers open and spread from a week of farm labor.  Tendons must be stretched and shouldlers stretched and lifted to eliminate stiffness, aches, and muscle and joint tightness. So in the days of the board churches, songs were sung to the rhythm of the resting beat, an andante beat, that slightly speeded up, but with the same spacing and pacing, became the beat of American swing, and the implied center of be-bop, two of the greatest musical innovations of the twentieth century.  And the simple, elegant chords, played in quarter note time on a Gretsch guitar by a Charlestonian, Freddie Green, were at the center, the heartbeat of both the ears and the feet.
• Music ------ the theology of the spirituals. 
• Other achievements:  Climbing Mount Kathdin, Maine's tallest mountain, its southeastern summit, Pamola, viewing the Knife's edge and eating blue berries on the mountain from a patch found sheltered in a small rocky cove.  
• Memories ------  The rescue of the Around the World sailor who capsized her boat from 40  foot seas, by a wrech thrown on the hull.

      Walter Rhett is a registered Charleston tour guide. His loves?  Jazz. Hiking. Thai food. Special places?  Bar Harbor, Maine; Hot Springs, Virginia.  Favorite cities: Charleston, South Carolina; New York; Chicago, New Orleans.  Joys? Good weather, and local conversation.

His daughter, also blogs. Find her experiences as a single woman in New York City, facing the perils and priviledges of finding her way at http://wonderchild.blog-city.com/