Friday from the Archives: “King Mackerel and the Blues Are Running” a song by Bland Simpson and Jim Wann introduced by Jerry Leath Mills from NCLR 14 (2005)
NCLR is grateful for all the long-time friends who have supported our work over the years. Writer and musician Bland Simpson wrote for our crowdfunding campaign, “For over three decades, NCLR has published the breadth of the state’s best contemporary writers, thereby tying our literary and arts community together longer and better than any other journal in our province’s history — an extraordinary and ongoing accomplishment by extraordinary folks, to whom we are all immensely indebted! Here’s to the next three decades, and more!” Will you contribute to the campaign and help with those next three decades?
Simpson started sharing his writing gifts with NCLR in 1994 as a book reviewer. It made sense to include his “Kind Mackerel and the Blues Are Running” as part of our 2005 feature on “Outer Banks Writing.” Long-time friend Jerry Leath Mills introduced the song:
“One fine afternoon in May of 1984, Bland Simpson and I drove through the Orange County countryside on some now-forgotten errand. If the truth be known, there may have been a cold beer or two involved, but memory fails me now on that issue, too. Anyway, the conversation was about one of Bland’s projects, then in a very early stage, for a musical production centered on the Carolina coast with its attendant lore and “beach culture,” a culture of fishing, music, shag dancing, and any number of serio-comic situations associated with that long and endlessly fascinating chain of boardwalks and gleaming strands between Kill Devil Hills and Myrtle Beach.”
That early project has gone on to its own forty year production run: “it has continued to delight audiences in many venues, on Public Television as well as on stage and with all its music available on tape and compact disc. Its availability for production by other Cohorts than the original three, through arrangement with the publishers Samuel French, Inc., coupled with the willingness of Bland, Jim, and Don to stage revivals of their own with a satisfying frequency, seems certain to keep the blues on the run for a long time to come.”
NCLR is proud to support all the long-standing literary icons who help make NC “the writing-est state.”
Read the entire essay on Gale Cengage or purchase a copy of the 2005 issue.
