Blowin’ In The Wind By Pete McCommons, Research
By Dennis Waters
When Dennis Waters gets something on his mind, he’s like a dog with a bone. Last year he called me up and said, “I think it’s a disgrace to our state that Sonny Terry’s not in the Georgia Music Hall of Fame. What do you think?”
I allowed as how I had assumed that Sonny Terry must surely be in the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, but Dennis said no. Sure enough, the greatest blues harmonica player ever to hurricane a Hohner has never been honored with induction.
We both promptly fired off letters to the chairman of the Georgia State Senate committee in charge of nominations, but Mr. Terry didn’t get in last year. Dennis knows more about Terry’s music than I do, and he was gnawing that bone. “How can it be?” he asked. “Don’t they know about Sonny Terry?”
I figured everybody knows about Sonny Terry, the blind bluesman who took up the harmonica out of necessity and played his way from the streets to the New York folk scene to Carnegie Hall to the Library of Congress and Europe—who linked up with guitarist Brownie McGee and played alongside the greats like Pete Seeger, who performed in the 1946 Broadway production of Finian’s Rainbow, and with McGee in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and with Steve Martin in The Jerk. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee were regulars at folk festivals and blues festivals during the ’60s and kept going into the ’70s.
With all this solid record of Terry’s national and international acclaim, Dennis and I couldn’t figure why in the world he’s not in our Hall of Fame. Then it dawned on us. Maybe people think that, great as he is, Sonny Terry has no claim to be in the Georgia Music Hall of Fame because he’s not from Georgia.
Go online and Google Sonny Terry. The biographical information you’ll glean is divided on his birthplace. About half of it says he was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the other half says Greensboro, Georgia. Let me get personal about this: I, too, was born in Greensboro, Georgia. When I was young and off on a trip, my parents admonished, “Be sure to say you’re from Greensboro, Georgia, or they’ll think you’re from North Carolina.”
Here’s what happened. Sonny Terry was born Saunders Terrell in Greensboro, Georgia in 1911, and after a while his family moved to North Carolina. It’s only natural that, as my parents warned, people would assume he was from that larger, better-known city.
Dennis and I know better. On separate occasions we each spoke with Sonny Terry after performances at The Great Southeast Music Hall in Atlanta. He confirmed his birthplace to Dennis as he did later to me. I went up to him after his performance, introduced myself and told him I was from Greensboro, Georgia. “Why, that’s where I was born,” he said.
Unfortunately, the State Health Department’s birth records in Greensboro only go back to 1919, but Dennis and I are not afraid to swear under oath before a State Senate committee in regard to what Sonny Terry told us. Barring that, if any Georgia music fans are adept at ferreting out statistical documentation, let’s get the great Saunders Terrell certified as a native Georgian and induct him into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame. Including Sonny Terry will honor our state.
Pete McCommons is editor and publisher of Flagpole Magazine in Athens. Dennis Waters is a retired schoolteacher now living in Athens and originally from Thomson, hometown of another great Georgia musician, and Georgia Music Hall of Fame inductee, Blind Willie McTell.
The nomination and selection process for the Georgia Music Hall of Fame is administered by the Senate Music Industry Committee and Friends of Georgia Music Festival, Inc. To voice your support for Sonny Terry’s induction, go to GeorgiaMusic.org/Inductees/php, download the Nomination Form and mail it to the address indicated on the form.
