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    The Music of Bobby Goldsboro: Musicians of Note
    The Music of Bobby Goldsboro: Musicians of Note
    The Music of Bobby Goldsboro: Musicians of Note
    Ebook113 pages1 hour

    The Music of Bobby Goldsboro: Musicians of Note

    By Robert F. Reynolds

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    About this ebook

    Like many young men, Bobby Goldsboro's enviable music career came about by chance.  Playing in a local band while attending college, rock great Roy Orbison hired Bobby's band to back him.  What begin as a temporary gig turned into one of the longest-lasting careers of the pop/rock era.  Soon Goldsboro was recording on his own.  Among his many time-proven hits are: Honey, Broomstick Cowboy, Summer (the First Time), Watching Scotty Grow, I'm a Drifter, The Straight Life, See the Funny Little Clown, and a host of other memorable gems.  Before long, Bobby was not only turning out hit records, he was hosting his own successful TV variety show.  As his music career wound down, he turned his skill to painting.  He is an accomplished artist with paintings gracing public places across the South. The Music of Bobby Goldsboro relates his story from small town kid to music legend, TV personality and artist.  It's a story you won't want to miss. 

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRobert Reynolds
    Release dateFeb 5, 2021
    ISBN9780359240401
    The Music of Bobby Goldsboro: Musicians of Note
    Author

    Robert F. Reynolds

    Robert F. Reynolds has penned several books, including: A Perilous Place; Thunder Bay; El Paso Run; The Rabbit's Tale; Along the Quay; Gray Wolf Pass; Mackinac Drift; Orchids and Sand; Molasses Men; Ernesto Juarez; Stiller's Creek; A Dark and Curious Place; A Fine Gray Rain; and others.  He's also written several music related books in his The Music of.... series. 

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      Book preview

      The Music of Bobby Goldsboro - Robert F. Reynolds

      The Music of Bobby Goldsboro

      Forward

      In the early 1940s, a short distance outside Dothan, Alabama, U.S. Army Camp Rucker was preparing military troops to go to war in Europe and the Pacific.  In years to come, a vast number of military men and women would pass through the installation for training on their way to conflicts overseas.  Fort Rucker is now the principal flight training installation for Army Aviation.

      Tucked away in the deep South, Dothan and its surrounding countryside was a region of farmland and forests, pies and moonshine, bayous and oxbows, kudzu and country crooners named Williams; Hank, AKA Luke the Drifter, the country music sensation from near Birmingham.

      A lazy hour’s drive southeast of the Camp Rucker military post was Marianna, Florida in the Sunshine state’s panhandle.  Similarly, Rucker/Dothan were almost equidistant to both the Georgia and Florida state lines.  Within minutes of Dothan or Marianna, one could be in any one of the three states.

      The damming of the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers in 1952 formed Lake Seminole, at the very tip of the southwest Georgia and Florida/Georgia state line, a short distance east of sleepy Marianna.  The lake is abundant with catfish, largemouth and striped bass, crappie and chain pickerel, not to mention alligators, various snakes and waterfowl—an ideal location for sportsmen.  From the reservoir the muddy Apalachicola meanders its way south to the Gulf, slipping lazily through Florida’s Panhandle.   

      Perhaps the most prominent physical feature of Marianna is Florida Caverns State Park, located less then three miles from the heart of the town.  It’s the only Florida state park with air-filled caverns that are open to the public.  It was an easy detour off Highway 90 for weary travelers heading east or west.   

      Back then, in the early 40s, Marianna was a small town with a population of barely more than 5,000 citizens. 

      On January 18, 1941 the birth of Robert Bobby Charles Goldsborough increased the town’s population by one. 

      Chapter 1

      Grace Wynell (Nell) Cawthon was born November 9, 1920 in Cottondale, Florida, thirty-six miles directly south down Highway 231 and a mere thirteen miles due west of Marianna, Florida.  The Cawthons later moved to Dothan where she met and married Charles Edward Goldsborough.  Charles, four years older than Nell, was born on March 12, 1916 in Mobile, Alabama.  His parents died when he was young and his aunt raised him.

      Charles’ aunt Wilhelmina owned Schad Flower Shop in Dothan, at first operating out of the lobby of Dothan’s Houston Hotel.  Eventually Wilhelmina moved her business to Main and South Oates Streets, where they lived in the back end of the shop.  In 1939 her newly wedded nephew Charles and his bride, Nell, moved to Marianna to open a second floral shop.

      In 1940, son Jimmy was born to the youthful Goldsboroughs and a year later came baby Robert (Bobby).

      WWII beckoned and the Army drafted young Charles and sent the boy off for three long years to fight in the European theater.  Fierce battles raged throughout the European countryside as Charles’ worried Nell kept the home fires burning.  At last the Allied forces beat Hitler’s armies into submission.  With the war over at last, Charles returned home to assume his family and business duties and to fulfill his familial obligation to grow the flower shop.

      An avid golfer, hunter and fisherman, Charles knew the Florida Panhandle to be in an ideal location to satisfy his leisure pastimes. In his later years Charles joined the American Legion, the Dothan Elk’s Lodge and became an esteemed member of the St. Columbia Catholic Church.

      There is little reported about the Goldsborough boys’ youth before their freshman years, but reviewing their high school yearbooks leads one to believe they were typical all-American boys immersed in juvenile athletics. It’s obvious they were absorbed in sports, as both would play on various high school teams and more than likely, fishing and hunting took up some of their time as they followed in the footsteps of their father. 

      Growing up, the younger Goldsborough boy was an impassioned Little League and Pony League baseball player who occupied his time fielding grounders and shagging fly balls on muggy Southern summer days. He was a decent pitcher but undersized, so he turned his attention to perfecting his skills at second base.   

      Recalling his youth, Bobby would say of Marianna, It was a great place to grow up because there wasn’t any pressure on kids at that time.  I had a great childhood.  I had an older brother and we just had a great time. To this day, I look back, it was one of the happiest times is my life living in Marianna.[1]  It was a telling comment, as Bobby would write and sing of happy childhood experiences in many of his later recordings.  

      But, as with many young athlete hopefuls, Bobby’s slight physical stature limited his athletic potential, so he turned his attention to music. 

      By age 12, Bobby had taught himself to play a borrowed ukulele and perfected his singing. He would learn to play other instruments as well, including guitar.  He became quite proficient, in fact, so that his talents with stringed instruments would serve him well in years to come.   

      Like many athletically inclined boys his age, he aspired to play in the big leagues just like the handsome fellows whose images were printed on the Bowman baseball cards sold for a nickel a pack alongside rolls of Necco Wafers and penny portions of Squirrel Nut Chews, in Marianna’s mom and pop grocery stores.

      As of the early nineteen-fifties, no Major League Baseball team existed in the Deep South for Bobby to idolize, so why not admire a rustbelt city’s professional nine?  He chose Chief Wahoo’s Cleveland Indians.  Everyone idolized some team or another.  But if the slight young lad were to realize his baseball ambition, he’d have to grow some to beat out the Tribe’s Bobby Avila for that coveted 2nd base job and play alongside the likes of Al Rosen, Vic Wertz and Early Wynn. 

      But, multiple encounters with batted balls and an errant self-spiking during an attempted stolen base convinced him he should proceed with caution when considering a career on a professional level baseball diamond.  Strumming stringed instruments and sketching seemed to pose far less risk. 

      He recalled growing up not recognizing a musical difference existed between singers like pop crooner Nat Cole or country artist Slim Whitman.  To him, it was all simply music.  His eventual music career would showcase everything from pop standard ballads to rock and roll, Northern Soul and country, with him slipping easily from one form to another.  But that was still a ways off.

      After his freshman year in high school young Bobby’s family moved the thirty-five miles northwest to Dothan. 

      The elder Charles’ Aunt Wilhelmina Schad passed away in 1956 leaving a void, so the Goldsborough family up and moved to Dothan to take over the original Schad Flower Shop.  Dothan was a bigger market with old family ties.  Son Jimmy and his wife Linda would continue to run the shop after Nell and Charles retired. The shop is still in the family as of today.

      The Goldsborough boys continued their participation in high school athletics as pictures of both appear on the school’s basketball team(s), Jimmy, number 11 as a guard on the A team and sophomore Bobby, number 23, on the B team.

      After graduating from high school, Jimmy went one hundred miles north to attend Auburn University.  He would graduate from Auburn University with a degree in finance and pursue a career in the banking

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