A Tribute To Old Time Country Music
Established 1998 (As Gary Sez)
A story by Don Edwards as it appeared in the Lexington Herald-Leader
A story by Don Edwards as it appeared in the Lexington Herald-Leader
By Don Edwards
HERALD-LEADER CONTRIBUTING COLUMNISTBecause this is a story about the past and Lexington's first rock music star, let's begin with the future. Sometimes only a child can see the truth.
"I never knew him," said Hannah Toadvine, 9, "but I'm sure that he would have been a very nice granddaddy from everything I've heard about him: he was funny and good-natured and kind and loving."
Hannah, a student at Cassidy Elementary in Lexington, sings in her church choir, studies cello for the school orchestra and is the only grandchild of Lexington singing legend Carlos "Little Enis" Toadvine, who died in 1976 at the age of 40.
Cynthia Toadvine Studer, 39, Hannah's mother, was only three years older than her daughter when her famous father died. More than 1,000 people came to his visitation or funeral.
"It had a profound effect on me. I was very shy, very quiet," she said, speaking publicly for the first time since her father's death.
"But it hurt. I can't tell you how it hurt -- the things that were written about him -- and I rebelled later on down the road. The anger and resentment finally came out."
Her earliest memories of her father are of how he loved-horses, University of Kentucky sports and Christmas; the house always being full of people; her sitting at the Comer's nightclub front counter drinking a Coke with a maraschino cherry in it; her father giving her $20 bills "when that was a lot of money"; of him playing boogie-woogie piano; and of her first learning to steer an old Pontiac that he drove before he had a flashy Cadillac convertible with the "Little Enis" front plate.
"That Pontiac had the biggest steering wheel in the world when I learned to drive in it," said Donna Faye Toadvine Harman, 46, Studer's older sister. "Daddy was a pretty good father, considering he was in the entertainment business and working nights. He loved his family. And people liked him. He was personable and had a way of captivating an audience."
I can verify that. I was one of the 1950s teenagers (usually with fake IDs) who crowded in to hear Little Enis and the Fabulous Table Toppers wherever they played: the Zebra Lounge, the Palms, Comer's, Brock's and other forgotten clubs of long ago. He was only 5 feet, 5 inches tall but had enormous stage energy and a quick wit. His big break, or so we thought, came when rockabilly piano phenomenon Jerry Lee Lewis played Lexington, heard Little Enis and hired him as a warm-up act for a tour that took him all over the country to then-famous venues such as the Sands, the Aragon and the Beverly Hills Hotel.
They split after the tour. "I was drinking heavily," Toadvine was quoted as saying. A Playboy magazine article by Ed McClanahan in the 1970s revived his popularity for a time and made him sort of a comic/tragic folk hero. It focused on his personal life, portraying him as a drunken, raunchy, colorful personality. The article was illustrated with a photo of Toadvine surrounded by a tawdry group of go-go dancers at the old Boots Bar on South Broadway.
"Enis didn't particularly like the article," said Pauline Rogers, 67, Toadvine's ex-wife and mother of his daughters. "Or even playing there. He said: 'Well, it's work.'" They were married more than a dozen years and had met at WLEX-TV, when she was one of the singing Kelley Sisters and they appeared on the same country music show.
"The first thing he said to me was: 'Do you want to see me play the guitar upside down and backwards?' And I said: 'Not really.' But years later, he didn't get angry about the Playboy publicity. He said: 'Ed's a good friend. If that's the way he writes it, that's fine.' I think Ed gave him some money so he could finish recording his only album. It was called I Kept the Wine and Threw Away the Roses."
In my 30s, I sat at what was then called a "fern bar" named the Fig Tree downtown and watched Enis as a solo act on his last legs. He was overweight and looked in pain. There was a spatter of boos and silence at some of his old jokes, politically incorrect to a new generation. But his guitar playing was still exquisite and drew applause. Studer still has his 12-string D-43 Martin guitar.
His first wife remembers him as one of five farm kids who grew up at Hogue Hollow in Boyle County. His uncles played music, and his mother was a song leader at church. He had rheumatic fever as a child; his doctor thought he wouldn't live past 30. Bedridden, he begged for a guitar and learned to play it flat on his back. "That was how he could do all those guitar novelty stunts -- 'left-handed, backward, upside down' -- later in life," Rogers said. "In Lexington, the night life and the adulation destroyed him. He had never had that much attention."
He came to Lexington, worked as a bellhop at the old Henry Clay Hotel, stoked the furnace at the old Lafayette Hotel and worked on a car lot. He began playing at Martin's, a North Limestone tavern, where customers would pass the hat and he'd earn $40 or $50. After he formed his own band, he was a sensation within a year, switching from country to the then-new, controversial rock 'n' roll music.
His daughters went different paths in life. Studer sang at Renfro Valley and in local clubs. "To a degree, his legend helped me. I got jobs because of it," Studer said. Today she is married, is a nurse and still reflects on her father's complicated life. "I still want to ask him: 'Why weren't you there more? Why did you drink so much?' If he had lived, I think he would have bought his parents' old home and retired to Boyle County."
Harman caught the downside. "A boy I was crazy about in high school wasn't allowed to visit me because I was the 'notorious' Little Enis' daughter. The funny part was, Daddy was strict and very protective of his daughters. We know only glimpses of his life." She sang with her father on stage and was bitten by the show-business bug. "When I was 12, he was teaching me how to hold a mike, how to move on stage, all the little tricks you need to know. He said, 'Don't get out of my sight' when we played private parties." She moved to Nashville more than 20 years ago and eventually became a backup singer on Merle Haggard's Kern River album and toured for several years with the Haggard show, meeting all the big names in the business and later working as personal-image consultant in Nashville.
"When we played Rupp Arena in 1988, the first thing my mother said was, 'Your father would have been so proud,'" Harman said. "That was my last concert. I wanted it to end in my hometown. You can only take so many years on the road, living out of a suitcase, living each day for that one hour of performance."
Today, Harman lives in Elizabethtown, is married and in business with her husband manufacturing GloTech illumination strips for bikes, safety vests and UK athletic wear.
Little Enis had a major heart attack in 1970 while performing on stage and was in a coma for eight days. He warned others about alcohol. One night in 1976, visiting his sister in Pompano Beach, Fla., he asked her to open his bedroom drapes so he could see the moon. His sister found him dead on the floor in the morning.
The legend began. Those left behind to live with it ... well, that's a different story. Rogers had told me that before his death, Little Enis had one wish: to record a gospel album with his daughters.
In a way, something similar happened one day in 2003. Suddenly, seated on the couch, Donna Faye, Cynthia and Hannah all began singing. The song was: "One fine morning ... I'll fly away."
Written by Don Edwards, a retired Lexington Herald-Leader columnist who wrote a column from 1979 to 2001
donaldcedw@ aol.com.Back To Little Enis Tribute
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