But we had dreams--and his was to make the big time, singing songs. I had a radio show and we used to talk about it.

We drifted into separate ways and when I ran into him ten years later, we were both in Lex­ington. I was starting to write for a newspaper. He was bellhopping at the Henry Clay hotel, shoveling coal at the Lafayette Hotel-both torn down now-- and trying to get a start playing, guitar for enough money to make a living from it.

­ He was working at Martin's for a nickle on a beer. "Elvis was making it big with his pelvis rock", Enis recalls, "and I could mimic that sound and those movements". It would be obscene to tell you how he got his stage name, but it started right there and then. And Little Enis began to move fast.

First to the Zebra Bar, where the Fabulous Table Toppers were formed. Then to Brock's, where -Jerry Lee Lewis heard him and took the group on the road. Next came the Sands. The Aragon: The Beverly Hills.

The better part of a decade had passed, and Little Enis had been near enough the top'to touch it.

Then it got to be 1974 and I hadn't heard from him in a couple of years. One day the phone rings. Little Enis says "There's an article about me coming out in the March Playboy.

He'd been in the hospital where he nearly died. "I was an alcoholic," he explained. Little Enis hadn't saved any money. Most of his friends had abandoned him. But he never forgot how to fight back -- and he started a new direction, without the booze or the hard rock.

This is his first country album. There is and has always been a tremendously talented and generous person behind the upside-down image. "I Kept The Wine and Threw Away, The Roses" tells it better.

One of the comfortable things about country music and musicians is the down-home friendli­ness ana good will. Like the musicians who played on this album. Like Cecil Jones who engineered it. Like the people who grubstaked it. You couldn't ge.t them together for only money.

All of them must have been thinking the same thing I was when I made the photos for the cover and sat down to write this blurb for the jacket.

We think you'll agree that this left-handed, upside down, pint-sized bundle of guts can really sing the notes right off a song and that he has earned a second chance. After all, he took his knocks and he got up again. That's how it is.

John Alexander
Entertainment Editor. The Lexington Herald Leader

From Sentinel Star - Orlando, Fla. - Fri. August 30,1974)

By Larry Guest

LEXINGTON, Ky. - Little Enis (real name Carlos Toadvine) is already an old man in his mid-forties.

Better known as Little Enis, this unlikely entertainer became a local legend here ­abouts a decade ago, appearing seven nights a week at highway bistros lining the Rich­mond Road on the outskirts of'town. From miles around, millworkers and gas station attendants and truckers gathered to erase the toils and frustrations of a long day with. breakers of brew and the earthy renditions of Enis.

Falling into ill health, Enis began asking for a night off. Then two a.nd three and so on until Carlos Toadvine became only a fond memory and a withered little man cough­ing himself into oblivion in a bleak, two-room apartment above a downtown Lexington five and ten.

After almost five years of obscurity, our hero was resurrected by a feature-length story in Playboy magazine. By popular demand, as they say in the business, somebody sought out Toadvine, nursed him back to passable health, and put him back in the road houses. Although lacking in strength, Enis has managed to retain his simple humor.

On one recent evening, he spent several long minutes with his ear pressed tight against a post during intermission. Then he shifted and put his other ear to the support. A curious onlooker from the bar could stand it no longer and held his ear against the beam. . "1 don't hear a thing," he protested.
"I know", lamented Enis, shaking his head wearily, "It's been like that-all...week".

Larry Guest, Sentinel Star Staff

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