Hold your arms out in front of you, bend your elbows a little and touch your fingertips together to make a circle. There are trees that big around growing up out of the middle of some of the graves in the White Oak A.M.E. church cemetery down in Sanford, North Carolina. Floyd Council is buried in an unmarked grave in that cemetery.
Blind Boy Fuller only ever let two guitar players back him on his recordings: Gary Davis and Floyd Council. Gary went on to make hundreds of recordings. Floyd only ever recorded six commercial sides by himself. He appeared as accompanist on fifteen of Fuller's commercial recordings. Long after he'd had a series of strokes he recorded six songs in his home for, I think, Pete Lowry's Trix label, though they apparently weren't worth releasing - twenty...uh...seven total recordings...twenty-one recorded in his prime.
Floyd Council was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on September 2, 1911. He lived around Chapel Hill most of his life. He was a truck driver. He played with the Strowd Brothers - they called themselves the Chapel Hillbillies. Record companies promoted him as "the Devil's Daddy-In-Law" and "Dipper Boy." His earliest recordings were released under the name "Blind Boy Fuller's Buddy." All of those were record company gimmicks. He was called "Mr. Floyd" locally and though strokes started slowing him down in the sixties and had rendered him effectively unable to play by 1970 he was considered until the end of his life one of the finest guitar players in the Piedmont. He died in Sanford, NC. on May 9, 1976.
I am annoyed that he's lying in an unmarked grave.
So this is what I’ve decided to do about it.
Floyd should have a memorial-something at the very least. I thought for a while that he should have a highway marker, but the DOT won’t place a marker in a cemetery with a single noteworthy grave (I’m certain every person in that graveyard was noteworthy somehow to someone, but try telling that to the sign people) and they won’t place a marker on a road that isn’t part of the numbered state highway system. I may have misread my map, but I’m pretty sure Floyd’s buried on a county road and not a state road. Either way, I wrote them and asked them to consider putting a marker out there by Floyd’s grave.
I’m amenable to putting a bust or a tasteful statue in Sanford where he died or in Chapel Hill where he lived most of his life, but that would still leave his grave out there naked. It’d be all right with me if we could figure out how to do both.
Ideally, someone somewhere inherited the records from the church and those records include a map of the plots sold out in the cemetery. If I could find that map, I could find Floyd and we could just buy the man a dignified set of stones and set them out there at his head and feet.
I can’t believe that Pete Lowry and Bruce Bastin didn’t find the information if it was there to find and I can’t figure out how to get a hold of either one of them – hell, Pete Lowry might be dead for all I know (he’s not, he lives in Australia now) – so I reckon I’ve started going over ground others have already covered…
Things done:
I’ve been to the cemetery and had a good long look for myself. Seemed like the right place to start. I would have felt plenty stupid if it turned out that he had a stone the whole time. Let me just say…and I say this as a person from West Virginia who has seen some of the roughest and most neglected - or alternately, some of the most badly coal-company-abused cemeteries you can find anywhere in the world…this cemetery is in pitiful shape. It WILL take a brush hog to clear his grave if we can find it on a map – since we’re already raising money to put a stone in the cemetery, I’m thinking some part of this project should include cutting down trees and clearing some land and making the cemetery generally accessible again for everyone. Regardless, he may yet have a stone out there and I just couldn’t find it…
Since Floyd was buried in the White Oak A.M.E. church cemetery (at least, according to his death certificate he was), I’ve assumed he was a member of that congregation – therefore I wrote the pastors of the five A.M.E. churches in and around Sanford and asked them:
1. Are there any members of their congregation who might remember/be related to Floyd Council and may I be introduced to them?
2. When White Oak A.M.E. became defunct, did they inherit that church’s records and possibly the cemetery map?
I wrote the two Councils in the Sanford white pages and asked if they were related (not to each other – to Floyd). If so, can I come speak to them? Maybe they have a story to tell or a photograph I haven’t seen (I’ve only ever seen two pictures of him – in one of them his features are indistinct; in the other he looks jolly but sort of goofy) or maybe they actually attended his funeral and can point me to the right spot of ground…won’t know until I get some answers back.
I called the Sanford Public Library and set the reference librarian to work trying to find anything in the fiche that might help and through him contacted the Lee County Historical Society and set them to work looking through the archives for the White Oak records. Everyone I talk to I ask to keep an eye out for an old timer who might have been to the funeral and might have personal knowledge of the location of his grave.
The Triangle Blues Society auctioned off a poster I made for their Nat Reese show at the Rialto – It was the big 41-inch poster that hung out on the street with the movie posters. It is signed by everyone who played: Nat Reese, Me, John D. Holeman, Kelly Pace and Tad Walters. The poster sold for $200.00 and Kim Pearce, the wonderful and attractive young woman who won the auction turned around and donated it back to us so we could auction it off again at our August 7 fundraiser at Bone Daddy’s Hideaway.
The Questell Foundation has offered to donate $200.00 towards Floyd’s stones. Together, that makes four hundred dollars we’ve raised to mark his grave.
In order to do my part fundraising-wise, I’ve done a portrait of Floyd which will be available on an over-priced t-shirt at Reverbnation (link will follow when I figure out how to size the image properly for the t-shirt people). Remember, the money is for a good cause. I will also be selling prints on high-quality acid-free wheat paper at the Hayti Heritage Center on August 20 – most of that money will go to Floyd, getting the damned prints made is going to be expensive. You can contact me at thbullfrogwillardmcghee@yahoo.com if you’d like to buy a print and can’t make the Hayti.
I’d like to have a Floyd Council Blues Festival down in Sanford to coincide with placing the stone. We’ll see if we can make that happen.
I’ve done a few other things, but I’m tired and can’t for the life of me think of what they are right now – I’ll amend this deal when I’m not half asleep.
Tomorrow, I’m going back to Sanford to check with the county clerk’s office to see who owns the land the cemetery is on and who owns the land adjacent. If I can’t find his grave and our best deal is to place a marker somewhere close – like it is with Fuller’s memorial – it may become necessary to buy the land the monument will sit on. I’ll update as information becomes available…
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