The Godfather arrived in style. Emerging from a white stretch limo in front of East of the Ryan on Sunday, March 19, the south-side scenester and aspiring R & B vocalist sauntered into the club draped in a luxurious car coat and clutching a bejeweled drinking cup. Inside, a group of matronly women sitting near the stage, sipping fruit juice and still dressed for church, barely glanced at him. But they took note of the many other musical figures who arrived for the show, a benefit for Clarence “Little Scotty” Scott: Otis Clay, Artie “Blues Boy” White, Bobby Jonz, Lee “Shot” Williams, and Little Smokey Smothers, among others.
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“We all seem to come together when these kinds of things happen,” Clay said from the stage during the first set. “If you think you got problems, I got the report on Scotty–that’s a problem. So this will be our theme song tonight.” He then launched into his inspirational signature tune, “If I Could Reach Out (and Help Somebody),” and the audience responded with affirmations and applause.
In the early 60s, when he was about 15, the KKK firebombed his family’s home in Florence, South Carolina. Scott suffered third-degree burns on most of his body. “I probably had over 90 operations,” he told me in 2003. “Blood ‘fusions, grafting skin. People used to die, and when they died they cut the skin off ’em, and I got the skin. They had a worm out of Africa–maggots. They’d put it on you and [it would] eat the dead skin and drop on the floor, and I would look at it and just holler, scream like bloody murder.”
“His appearance either was a blessing or a bummer, because a lot of the people regarded him as a caricature rather than a serious act,” Barge says. “The comment was about size and his looks and the burning. He’s a good singer, man. He couldn’t catch a break.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Marc PoKempner.
