Three South Carolina Songsters

Mr. Pinkney "Pink" Anderson



I had the pleasure of spending an evening being entertained and educated by a young Hunter Holmes at the Laurens County Library last week. It was an hour of celebration of the music of two local songsters, Pink Anderson and Rev Gary Davis, both born in Laurens County over 100 years ago. Hunter did a fantastic job of bringing these fellows back to life with help from his guitar, kazoo, harmonica, quills, and a pocket knife as a slide.

Pink Anderson was born in Laurens in 1900 and spent his life as a blues/folk singer and guitarist. He joined the Indian Remedy Company in 1914, traveling the South and holding the crowd's attention in hopes they would buy the "Remedy". He retired from the road around 1957 after over 40 years of entertaining people with the blues, folk music, ragtime, and traditional ballads. Pink might even be called a throwback to a long gone era even at the time of his recordings, but his influence has reached numerous modern day artists. You may be familiar with his song recorded by Ry Cooder, I Got Mine. He is probably best known as the "Pink" in Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd founding member, Syd Barrett, combined Pink's name with North Carolina blues artist, Floyd Council, to create the name for Pink Floyd. Mr. Anderson died in 1974, but his music lives on in the recordings he left us. Reverend Gary Davis and friend.


Reverend Gary Davis was born in Laurens in 1896. He became blind as an infant and was the only one of his mother's eight children to survive to adulthood. He was a blues and gospel singer with a fascinating style of finger picking which influenced many famous musicians, including Townes van Zandt, Ry Cooder, Keb Mo, Jackson Browne, and Jack White. Ry Cooder tried to learn Rev Davis' style, sitting with him for "lessons". But he says "I couldn't make anything sound like that, and I never could play his way. I found that it was beyond my ability to do the thing that he was doing." I was surprised to see that Rev Gary wrote the song Cocaine which was later recorded by Jackson Browne with additional lyrics added. He died in 1972 and is buried in Long Island, New York. The recordings he has left for us are mostly gospels. His voice and guitar work are amazing. We often look at these wonderful musicians as a "lost breed" of entertainers that were known as "songsters"- singing guitarists who could do a large variety of music-blues, folk, pop, and religious. A big thank-you goes to another Laurens native, Hunter Holmes, for keeping this legacy alive and doing it so well. Hunter is more than a good musician, he, like Pink and Rev Davis, is a storyteller. He has captured that spirit in this mysterious music that comes from somewhere much further back in time and pulls on emotions that you didn't even know were there. If you can figure out who these people were and watch someone play their music, some of the mystery of it all is made clear. It has been said that the music of these songsters is defined by its audience as much as its musicians and this was evident in the faces watching this young man as he brought some old local spirits back to life.