Readers' responses can be interesting

My e-mail bag has been bulging with feedback:

REMEMBERING ANITA: My Aug. 23 column on Anita Humes Chappelle, lead vocalist on The Essex's 1960s hits Easier Said Than Done and (He's a) Walking Miracle, elicited a warm memory from my golden-oldies buddy, Harley Drew. "Good article about Anita," wrote Mr. Drew, operations director and morning show host at WGAC-AM (580).

"I wondered what had happened to her. I was still relatively new in Augusta when Easier Said Than Done was a hit (1963). I was at WFNL (a former Augusta station) and somehow or another made contact with Anita and asked her to sit in for a bit on one of my shows. ... I always felt that she had tremendous potential and who knows where her career might have gone had she not been dedicated to her military career."

LARRY JON STORIES: Bobbie Ross, receptionist and assistant business manager at WKXC-FM (99.5) in North Augusta, wrote concerning my Sept. 6 column about Augusta balladeer Larry Jon Wilson. Mr. Wilson tapes announcing segments for Turner South in the WKXC studios.

Ms. Ross wrote: "I have been very fortunate to engage in some great conversations with Larry Jon. I do not know of his songwriting or musical work, but he has constantly amazed me with his memory of people and places in Augusta.

"The great memory he has is in itself amazing, but the delivery of the story is even more enjoyable. His voice brings back a wonderful part of the South that I am afraid that we are losing."

KEEN ON KEAN: Athens, Ga., resident Todd Cowart of the country-rock band The Hushpuppies, which has been playing The Red Lion on Walton Way, continues to be a major follower of Texas country-rockers Charlie Robison and Robert Earl Keen.

"I met Robert Earl Keen again in Athens the other night," Mr. Cowart wrote. "He put on the best show I've seen him do. He had a packed house and had them in the palm of his hand. He truly is the alternative country market. What an artist!"

ABOUT THAT SONG: Nashville songwriter Gwil Owen answered by e-mail my query about his song Oh, Augusta that the new band Pinmonkey has recorded for two of their albums, Speak No Evil, and their self-titled major-label debut due Tuesday on BMG/RCA.

"I've been in Canada for three weeks," noted Mr. Owen, who with Allison Moorer co-wrote the Oscar-nominated song A Soft Place to Fall, featured in the Robert Redford movie The Horse Whisperer.

"The (Pinmonkey) song (about love lost in the Garden City) is indeed set in Augusta, Ga. I've never been there, so it's more about coming back to your hometown, wherever that might be. I got Sand Bar Ferry Road (a reference in the song) from a road atlas, and I called my friend Rich Brotherton to fact-check. I don't really know how I came to write the song. The "Oh, Augusta" part just came into my head and I built it around that. I wish I had a good story for you, but it's just one of those oddball things."

LORETTA, CONWAY AND JAMES: One reader wants to find Loretta Lynn's and Conway Twitty's duet, God Bless America, Again, and another wants the name of a DVD release featuring 1970s concert footage of Augusta soul legend James Brown.

The best I can determine is the Lynn-Twitty duet is the title song on a 1972 release from Miss Lynn for MCA.

The James Brown concert footage likely is from The T.A.M.I. Show movie originally released in 1964 and recently released on DVD. The historic rock and rhythm and blues concert was filmed in the Santa Monica (Calif.) Civic Auditorium. It featured, as one reviewer put it, "electrifying footwork by James Brown" and also performances by the Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, The Supremes, Jan and Dean, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Leslie Gore and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas.

Don Rhodes has written about country music for 31 years. He can be reached at (706) 823-3214 or at ramblin@morris.com.