Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published in “Performance”

Kearns Tells All About Phoebe — But Who Is ‘The ‘Poetry Man?’

Phoebe Snow Rolling Cover
Phoebe Snow ‘Rolling Stone’ cover from June 5, 1975.
At about five-thirty on Sunday afternoon, Philip Kearns and the band got tuned-up to play and pay “A Tribute to Phoebe Snow.” This would be the fourth time that Kearns had performed this tribute to his ex-wife, who died a little over four years ago at age 60. He’d originally done the show as a one-off performance in Greenwich Village about a year ago, but the success of that show led to a performance in downtown Winston-Salem, which led to another performance at Greensboro’s Carolina Theatre.

This time he was playing at the Luna Lounge & Tiki Bar, a nice enough small bar at the northern boundary of Winston-Salem’s gallery district, a far cry from the Duplex Cabaret, where he first performed the show, or the venerable Carolina. But the show was for charity, to raise funds for the North Star LGBT Center, a cause dear to his heart. So, as they say, “The show must go on.”

Keeping Phoebe Snow’s Music Alive in Winston-Salem

Tribute to Phoebe Snow posterI can’t remember the last time I heard Phoebe Snow’s “Poetry Man” on the radio. But 40 years after the song first hit the airwaves, Philip Kearns is working to make sure her music is not forgotten with a tribute show he’s been playing around the Triad for about a year now.

It’s not surprising that you don’t hear Ms. Snow on the radio, which programs almost exclusively by genre. Like many talented musicians, Phoebe Snow transcended any single genre, and the music she created measured soul, jazz, rock and pop into a blend that was distinctly her own. Coming to prominence in the middle of the 1970s, she was one of the last of the great singer/songwriters who populated the charts in the early part of that decade, and one of the last of a breed of popular musicians who eschewed pop pablum to make her own kind of music, as Cass Elliot would say.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been working as a journalist since the 1970s. She currently hosts a weekly radio show of  sixties music, The Sixties in 60 that can be heard every Sunday at 6 pm Eastern Time on The Barrel of Rock.