“I heard you were in the Karaoke bar,” my niece said to me. Kelli Daniel’s phone call led off with that statement, and I knew from whence she had gotten that bit of misinformation. I told her that I had not been in a “karaoke bar,” but the bar that I frequent to shoot pool has that singing option on Friday and Saturday. My sister had called me on a Friday, and Jaci Clark heard the hollering in the background. “Well, did you sing?” asked Kelli Daniels. “’Cause I know you can, and you have.” I told my niece that I have only taken the microphone once, and that I was compiling a “set list” for future possibilities.
When I walk into Si Greene’s on the east side of Indianapolis, there is someone who will call out to me: “The singing pool player!” I will stop at the front bar for a beverage and proceed to the back, where the pool tables wait. When I leave, I leave a snippet of song with whichever server is behind the bar: “Goodbye, no use leading with our chins; this is where our story ends.” I also do that singing thing when I leave the cidery that I visit with my friend Paula Nicewanger, one of the co-owners of this publication. But “singing pool player” is a new designation, coined by a Si Greene’s patron.
I have been singing for most of the life that I can remember. My brother and sister and I would, under the direction of our mother, sing in churches throughout the Hill District of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Brother Jerri joined me when “The Chancellors” – a “singing group” and not a “band” – were formed. We performed the Don and Juan song “What’s Your Name” on the Schenley High School stage during a talent show in the early 1960s. In 2010, as she lay dying, my mother voiced a snippet of that song, and reminded me that she had been in the audience during our performance. I have continued planned as well as impromptu deliveries of song throughout the years; some of the planned deliveries will occur with the Irvington Community Chorus (see “Harmony Collected,” The Weekly View, May 15th, 2025.) To coin a phrase from the French philosopher René Descartes, “I sing, therefore I am.”
When I lived in St. Louis Missouri, I frequented Jack Patrick’s, an Irish pub near where I lived. I was a pool player on a team that the pub sponsored, and, as is my wont, a frequent singer of songs in the pub. I remember my dear friend Mike Dolan barking at me: “CJ! Go home! My ears hurt!” I met some men who had a band, and they needed a “sanger,” (the Southern pronunciation of “singer,”) and I sang with them. We practiced and practiced and sang and sang and never played anywhere other than their living rooms and dens, but when I joined my pool team, I shared my joy of singing with the teams against whom we played.
My current Irish pub, Si Greene’s, is the latest place for me to impose my song on the patrons, and on Friday nights, I can do so as part of a Karaoke offering with the musical backing of DJ Marshall. As I told my niece Kelli, I have not trotted out the pipes for delivery of a song but twice, to date. I am going to sing into DJ Marshall’s microphone again; I heard someone in the small audience near the pool tables murmur, “a pool player who can sing.”
The singing pool player.
cjon3acd@att.net