www.theotherpaper.com BY ERIC LYTTLE
Nannie Sharpe always looked forward to calls from her daughter Jayma, especially since she’d left their Woodbridge, Va. home to study abroad in Italy. A call earlier this week, however, proved even more interesting than usual.
Jayma had been out to dinner with a couple of Italian acquaintances. One, named Roberto, was a record collector of some note, specializing in old jazz and soul. During the course of the evening, he relayed the story of how an old demo tape, recorded decades earlier in Columbus, Ohio, had gained a bit of notoriety after its use in the 2010 movie, Blue Valentine. Fans of the dark story of romance between Ryan Gosling and his co-star, Michelle Williams, who’d earned an Oscar nomination for her role, became enamored with the charmingly soulful song that highlighted the film, posting it all over YouTube, drawing hundreds of thousands of hits.
What made the story interesting was that the identity of the group that recorded the song had been lost to time. No one knew who these obscure Columbus singers were. The guest remembered the title of the story in which he’d read about the song: “Lost Soul” (which was The Other Paper’s cover story on Jan. 27)
Knowing her mother and her uncles had dabbled briefly in Columbus’s soul-music scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Jayma called her to tell her about it.
“She said, ‘Let me get on the Internet and look it up and I’ll get back with you,’” Sharpe said
Soon, her cellphone was blowing up with texts from her daughter.
“It was all, ‘OMG exclamation point, exclamation point,” said Sharpe. “She said, ‘This is you, Mom! They’re looking for you!’ I said, ‘Are you sure?’ And she said, ‘Mom-they are looking for you.’”
Sharpe, whose laptop recently died, went to the library Monday and looked up the link her daughter had emailed her.
“I was sitting there reading it. Oooo I was getting so excited,” said Sharpe. “I was having to jump up.”
The song in question was called “You and Me” and was recorded about 1970 as nothing more than a one-take rehearsal at Harmonic Sounds Studio, which once sat at the corner of East Broad and 18th streets. The taped rehearsal was then labeled, tucked in a box and all but forgotten for the next 40 years.
When the studio manager, Clem Price, died in Columbus in 2006, the tape was one of a handful that turned up at Price’s estate sale. The buyer was friends with an associate of the Numero Group, a label in Chicago that specializes in reissuing long-forgotten soul and R&B records recorded by small, indie labels.
After weeks of research and a field trip to Columbus to talk to some old soul singers still in town, Numero Group owner Rob Sevier and his associate, Dante Carfagna, were able to identify virtually all of the songs and artists on the tapes. Only one box remained a mystery. On it, written in pencil, were notes identifying tracks 1 and 2 as “Penny & the Quarters.” And nobody knew who Penny was, much less the Quarters.
A year later, Numero Group released a CD titled Eccentric Soul: The Prix Label, featuring songs recorded at Harmonic Sounds. Track 18 on the 19-song disk was “You and Me.” The CD sold poorly.
In 2009, two years after its release, actor Ryan Gosling over-nighted at his PR agent’s home in Chicago. Kathryn Frazier of Biz 3 publicity also happened to represent the Numero Group. As the night unfolded, Frazier and Gosling sat up playing old soul songs from the Numero Group releases. One song, in particular, caught Gosling’s ear.
Later that year, when he was filming Blue Valentine, Gosling knew just the tune to represent his character’s budding love for Cindy, the character played by Michelle Williams’ role-“You and Me.”
Within days of the movie’s release, the number of downloads from the Numero Group’s website for “You and Me” began to escalate.
And still, no one knew who Penny & the Quarters were.
A week after The Other Paper ran its January cover story about the mystery song, Glodean Robinson came forward. She was the widow of Jay Robinson, and she had proof he’d written the song. Unfortunately, he’d died in September, 2009-just about the same time Gosling was discovering “You and Me.” Robinson had no idea his song had been re-released in 2007. And with him, it seemed, also died the identity of Penny & the Quarters.
That is, until an Italian TOP reader met Jayma Sharpe, who quickly called her mother.
Nannie Sharpe was nicknamed Penny as a child. “Daddy gave us all nicknames,” she said. “There were 10 of us. He had to do something.”
“I was kind of a tomboy. I used to race my brothers. He’d say, ‘If you beat them, I’ll give you a penny.”
The Coulter family (Sharpe is Penny’s married name) moved to Columbus in 1961, from North Carolina. It was there, near Charlotte, that the family had begun singing together. “I probably started singing with my brothers and sisters when I was 5,” said Penny. “We’d sing all the time, in church, in the house. We’d stand around, helping whoever’s turn it was to wash dishes that week, singing together.”
In late 1969 or early 1970, Penny’s brothers, Preston, Johnny and Donald-all of whom still reside in Columbus-answered an ad in the newspaper.
“They were auditioning singers, starting a label,” said Preston. “My brothers and sister and I answered it. There were all these people there at Harmonic Sounds. It was really crowded. But when we sang, everyone was like, ‘You were great. You were great,’ and Mr. Price (the studio manager) told us, ‘I want to work with you.’”
In the following weeks, Penny, just a year out of high school at that point, began singing background with her brothers for other Harmonic artists. “We would go over there every Saturday morning and stay all day, from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. I remember thinking, ‘Do we have to stay all day?’”
Preston remembers meeting Jay Robinson. “Mr. Price asked Jay to work with us, to polish us up,” he said. “I remember he used to emphasize to us to enunciate those words, and he liked the phrase ‘my, my, my, my’ to illustrate.”
It’s a phrase Penny ultimately used in “You and Me”-a song Robinson asked them to sing one afternoon.
“I didn’t even realize they were recording,” Preston said.
“We were just trying to get ourselves on record,” said Penny. “It was exciting. It hadn’t really set with us as to what we could be yet. We were just trying to get on board.”
But a record never came, and as the soul scene slowly gave way to rock ‘n’ roll, and then disco, the studio ran out of money.
The Coulters moved on, but continued singing gospel together through the years, in the choir at Bethany Presbyterian, and in a handful of groups, calling themselves at various times the Harmony Group, the Ecumen, the Final Choice. They even produced one CD as DC and the Gospel Quest, but it never took off.
After working for 30 years as a mail sorter at the Main Post Office on Twin Rivers Drive, Penny moved to Woodbridge, Va., in 2006. Now 62, she still sings for the Harvest Life Changes Church, whose choir can be seen on the Word Network daily at 2 p.m.
None of the Coulters have yet seen Blue Valentine, the movie that pulled a rehearsal from a younger day out of obscurity. But they plan to. Soon.
“It’s been 40 years since I’ve heard it,” said Preston of that old recording. “I’m just shocked and elated at the same time.”
Rob Sevier, co-owner of the Numero Group label, spoke with Penny and Preston on Tuesday. “It’s exciting to resolve the mystery of this song,” he said. “It started as a throwaway in a catalog we thought was pretty cool. The song was charming, so we included it on the CD. And against all odds, we were proven correct long after it was released. The act of releasing the music aids in the discovery. Bringing the lost to light is a beautiful thing.”
Penny couldn’t agree more.
“Just last Sunday, my preacher’s sermon was that your blessings will come in unexpected forms. I know that’s right.”
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