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OliverFest: North Wilkesboro celebration will pay tribute to hometown singer who made good
Journal File Photo
William Oliver Swofford at his home in North Wilkesboro in a 1980 photo.
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Published: June 17, 2009
NORTH WILKESBORO - William Oliver Swofford was a big singing star in the summer of 1969.
Swofford went by the stage name Oliver and died in 2000. He was in his glory days with hits "Good Morning Starshine" and "Jean," which earned him a gold record.
That September, he stopped by his alma mater, Wilkes Central High School.
He entered the high school carrying a guitar and wearing a light jacket. The hood was pulled over his head so as not to attract screaming girls. He walked into the advanced chorus class taught by his former teacher, Mary Louise Clements.
He pulled down his hood. And he pulled out his guitar.
Ted Brown was in that class. He listened to every word.
"He sits down and sings for close to an hour only because Miss Clements was so proud of him," Brown said. "He apparently was a fine young man to do a favor for her. That really impressed me all my life."
Forty years later, Brown is organizing this weekend's OliverFest, a tribute to a hometown singer who made good.
OliverFest will run from noon to 8 p.m. Saturday in downtown North Wilkesboro. Britishmania, a Beatles tribute band, will perform along with musical acts Crusher Run, RudeMood, Eddie Sturdivant and OFX and Sonny Remington. The Wilkes County Cruisers will display class cars. There will be contests for dancing and singing.
To his friends here, Oliver was known as Bill Swofford. His brothers Carl and Jim still operate a number of businesses including the Brushy Mountain Smokehouse and Creamery, where a framed Oliver album cover hangs on the wall. His brother, John, is commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference.
"We think (OliverFest) is wonderful, and certainly hope it will be a success," said Carl Swofford, the oldest brother.
Like his brother John, Bill Swofford was a Morehead Scholar at UNC Chapel Hill.
Bill Swofford joined fellow Carolina students to form a bluegrass band, the Virginians. The band toured some, changed its name to The Good Earth, and made an album that didn't do well, then split up. But Swofford had met a producer, Bob Crewe, who loved his pure, clear voice and wanted to make him a solo artist.
Crewe wanted to redo the song "Good Morning Starshine" from the Broadway musical Hair, even though one of his other artists had failed to make it a hit. He thought that Swofford could.
On the track, Swofford played guitar, which he had learned just two days before recording the song.
But before Crewe's label released it, Crewe decided that his blossoming star needed a new name. The Broadway musical Oliver! was big at the time, and they settled on Bill Swofford's middle name to launch the career of Oliver.
"Good Morning Starshine" made it to No. 3 on the Billboard chart in the summer of '69. The follow-up, "Jean," was Rod McKuen's theme to the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It did even better, reaching No. 2 on the Billboard chart and garnering McKuen an Oscar nomination for best original song.
Oliver's later releases never achieved his previous level of success, but he continued singing, performing at college campuses and other venues before settling into a career in business in Louisiana.
He died of cancer in 2000. He was 54.
But in the summer of '69, he was young and handsome and an inspiration to people in a small town in the North Carolina foothills.
"He was very good," said Clements, who still lives in North Wilkesboro. "He could sing anything."
Brown recalls being 16 years old, driving down Cherry Street in North Wilkesboro in his father's car, and hearing Oliver sing: "Good Morning Starshine, the Earth says hello, you twinkle above us, we twinkle below...."
The world seemed full of possibilities.
"I thought, ‘Wow! That guy went to my high school; he grew up down the road from me and went to the Y,'" Brown remembers. "I thought, ‘Wow! You can be anything you want to be.'"
■ Monte Mitchell can be reached in Wilkesboro at 336-667-5691 or at mmitchell@wsjournal.com.
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