Lee O.B. (or Obie) Quiggins was a street singer I found picking an old Martin guitar on 4th and Main in Evansville, Indiana----July 21st, 1960That night I taped Lee in a room at the old Lincoln Hotel in Evansville. He was a strange singer--to say the least. He had a bizarre speech impediment but that didn't stop him. As a kid barely out of my teens I thought Lee was the coolest guy I'd ever seen. He was real and authentic (I was sure) and whatever he sang, to me it was valuable "folklore". Taping Lee made me "a collector" as important as Child and Lomax. I came home that night and played those tapes for my family---an aunt and an uncle. When they quit laughing and calling him Art's unwashed baritone, I retired to my bedroom where I consoled myself by trying to strum a banjo I'd bought just that week. I was devastated.
Lee Quiggins was as strange as I have described him. Actually moereso. My family was probably right. But he did have a unique style of picking his guitar -- a strange stacatto pecking sound not unlike the cacophony produced if chckens were to attack a hammered dulcimer or an autoharp. He had a flatpick stuck into a thumb pick---between the bottom of the pick and his thumb. To this day I've never seen anyone else do that.
Last week, a few weeks after I had sent a cassette of Lee's performance that night to Fritz Schuler in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, I got a CD in the mail. Fritz had taken my tape of Lee and digitized it. He'd put it on a CD. I could not believe my ears---or eyes. I'm certain that, somewhere, in a better land over the proverbial rainbow, Lee O.B. (Obie) Quiggins of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee---58 years old in 1960---was happy and completely aware that an 18 year old kid from Chicago had immortalized and digitized him for all posterity and for all time.
As Thomas Wolfe said once in one of his massive books, "This world, this life, this time---is stranger than a dream."
Art Thieme