By Ryan Phillips
Bland Simpson's path through life could be likened to a river with thousands of inlets, or a twisted tree with branches in all directions. His contributions to music, theatre, academia, literature, and conservation are as deep as they are broad. As a college student with similar interests whose post-college career is approaching fast, interviewing and profiling Simpson was an emotionally and intellectually fascinating experience. "Comparing Notes: A Field Survey with Bland Simpson" is an examination of both Simpson's success and the personal effects of speaking with him.
The metal chairs at Weaver Street Market’s outdoor seating area were as vibrant as the sunlight in my eyes, with little space for shade. I shielded my vision as I looked around for a face I had seen dozens of times, though almost exclusively across screens. Bland Simpson appeared across the plaza wearing the baseball cap and pocketed vest that have become his trademark. From the moment he sat down and began to speak, the glorious weather and murmuring passersby faded into the background. He made eye contact with me as he leaned forward into the small talk. In those opening moments, the conversation wasn’t between a brilliant, well-known, Tony-winning writer-professor-musician-conservationist and a young college student, but just between two people catching up after time spent apart. He gave me the answer of an author when I asked about his connection to the spot we were in. Painting a picture of Carrboro (which he called “the Paris of the Piedmont”) long before I had ever been there, he brought me back to his childhood. He pointed this way and that to identify the former locations of factories and water towers and told me stories about the train line that used to bring students into Chapel Hill. Simpson soon progressed into discussing the beginnings of his career.
As I listened to the turns of his origin story, I began to visualize myself in his shoes. While a student at UNC-Chapel Hill, he developed his passions for writing and music at the Daily Tar Heel and at the piano bench, respectively. My short stint at the newspaper and my forthcoming afternoon with a clarinet in the practice room echoed in my mind. The thought of him and I starting out in almost the exact same position, albeit over fifty years apart, was simultaneously inspiring and overwhelming. I tried to brush away the introspective questions as his answer continued. Music and writing combined into songwriting, songwriting turned into a contract, a contract became an unexpected move to New York City.
The journey that started his professional music career is one of two strange, influential trips to New York at age twenty. His first trip, in 1968, brought him to the home address of Bob Dylan in Woodstock. With no distinct plan, he hitched along in his friend’s car in the dead of winter and made it to Dylan’s front door. Answering the door without a coat in the sub-freezing temperatures, Dylan stood on the porch and made conversation with the young stranger outside. The talk was a brief but memorable one, as he wrote an evocative short piece about the experience years later. Four months after, on Good Friday, he found his way into New York City with no scheduled appointments but a head full of songs he was eager to share. Upon arriving at one of Albert Grossman’s publishing companies, a woman named Linda was the only one working on the holiday. While at the office, she played Simpson an advance copy of Nashville Skyline, the album Bob Dylan was working on at the time. Linda listened to six of his songs and took him to another building to record music. Afterward, she invited him to come to a concert with her. “So all of a sudden, here I am in a little club about to see Tim Hardin, having gone myself into a studio for two or three hours and laid down a dozen songs. I like New York, I like this.” At the club, Linda introduced him to Odetta, another legend of the 1960s New York folk scene. He went on to spend the night at Grand Central Station before catching a bus home. He received a formal songwriting contract offer five days later. As with his description of Carrboro, Simpson’s detail gripped me. I could feel the cold air on Dylan’s porch, the dim lighting of Tim Hardin’s concert, the nighttime bustle of Grand Central. A few months older now than he was then, I began to imagine whether I could ever work up the courage to make such a journey. My quickest internal answer was a loud “no,” but with the cinematic glory of Simpson’s tale, I couldn’t help but dream.
In his narration of this chance beginning, or “happy accident,” as he would call it, the excitement was palpable. Still, he maintained his friendly, relaxed demeanor, as though telling a story he’s told a thousand times. These happy accidents pervade his career. Simpson spoke about how Max Steele, the then-director of UNC’s creative writing program, asked him to teach because he was an up-and-coming author. Eventually, this evolved into a full-time position. One coincidence begets another; if not for Steele’s offer, I would not have met Bland, and I likely would not have been inspired to study English. His thoughtful, engaging teaching would not have reached me, my classmates, or the generations of students who have come before us.
Collaboration is a running theme of Simpson’s greatest happy accidents. When I asked him about the role of collaboration in his work, much of his answer was about his wife, Ann, who is a photographer. He encapsulated their work together in a single story, which he told in fond, vivid detail. They spent a day exploring the remnants of Shell Castle, North Carolina, once an industrial point of entry for the state. “It was about an acre of mostly oyster shells, and all those buildings that had been there were all gone. But you could see their frames and foundations. The water was very shallow that day. It was extra extra low tide.” He brought his notepad, and she her camera. After wandering the small island and returning home, they compared their observations. What he saw as a writer and she as a photographer overlapped some, but the richest area of discovery was in the differences. With their two distinct visions, they each saw patterns and images that the other missed entirely. He found that working with Ann expanded the bounds of his vision. “Out of the two of us,” he said, “we got twice as much from that visit.” The subtle smile that found its way to his face as he recalled the memory reminded me that the collaboration in the story was not just between him and Ann, but between the broad forces of his life: between family life and education, between writing and nature.
After moving back to North Carolina from New York in the 1970s, Simpson found a group of creatives, all fellow UNC alumni, that became the band The Red Clay Ramblers. The group is the most prolific and long-standing collaboration of Simpson’s career. Since they formed, they’ve maintained a sound that seems to capture the spirit of North Carolina: a timeless, joyful blend of blues, country, and music of the theatre. The novelistic stories, rich harmonies, and rolling string melodies are performed with thrilling confidence. His bandmate Jim Wann offered the idea of a musical theatre production with music in their style, which soon evolved into Diamond Studs, a musical about the life of Jesse James. It eventually brought him back to New York and became his first successful musical theatre production. The Red Clay Ramblers remained together after Diamond Studs; over the following decades, they continued to search for opportunities in music and theatre. “Of course, when you have success, you say ‘Well, let’s do that again,’ so we went after that. We kept writing shows and putting them on and trying to get them to New York one way or the other.” He was excited about the future of the group, patiently describing the realities of the still-ongoing pandemic that prevents them from performing actively. However, he reiterated that the band still meets to write and record in preparation for their return to the stage.
As he remarked on the pandemic, I remembered the first time I logged into the Zoom link of his spring 2021 fiction writing course, my hair still uncut since the previous March and my personality far smaller than it is today. Hearing his life story in the crowded outdoor plaza was light years apart from the virtual space of the classroom in the lonely heart of lockdown. Thinking about how much my surroundings and disposition had changed in just that two-year span sent me into a comparison of my life and his once again. I began to consider how the years have shaped him, whether that young man starting work on Diamond Studs and that face in the Zoom room was really the same person. Perhaps he wondered the same about the former online student now sitting with him at Weaver Street Market.
I listened carefully as Simpson described what he might tell his former college student self. His foremost piece of advice was to find inspiration in the breadth of the surrounding community. The students who are curious about the mysteries of math and physics, the creatives who develop art and absorb the art of their peers, the future historians who find magic in the past. “The first word in ‘university’ is ‘universe.’ There’s something of everything here.” Aside from his individual pursuits as a student at UNC, some of his peers helped him develop his passion for music, particularly musical theatre. In short, he reiterated the ways in which the university community can foster as much passion, inspiration, and education as any course of study. As he described the treasures of the university, I began to consider how many resources I could still take advantage of before I graduate. Simpson went on to describe the inspiration that he gets from his students. In teaching prose, the original topics and settings; in teaching music, the progressions and melodies that he’s never considered. The list goes on: “It would be long and complicated for me to list the ways I have found teaching inspiring, with so much inspiration and energy coming from students.”
Simpson’s penchant for collaboration is matched by his love of the solitary art of authorship. He contrasted this to the process of theatre, where there will always be numerous people to answer to, while writing a book is an effort conducted solely by the author. Because of this individuality, Simpson’s interests are most visible in the topics he chooses to write about. One of the topics that have brought him the most success is the eastern coast of North Carolina. He recalled a conversation with David Perry, once the editor-in-chief of the UNC Press, where Perry noted the relative lack of books about Eastern North Carolina. The conversation remained in his mind and eventually blossomed into a 1990 book on the Great Dismal Swamp. From there, his writing continues to spring to the present day. He mused on the journey from a casual conversation with Perry to the extensive series of published books on the topic he has today. I once again returned to myself upon hearing this answer, wondering what private interest might someday evolve into success, whether there will someday be an audience waiting to read what I write.
Beyond his successes in the genre, Simpson’s writing about Eastern North Carolina reveals his deep passion for nature. Even the way he speaks in conversation about the natural world feels impactful and authorial. He poignantly described his love for boating of all kinds, but particularly small vessels. A canoe can weave through the swamp in ways a motorboat cannot, and the passenger can discover the hidden secrets inaccessible to other vehicles. Like in his writing or teaching, he adapts his mode to go even deeper than before. Despite the poetic meaning that can be prescribed to boating, Simpson also reiterated the great fun of the activity. As any author would, he found the place to quote Kenneth Grahame: “There is nothing… so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
He told me a story about his early experiences with nature and the ways in which his father passed along a respect for the environment. During Simpson’s young childhood, his father took him on a ride through the country, with nothing but farmland visible for miles around. At that moment, his father told him that farmers were the closest to God of anyone, for the way they rely on the elements and are attentive to the patterns and conditions that nature gives them. He continued on about his father’s environmental passions as he discussed a discovery he made about his father only in recent years. Simpson stumbled upon a newspaper clipping that described his father’s leading role in proposing a new water system to prevent further pollution in Elizabeth City. In describing this, Simpson’s pride and joy in his father’s efforts were palpable, calling it a “sweet dream come true and made manifest by that small clipping from decades ago.” He found that learning about his father’s efforts clarified to him why he was so drawn to nature in his own career. To him, life is full of moments like these “that are, nominally, not earth-shaking, but to you, they are. These little gifts, from wherever they come from, that mean a lot to you and that you don’t forget, they make some things either make sense or make more sense.” My young age became apparent to me again as he described this; my own past is still too shallow to unveil itself in such momentous and unexpected ways.
As we both stood up to leave, I told Simpson about a play I’d been working on writing. He returned to his role as my former professor and gave me a few parting tips on how to approach the project. “Get the words on the page, then you can worry about the rest.” We shook hands and I thanked him for his time. As I waited for the bus that would take me home, my head pulsed with ideas and inspiration. His stories served to remind me just how little of my life I had lived, and how much the rest would entail. I knew implicitly that the next Bland Simpson was probably in Chapel Hill now, walking the halls of Greenlaw or diligently practicing piano in the worship of Bob Dylan. I had always hoped I could match Simpson someday, that that mysterious student waiting to blossom might be me. My future felt imminent and hopeful. And I knew that a life like Simpson’s might only be a few happy accidents away.