Once, spotting a friend from Chicago in the audience while performing in Jackson, Wyoming, he did a double-take but never broke character as Twain. It was so successful it moved to the main stage, Friedman said. “The adoration he received from his fellow schoolmates upon his return to school shaped his life,” according to a biography for one of his plays.įor about 40 years, he lived in Galena, which inspired him to write his first one-man play, “Galena Rose: How Whiskey Won the West.” After a spell at the Civic Theatre at the Lyric Opera House, he walked in to the Organic Theater Company and landed a booking there. And me milkin’ cows ’bout 100 yards down the line, singin’ harmony.”īy first grade, he’d won an all-school talent contest and scored a performance on the radio. She’d sing doin’ the housework, with tears in her eyes, listenin’ to some fool preacher on the radio. My mother was a singer - just around the house but with a voice just as big as Mahalia Jackson’s. In another Sun-Times interview, he said: “I learned to sing by bein’ a Southern Baptist. “I was a rather successful evangelistic singer, playing over 500 churches around the country until I was 22.” “I was born with a range of 3 ½ octaves,” he said in a 1972 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times. He loved her so that he let her tell him when he could go dancing with whiskey.”Įven when he was little, Jim Post’s talent was apparent.
‘Oh James,’ she would say, ‘You talk like a poet.’ And he would reply, ‘Ollie, don’t make fun of me,’ and she would slide across the beltless seat and whisper in his ear and lean her head on his shoulder. This is when he would be struck by the god of poetry and send my mother’s heart fluttering like a teenage girl. with his family with his elbow out the window - drifting through his thoughts - he would start talking to mama.
Post wrote about how the elder James Post would beguile the future singer’s mother with extemporaneous poetry: Though his father had just a third-grade education, Mr. Young Jim grew up on a farm in Harris County, Texas, about 20 miles outside Houston amid “piney woods and blackberry thickets,” he once said. Bonnie Koloc, Jim Post, John Prine and Steve Goodman - four of the biggest names in Chicago’s folk music heyday - played one after another one year at the Earl of Old Town.Īnd he could riff about a piece of furniture onstage and make it “jaw-droppingly funny,” Sabien said.
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