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Ken Helser
A remembrance of our class mate, Billy Stinson
Perhaps Billy would not want me to tell this but what do I have to lose... Billy and Robert Howard formed a little duet group of themselves singing the old folk songs of the early 60's... Peter, Paul, and Mary, The Kingston Trio, and others. I loved to sing and actually learned to play guitar from Robert. But the day came that I wanted to play with them. I had an informal audition with Robert, sining the song, "Hand down your head, Tom Dooly hang down your head and cry..." And Robert really liked it. He came alive until the old black gospel sound that I learned from my nannie, "Aunt Coralee" came out. He stopped. He commended me in part but let me know quickly, "Ken, you just got too much black in you to be able to sing folk music. Go join a black band." Great advice though it broke my heart. REJECTION. But Robert was right, for a few years later I began playing horn with an all black band from Carlboro, "The Swinging Flamingos." I loved it. The only blue eyed member of the band, me, loved it and did well. As a freshman at NC State and playing in a black group on weekends, it was heaven on earth except for one thing: I wanted to sing. Finally that day came when Irven Hicks asked me to become the lead singer in a group called, "The Tassels." And from there it was history. We ended up forming with a few of the Swinging Medallion's "Double Shot of My Baby's Love" guys a new band called "The Pieces of Eight," and "Lonely Drifter" rose to into the top 40 all over the nation. Finally, after great success, just before touring with "The Alman Brother's Band," I gave my life, my heart, my everything, to Jesus and followed Him. God restored my broken marriage, my health, my all, and as I write this on my 27th trip to Norway, with my wife of 49 years beside me, I look back with no regrets and am so glad I got delivered out of rock and roll to be able to sing and write the greatest music ever, songs from heaven: Worship! And back to Billy Stinson, I once did a five minute radio show, over 1200 of them to be exact that went all over the country. I interviewed young people whose lives were radially changed from the Jesus Movement of the early 70's and followed each testimony with Christian music, which during that early era of a new sound in Gospel Music, contemporary was unheard of. Somehow, I can't remember exactly the circumstances, I came across an album the Billy and his wife, Sandra made. The cover was black and white and I knew Billy Stinson, the artist, and a great one at that, had drawn it, and I believe it was called "The Merchant Ship." I do know there was a song on it about a merchant ship that he equated to a virtuous woman, that described in the Proverbs 31, and the great line of the song was, "Who can find a virtuous woman... she is like a merchant ship carrying her goods from afar..." So, God Bless Billy and Sandra Stinson who love Jesus, love family, and as he wrote, "I am, thankfully, paddling downstream instead of up..."
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