‘Positive vibes’: Nightly Hilton Head golf course serenades sooth coronavirus world
It started innocently enough — and oddly enough.
But in the end, Billy Howe and fiancee Stacey Beane have found a sweet way to ease the stress of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
Most evenings just about sunset, they stand on a golf green outside their Hilton Head Island home and play music for five or six minutes.
He plays trumpet, and she plays the violin.
“Misty” as played by Erroll Garner. “Maria” from “West Side Story.” “Yesterday” from the Beatles. Fanfare from “Water Music” by George Frederic Handel. “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” by Martin Luther.
“It’s just a way of sending out some positive vibes,” Howe said.
On March 23, Howe walked out to the raised sixth green on the Dolphin Head Golf Club in Hilton Head Plantation, a long dogleg that’s the hardest hole on the course.
He was in his PJs and slippers. He propped his iPhone against the flagstick.
He stood silhouetted like the tall pines against a light blue sky and played “America the Beautiful” to the appreciative crickets and toads.
“Nobody knew I was going to do it,” he said. “It was something different, something upbeat.”
He posted it on Facebook.
The Headliners
Now it’s part of a long-running series of tiny concerts they call “Goodnight from the Sixth Green.”
Neighbors boxed in by a silent contagion sit on their porch for the quick serenade. Some people are now making an effort to walk or bike that way around 7:30 p.m.
A few neighbors step out onto the empty fairway, and clap.
Howe has been wowing upbeat, dancing audiences for 35 years, playing trumpet and singing with The Headliners band.
When Larry Perigo’s Headliners turned 40, I wrote: “It says a lot about Hilton Head that one of its longest-running institutions is a show and dance band.”
When Howe joined the band in 1985, they were playing six nights a week at the Indigo Club at the Hyatt, with two floor shows and three dance sets nightly.
He also plays Echo Taps at Hilton Head’s community gatherings on Memorial Day and Veterans Day.
Stacey Beane has been a professional violinist since graduating from college. She plays with The Lexington Philharmonic back home in Kentucky. She teaches violin with the Suzuki method.
They both play at the Church of the Cross in Bluffton.
Last Saturday, Beane wore a hat to the twilight gig. Back in the real world, it was Derby Day.
In the coronavirus world, it was another quiet day of social distancing.
Howe played the familiar bugle fanfare that calls horses to the post at Churchill Downs.
Together they played “My Old Kentucky Home.”
‘Navy Hymn’
Howe has a day job, a painting company he calls Daygig Painting.
But most musicians found themselves suddenly without income when the coronavirus shutdown started in March.
The local SERG Restaurant Group’s “Community Strong VIP” fundraiser has included support for musicians as part of the $60,000 it has contributed to the Deep Well Project on Hilton Head and $50,000 to Bluffton Self Help, a company spokesman said.
Howe looks forward to the world when we dance again. But he admits that after 40 years of performing, it’s actually nice to get a little reprieve.
“I’ve never had one,” he said.
One evening on the sixth green, retired dentist George Myers, who spent a career tending to the teeth of veterans, asked his neighbors if they could play the “Navy Hymn.”
Beane played the violin in the fading day, and the old dentist sang words that are oddly soothing in the coronavirus era:
“Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep,
O hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea!”
This story was originally published May 5, 2020 at 2:48 PM.
