Happy Birthday, Doc

“I was born—they tell me I was—on Groundhog’s Day: February 2, 1928.”

This is how Doc Adams started our first interview together, one Saturday afternoon in August of 2008. We’d met only once before, but I’d been eager to meet him again. I’d told him I wanted to write an article about him and his music—he’d played with Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and others and had been a mainstay of the Birmingham jazz community for years—and he agreed to an interview. I arrived with three pages of questions, none of which I got around to asking. The moment I turned on my recorder, Doc launched into his story, starting at his birth and proceeding chronologically from there, laying out his life in remarkable, loving, specific detail—describing, even, the tile on his parents’ living room floor, whose pattern he’d studied from infancy.

Doc had many gifts; just one of them was his power in storytelling. At the end of two hours, he was about to graduate from high school—and I’d abandoned my notebook of questions altogether. As the interview came to a close, he found a place to pause his reminiscence: with the letter of recommendation his early mentor Sun Ra (then still “Sonny Blount”) sent on his behalf to Howard University. It was an effective cliffhanger.

“We’re going to have to have another session,” Doc told me. I happily agreed and came back the next week. And the week after that. For two and a half years we did it again, every Saturday and occasional Sundays, until his story stretched out across a hundred cassette tapes. Eventually I started asking questions. What was going to be an article turned into a book—and, more than that, a life-changing friendship.

Doc died in 2014. For his birthday today I’d like to share this remembrance I wrote after his death for the weekly paper Weld. Of all the things I’ve ever written, this is easily the most meaningful to me. I hope you’ll click the link below to read the full story—and join me in remembering Dr. Frank Adams, with gratitude and love, on this, the anniversary of his birth.

Happy birthday, Doc.

Remembering “Doc” Adams
November 11, 2014 // WELD for Birmingham 

Like a lot of people, I knew Frank Adams most of all as “Doc,” but over the course of an extraordinary life he went by a variety of names. To many among his friends and family he was first and foremost “Frank,” and to years upon years of students at Lincoln Elementary he’d always be “Mr. Adams,” the much-loved teacher and role model.

As a high school student in the ‘40s, he traveled with comedian Mantan Moreland’s Hot Harlem Revue, and Moreland dubbed him “Juniflip,” a name for the young and unpredictable, the energetic but untested. (“You’re just a little Juniflip,” Adams liked to explain in later years: “You might flip over into greatness, or you might flip back into mediocrity.”) Other, older musicians in those days knew him as “Youngblood.” In college at Howard University, his bandmates called him “Francois” — a name which they on some occasions extended to Francois DeBullion (“I never knew where they got that DeBullion,” he said), but which on other occasions, as he launched into an especially hot solo, they might abbreviate to just “’wa.”

“Get it, ’wa!” they’d shout from the sidelines, and — as he’d do from many stages, for many decades to come — he’d get it.

He had an insatiable appetite for education — his students’ education, of course, but also his own — and so he pursued a series of degrees, culminating in the one that made him “Dr. Adams.” The title suited his role as gentleman and scholar, but he shook loose its stifling formality every opportunity he got.

“Please,” he’d plead, “just call me Doc.”

Click HERE to read the rest of this article…

P.S. We are lucky that one of Doc’s students, Jessica Latten, documented his spirit so beautifully in her photographs. The photo on this page is hers; others are included in the Weld story, and she’s taken many(!) more just as good. Thanks to Jessica for sharing these loving portraits of a man whose memory means so much to so many.