Piano man Reggie Asberry is pretty much the "house band"
at the Highland Beach Holiday Inn and also performs
at the Delray Beach Marriott. Photos by Tim Stepien
By Tim Norris
From a black case, Reggie Asberry pulls out his backup band.
Combos, trios, quintets, they’ve mostly given way to electronics, he says, as he’s setting up his Yamaha PSR 3000 against windows in the corner of the bar at the Highland Beach Holiday Inn.
“Hiiii!” a woman calls, from a door connecting to the inn’s restaurant. “We haven’t seen you in so long!”
“I’ve been in jail,” Asberry says. He hasn’t, but the joke seems to invite a laugh, give a simple answer to a complex question and relax anyone who might wonder about the black singer in the corner.
He’s performed with some big names. Nowadays, still at the microphone after 30 years, he’s a single act.
Kathy Norem-Staples dances with her husband, Bill.
Around him, a soundscape spreads. Two men clack light beers in bottles on the bar. A waiter clatters a dish cart past. From the outside, the Atlantic throws roar-and-hiss breakers at the beach.
From such a daily wash and chop of sound, Asberry wants to pull customers into a smooth current, familiar light jazz and soft rock or any request, and bring them pleasantly adrift, with feeling and memory. He taps the brim of his black hat and opens his mouth, and You’re Gonna Miss My Lovin’ comes out, in low, easy tones.
He’s booked here Wednesdays through Saturdays, starting at 7:30 p.m. On this Friday, customers are slow to show. Into a large, clear-glass snifter, he has dropped a $20 bill. It looks lonely. “Tough times,” Asberry says.
The men at the bar play with the barmaid. “Miami is NOT in a bowl game!” one of them tells her. “They opted out. And you call yourself a Miami fan?” She laughs.
A tanned man in a tropical shirt settles on the bar’s eastern flank, asks for a whisky-and-soda. He seems to know the piano man, like a lot of others do. In a moment, a little off-key, he is singing along.
Asberry sets his own scene, snapping a few buttons on the Yamaha‘s console, key, rhythm, tempo, intro, instruments, imitating an orchestra on a keyboard. His next tune builds from chosen rhythms and from the sounds of trumpets and saxophone, played by his fingers on the keyboard, “Kansas City, here I come!” It’s something he can control.
There’s an awful lot, he says, that a man can’t do anything about, including people who just keep talking loudly and a tone-deaf customer caterwauling along. Including getting older, living a life. Including what can happen with health. People write songs about some of those things, and some of those songs, he sings.
The Things You Do, Dock of the Bay, Just My Imagination, Under the Boardwalk, Moon River, always another, usually from his head.
He rarely mimics, maybe a phrase sung in a gravelly Louis Armstrong or a hint of Lou Rawls or Otis Redding, but his range reaches from a basso Barry White into a falsetto Prince or Roy Orbison.
No throat spray; he sips lemonade. “I don’t drink or smoke,” he says. There is no song, though, about kidneys, nothing he could intone about his own, about the diagnosis of kidney failure two years ago, the transplant he needs and the waiting list, about the dialysis, about their hope to do a benefit to raise the money he needs.
Everybody has problems, he says. This is a place where they come to set them aside.
People wave, approach, hug. Play me a song, you’re the piano man. Isn’t that it?
“I never took piano,” he says. “I learned that later. I wanted to be a singer.”
Born and raised in West Palm Beach, Asberry showed what he calls a God-given voice, sang in choruses through the public schools. He wanted to be a band director, took up tuba in high school, won a scholarship to Florida A&M, embarked on several careers, musician, teacher, choir director, that touched a lot of people.
He never found fame; he won the local part of an audition for Star Search, years ago, and somehow the money wasn’t there for the trip to California for the finals. But he found other rewards. “Laaaydeeee,” he is singing, just now, “I’m your knight in shining armor, and I love you.”
After playing tuba in the A&M marching band and other ensembles, Asberry took his degree in voice at Daytona’s Bethune-Cookman College, where he also met Hattie Rolle, a gifted singer and also Miss Black Florida of 1978, and then he headed out to the University of Indiana’s vaunted music school for graduate work.
Two weeks later, he returned to West Palm Beach. “I needed to be with her,” he says. They became partners, parents of a daughter, Jasmyne. They have been married 30 years.
Two hours in at the Inn, a few more people appear and applaud, and the Jackson in the jar finally gets some company. Kathy Norem comes through the door with her husband, Bill Staples, and in moments they are dancing to Reggie’s music.
“I remember sitting at the piano bar in the ’90s at Cypress Manor, listening to Reggie,” she says. “My mother, Ginger, now deceased, and my father, Bill Larkin, loved to dance to him. He would play Stardust for them, their wedding song. I hired him to play for my 60th birthday four years ago. Reggie always greets everyone with a smile, and he remembers us.”
A week later, he has set his console at the restaurant inside the lobby of the Marriott Hotel in Delray Beach. He performs there Wednesdays through Fridays, 4:30 to 6:30. Asberry sports a new fedora his wife had given him for his 56th birthday, is playing and singing almost in shadow, but his music brightens the place, like lights on a holiday tree.
Asberry has been invited to the employee holiday party in a nearby room, and he will leave the backup band locked in its case. He is grateful to Michael and Tom Walsh, who head the company, Ocean Properties, that owns Highland Beach‘s Holiday Inn and Delray’s Marriott, he says, for giving him work.
Celebrating Christmas and a new year, just as himself, feels good. Maybe, he says, they can all sing some carols together.
In Coasting Along, our writers occasionally stop to reflect on life along the shore.
