During the week, she is Ethel Paxton, a fingernail technician and certified massage
therapist.But on weekends,
she is C.K.Wyatt, country, oldies, rhythm and blues and gospel singer.
Ethel works in the front booth at
Hair Designers in the Amoco building on Statesville Boulevard beside Hendrix Barbecue,
filing, shaping and painting real nails and not-so-real nails, some days for 13 hours at a
time. She puts customers at ease with her friendly smile and she loves to talk, tease,
laugh and sing along with the radio.
Sometimes she doesn’t even
realize she’s singing, says Brenda Overman, who owns the salon.
“I can’t help it,”
Ethel says. “I love music.”
Customers sometimes join in.
“And some tell me to shut up,” she says. “I think they’re just jealous
because they can’t carry a tune.”
“Oh, I’m ruined,”
she teases, in a dramatic display of despair. “I just lost my nail business.”
Oh, well.
Ethel, a petite brunette with
sparkling green eyes, has her other business and her other name.
She hadn’t even thought about
a stage name until the owners of the Spencer studio where she recorded her demo tape asked
if she wanted to use Ethel on the cover.
Ethel?
“She doesn’t look like
an Ethel,” Brenda says, “and she doesn’t act like an Ethel.”
Ethel decided to use her maiden
name, Wyatt, but wasn’t sure what first name to use. “We were tossing all kinds
of names around,” she says.
Customers even made suggestions.
Finally, Ethel settled on the first letters of her daughters’ names, C for Crystal
and K for Kimberly. Thus, C.K. Wyatt was born.
“They thought that was just a
hoot when we came up with it,” Ethel says of her daughters.
The singerwon’t tell her age.
“Young,” is her only response to the question.
“She’s a
grandmother,” Brenda volunteers.
Savannah D’ette Cline,
daughter of Kimberly, who works as a phlebotomist at Rowan Regional Medical Center, was
born Christmas Eve.
And Cody Dillon Hagaman, son of
Crystal, an executive secretary at Telespectrum Marketing, was born in March 1995.
Cody, who Ethel refers to as
“my little man,” loves to hear her sing. “He sits and winks at me at
shows,” she says. “He’ll say, ‘My Neena.’ ”
Ethel, as C.K., has performed
onstage with Porter Wagoner at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, with Louise Mandrell at a
Memphis fund raiser for the hearing- impaired and with the Jordanairs as part of Henry
Harrison’s Tamarac Talent Search in Memphis.
“It surprises me how nice
they are,” she says. “They’re just like us. They’re regular
people.”
C.K. sang the Patsy Cline classic,
“Crazy,” in a video production this month in Charlotte for Dick Clark
Productions. “You had to sing like a star,” she says.
The tape will be reviewed by movie
producers for singers to appear in an upcoming production. “They wished us all
luck,” she says. “If Clark Productions calls you, then you have to go to Los
Angeles for three days.”
An audition earlier this year with
Dick Clark Productions in Myrtle Beach failed to land C.K. a spot on the performance
schedules for Dixie Jubilee and Carowinds.
C.K., whose business card reads,
“You Ring, I’ll Sing,” also sings and works as a deejay for political
rallies, local clubs and functions, malls and private parties around the state. She
performed Thursday night as part of a talent competition at Richard Petty’s club in
Level Cross and is scheduled to sing and emcee at Salisbury’s Octoberfest.
Ethel gets teased by customers and
friends at local performances because of her stage name. “It’s like, ‘Who
is C.K. Wyatt?’ ” she says.
When she first started using the
stage name seven years ago, Ethel says her husband, Ron, had to remind her that fans were
cheering for her when they were shouting, “C.K.”
“He calls me Ethel,” she
says, “and somebody will go, ‘C.K.’ So it gets a little crazy.”
Speaking of “Crazy,”
Ethel says she can’t get three songs into a show without someone shouting for her to
sing the Patsy Cline favorite.
Ethel Wyatt was a little girl when
she first heard Cline, who was killed in a tragic plane crash at the height of her career,
singing “Sweet Dreams” on the radio. “I just couldn’t get over that
voice,” she says. “I fell in love with that song.”
From then on, “that’s
really what I wanted to dowas learn how to sing, ‘Sweet Dreams.’ ”
One of the greatest moments in her
singing career was when she sang the song in a studio and hit the perfect pitch on the
first try. “That was it for me,” she says. “I couldn’t ask for any
more.”
Ethel started singing as a small
child. “I used to sing ‘Rocky Top’ at the top of my lungs on my
grandfather’s knee,” she says.
She sang at church on Sunday
mornings and would go with her parents to hear bands in a local park on Sunday afternoons,
always singing along.
“I had an opportunity to join
a band at the age of 10,” she says, but my father said, ‘No.’ ”
Ethel’s father, Paul Herman
Wyatt, who plays by ear and makes musical instruments, was in the business himself. He
played in a bluegrass band that was once asked to audition for “Hee Haw.”
“Do I have to tell?”
Ethel responds to a question about where she was born. “I’m a Yankee.”
But she talks like a Southerner
because her father was from Virginia and her mother from North Carolina, she says. They
met and married in West Grove, Pa., and Ethel and her two sisters were born there.
She may have been born in Yankee
territory, but the Wyatt family moved to West Jefferson when she was 12. Ethel graduated
from Northwest Ashe High School and married soon afterward.
It was a business opportunity that
brought her and her husband to Rowan County 23 years ago. She once taught line dancing and
has been working as a nail technician for the past 18 years.
People often ask Ethel why she
didn’t start singing professionally at an earlier age.“I just say I was raising
my children,” she says. “That, at the time, was top priority for me.”
Ethel loved singing to Crystal and
Kimberly. And she always had a captive audience, she says, until they grew up and moved
out on their own.
“It’s not a drive to do
anything with this,” she says of her singing. “I just really enjoy it, and I
have time to do it now that my children are grown.”
Ethel involves her nail customers
in her singing career, including asking their advice on which photo to use for her demo
tape.
Her father, who now lives in
Virginia, didn’t like the one she chose because it shows her propped on a guitar
case. “He said, ‘That is deceiving,’ ” she says, because she
doesn’t play the guitar. “I said, ‘That’s a prop.’ ”
Ethel admits to getting nervous
when her father goes to her shows. “Even at the ripe age of 29,” she jokes.
“He doesn’t cut me any flak. He says, ‘Stand this way. Sit this
way.’”
Her mother, Opal D’ette
Wyatt, is easier. “She just sits there,” Ethel says, “and says, ‘I
believe you’re a star.’ ”
The grandfather for whom she sang
“Rocky Top” is not around to hear her, but Ethel says she thinks of him when she
performs “Grandpa,” the sentimental number made popular by The Judds. “I
had to really work on that to get past the first two sentences without getting really
upset,” she says.
Ethel always asks if there are any
grandfathers in the audience when she sings that song. “They sit there and nod,”
she says.
If she could perform with anyone
in the world, Ethel says it would be Loretta Lynn. “I’m stuck back in the old
days,” she says. “I like that old music.”
Ethel is amazed with all the the
new “fantastic” singers on the scene today, but would most like to sit down in a
room with Lynn, Brenda Lee and Dolly Parton.
“I don’t even know where
I’d begin,” she says. “I just think that would be so neat to sit and talk
to those ladies.”
It’s rewarding to watch
people react to her music, Ethel says.
“You can watch and
they’ll get teary-eyed.I was in a room one night, and they just started flicking
their Bics.”
The men and women in the audience
held up their lighters until she finished the song.
She was singing “Crazy.”
Of course.
n
To schedule a performance, or to
get your nails done at “Nails by Ethel,” call Ethel/C.K. at 638-0317. |
Today's News