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"The apartment cost $7 a week so you can imagine what a dump it was," Royal told me.
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They lived in a fourth floor, walk-up apartment near the corner of Abercorn Avenue and York Street. Royal convinced his friend South into coming from Atlanta to Savannah to play in the band. It was Buddy Livingston and The Versaltones featuring Billy Joe Royal." In addition, we performed on WTOC television in Savannah at 7 p.m. "My voice developed from all of that singing. "And we'd often find a place to sing on Sundays," he said. In 1987, Royal told me about that period performing at the Bamboo Ranch six days a week and five hours a night. It would become one of the most critical periods of his life in which he began emulating many of the major name acts booked into the club twice a month including Sam Cooke, George Jones, Fats Domino, Roy Orbison and The Isley Brothers. Highway 17 with a country music band fronted by local personality Buddy Livingston.
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That's where he formed close friendships with other Atlanta rising entertainers including South, Jerry Reed, Ray Stevens, Mac Davis, Freddy Weller (later with Paul Revere & The Raiders ) and others.Īt 16, he moved to Savannah, Ga., where he began playing in a band at the Bamboo Ranch nightclub on U.S. His family moved to Marietta, outside of Atlanta, where he began diving into the music scene at age 14 with the Georgia Jubilee weekly radio show. Royal had one of those incredible careers that just seemed charmed with mostly all of the right things happening at just the right times. Royal replied simply, "They will flash their lights and honk their horns." Jones, who had out his initial hit singles It's Not Unusual and What's New Pussycat, asked Royal, "How will we know if they like us?"
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Royal told me that when the tour ended in Savannah, Ga., that he and soon-to-be British superstar Tom Jones performed at a series of shows at outdoor movie drive-ins where they sang on a flat bed trailer in front of a giant movie screen to the patrons sitting in their cars and pick-up trucks. Later that same year he would hit big again with another South composition called I Knew You When (You Were Lonely).