VDT VIEW

By Dean Poling
VDT View

Former Valdostan Stacia Watkins has become a member of the Atlanta-based band Broken Rhoads. Recently, Broken Rhoads competed in the CMT Music City Madness Competition, becoming one of the 64 bands selected from thousands of entries.
While the band did not make it into the competition’s next level of the top 32 bands, its spirit remains unbroken and the road continues for Watkins and Broken Rhoads.
We recently conducted an e-mail interview with Watkins. Here are excerpts.

VDT VIEW: You’re from Valdosta and moved to Atlanta about seven months ago. Which school did you graduate from? Do you still have family here?
STACIA WATKINS: “I graduated from Lowndes High School and attended Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College where I majored in Music Education. I have not completed my degree because I would like to attend Belmont to major in music business. I have a lot of family left in Valdosta. My mom, sister, grandmothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, all still live there.”

VDT VIEW: Did the pursuit of a music career take you to Atlanta?
STACIA WATKINS: “It really did. I have a lot of friends from college up here and they encouraged me to take a step and move to Atlanta to try out the music scene. I’m so glad I did. After being here a week, a friend introduced me to Charlie Gilbert, Broken Rhoads lead guitarist, and my songwriting partner. It was a musical match made in heaven I guess you could say. But what I learned about performing, and music, and writing … I really learned and honed in Valdosta. The music scene is wonderful there and it taught me a lot. I look forward to coming home to Valdosta as much as I can and cannot wait to perform for my hometown crowd again.”

By Dean Poling
The Valdosta Daily Times

NOTE: In 2006, VDT View interviewed St. Augustine, Fla.-based musician Sam Pacetti. For Downtown Valdosta’s Oct. 17 Art After Dark, Pacetti returns to Valdosta, playing Bas Bleu. Here’s the story that ran on Pacetti last year in which the guitar virtuoso talked about music, life and the renaissance of Downtown Valdosta

VALDOSTA - Guitar virtuoso Sam Pacetti speaks of Downtown Valdosta like a man who has lived there for years.
“There is such a renaissance going on in Downtown Valdosta,” Pacetti says.
He mentions many downtown locations: The Bleu Café, the Sportsman, The Bistro, the coming City Market and, of course, Hildegard’s which has become a Valdosta showcase of his virtuoso guitar talents …
But Sam Pacetti doesn’t live in Valdosta. He doesn’t even live in South Georgia.
Pacetti lives across the Florida state line, more than a hundred miles away, in his native St. Augustine, where visitors to that city, which is touted as the oldest city in America, can find the name of Sam Pacetti written on chalkboards and on marquees as a regular entertainer there, too.

Corbin Bleu will be performing 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 16, Wild Adventures. Corbin Bleu began his career by modeling and acting in commercials at a very early age. He scored minor roles in many movies and television shows and attended the esteemed Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, where he developed into a talented performer.
He snatched the starring role in the Disney Channel Movie “Jump In,” one of its highest-rated movies. Corbin also recorded the movie’s lead song, “Push It To The Limit,” which hit the top of the charts at No. 1 on Radio Disney and No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100.

By Dean Poling
VDT View

REMERTON - Brian Buffington, so the poets say, can write a song about almost anything, anytime, off the cuff, and it is usually funny.
“Brian has the ability to take something from everyday life and present it in a way that is hilarious,” said Charlie Dame late last year, organizing the first of a series of Songwriters Circles with Jerry Newman. “You just never know where he’s going to take a song and it’s a lot of fun for the audience.”

QUITMAN — Big things are happening for Ninja Gun. The Brooks County-based band recently returned from two months of playing its second West Coast tour. This past week has seen the release of Ninja Gun’s second album, “Restless Rubes,” on the Suburban Home Records label. And if fortune smiles further, who knows, maybe the royalty check has finally arrived for the television show “Friday Night Lights” using two Ninja Gun songs last season. Back home for a while in Brooks County, Ninja Gun frontman-vocalist-guitarist-songwriter Johnathan Coody is glad to have the break but is anxious to return to the road to promote the album. It is a dichotomy that fuels Ninja Gun. “I love the South and South Georgia,” Coody says, “but it can be confining. It is interesting to me to see different places and see a different mentality, see a different culture. … It’s gratifying to see people connect to what you do, especially from another area.” That conflict of ideas and impulses plays out in Coody’s bio. As he relates in a few short sentences: He grew up on a Brooks County pig farm, earned a degree in psychology, and now plays in a punk-rock band. “We’re redneck country kids who want to get out,” Coody says. “We have an appetite to see other things. I never felt like I could be satisfied working with Georgia Power.” That’s the spirit of the band and the theme of the songs on “Restless Rubes.” The satisfaction found in not being too satisfied with the status quo. About the “stigma of being a musician and maintaining a sense of security,” Coody says. These tracks show a growth of maturity in the songwriting as well as the band’s musicianship, while still maintaining a sound that is, as former area music critic Matt Walker described it, something akin to Johnny Cash meets the Ramones. Ninja Gun maintains the country punk of the band’s debut album, “Smooth Transitions,” while finding a new direction.