He started playing the drums when he was a kid at a Salvation Army church service. Since then, in his 74 years, Red Hambright has performed in just about every club in Vicksburg and Warren County.

“The drums were the first thing that caught my eyes,” he said, when he went to the service on Oakland Plantation on Mississippi 3 north of Ballground, where he grew up. His folks were sharecroppers — “That’s how we made our living” — and as for schooling? — “I went through Redwood.”

Hambright had a twin sister, Estelle, and he was named Estrell, “so it’s no wonder they called me Red.” His once-red hair has lost its hue, is now mostly gray, “so they just call me Oldtimer.” As a youth, the family called him Brother, “but I was so bad I don’t think Brother Hambright would work too good.”

When he came to town from the country as a young man, he said that’s when he realized his ambition — “besides selling beer” — was to play the drums. He worked for Rose Oil and Anderson-Tully before he spent “48 years, six months, five hours and 30 seconds” driving a truck, distributing and selling Miller beer.

He’s had no musical training, explaining that, “It just come to me.” His mother’s family were musically gifted, but his father’s family — “They had two left feet. A lady asked me if I played by ear, and I told her I played by letter. I just rear back and let her fly.”

Though the drums are his first love, he also plays “a little sax and a little keyboard and would sing when I had to — a little, but not much.”

Hambright played with several local bands, but had his own group, The Reversibles, for about 30 years. They got the name when they were playing at The Top Hat Lounge and the owner hung the name on them and we just kept it.” Among local musicians he’s played with are Stanley Scallions, Jim Pickens, Bud Shiers, Gene Woodman, Nat Palmer — the list goes on.

They played a variety of music — old country, rock and roll, blues — “strictly dance hall music.” They’d play a fast number, then a slow one, alternating for an hour or so, “sort of easing into it for the first hour, and then we’d cut loose.”

He met his wife, Sally, at a dance — they’ve been married 53 years — and he claims she has no musical ability, “can’t even play a radio.” They have three daughters, a son, and several grandchildren, one “who is a tremendous musician.” He’s in college, Hambright said, “and he plays my kind of music.”

The Reversibles made musical history in Vicksburg as they were the first local group to use a public address system, “just a little old Silvertone we bought from Sears and Roebuck.”

There are times Hambright will never forget, such as when he played at a place on U.S. 61 North which was a real dive, and as he was “totin’ my equipment in there, the owner asked, ‘Red, do you own a gun or a knife?’ and I said ‘Naw, for what?’ and I was told, ‘Well, we’re gonna issue you one. You’ll need it in here.’”

On another occasion his band was hired to back up nationally known star Ace Cannon. “They hired us because they didn’t have to pay much,” Hambright said.

That was at a time in his life, Hambright said, when he drank a lot “and so did Ace. I was sitting way up in the bandstand on an old ragged three-legged stool, and when I went to kick off, the stool fell out from under me, my feet hit the drums, sent them flying out into the crowd, and they said, ‘Look athere, he’s drunk already.’ That was embarassing — and I hadn’t had a drop to drink.”

Several times Hambright played at The Cotton Patch, a club in the Bovina area, for both white and black people on the same night, but at segregated events.

“We’d start at 7 or 8 o’clock and by midnight the white folks was ready to go home, but the blacks were just getting wound up at 12 midnight,” so he’d play for them, sometimes until daybreak.

Hambright says life has been good: “I’ve had no complaints which is just as well as nobody would listen anyhow.”

Quick with a quip, he says he’s been here all of his life and has been out of town only two or three times, but “that’s because I never had enough money to leave.”

He doesn’t play much anymore because of arthritis. He still has two sets of drums, one dating to 1955, and he noted that when he started playing all you needed was a snare, a bass, and a set of cymbals, “but now you’ve got to have 300 zillion things to play.”

His favorite music is blues. He remembers a store on the plantation where he grew up and a one-legged man would wind-up a box, probably a Victrola, on the porch “and they’d raise the devil out there.”

His favorite song, though, is country singer Ray Price’s “For the Good Times.” The title pretty much reflects Red Hambright’s love of life in general and music in particular.

“It’s still in my blood,” he said. “I want to kick loose and play.”

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Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.