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In more playful days, fun-seekers out a for late-night spree would ride the elevator up Raleigh’s round Holiday Inn and empty their wallets to hear Will Silver belt out the blues — especially on New Year’s Eve, when he would thunder like Aretha Franklin on Sunday.
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He wore a sparking silver vest and a pair of silver shoes and he drove a silver Cadillac — a flamboyant display he sometimes topped off with a black fedora.
He could holler Howlin’ Wolf or croon Louis Armstrong, and he pounded the keys of his baby grand with fingers that could stretch for an octave and a half.
“I don’t consider myself talented,” he would say. “I consider myself gifted. A gift from God and so forth. It’s a miracle almost.”
So on Thursday, when Hotel Indigo cuts the ribbons for its new boutique hotel, modernizing the classic and still circular Holiday Inn, it will offer deep tribute to the troubadour who used to light up the penthouse.
“It’s a blessing to us,” said his sister Barbara Tharpe Walker. “It all came from his heart. I’m so proud that he’s my brother. Proud of him.”
Most of Raleigh knew “Will Silver” as Wilbur Tharpe, a longtime and much-loved Spanish and social studies teacher at Daniels Middle School — now named Oberlin.
As Will Silver, he wasn’t living out an alter ego so much as creating an extension of his daytime personality — as playful and inventive standing at a chalkboard as he was hunched over a piano.
He once gave extra credit to a student who sang the Preamble rather than recite it. He once placed his chair on top of his desk while giving his class an exam so he could better watch over their eyes. Three times, Wake County named him teacher of the year.
“If you would come to class early, he’d be sitting at his desk with a cassette player listening to gospel music,” said Barbara Herring, who had him for eighth grade. “I liked him so much, I ate lunch with him all the time.”
Herring attended a youth group at Pullen Baptist Church on Hillsborough Street, and when it finished, she would wander over to listen to him play in the basement lounge of a nearby hotel.
“He was playing across the street,” she said. “Why would I not go see that? In my mind, he was wearing silver platform shoes.”
Born on Coleman Street in 1949, he grew up attending segregated schools — notable for man who became one of Daniels’ few Black teachers.
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He never took a music lesson. He never learned to read a note of music. When he was maybe 5, he wandered over to the corner store neighbor Alberta Simmons ran out of her basement, which had a piano off in a side room.
Inside that basement, Tharp figured out his first chords, playing entirely by ear, mimicking the songs he learned in church. By the time he turned 13, he was playing in a string of churches around Raleigh, then catching a bus to play more in Durham.
He pivoted to blues and rock and roll in the same way Ray Charles brought church music to the pop charts — using gospel chords and cadences to get tails shaking on the dance floor.
But after college, when he started playing clubs around Raleigh, Tharpe kept his roots
“Wherever I played, I’d always do one gospel number,” he told an interviewer late in life. “Let me know everything is on right, right road. I’m on the right road now. Made me comfortable.”
From the early ‘70s on, Will Silver played dozens of stages around Raleigh, all of them shuttered for decades: Blues Alley, Seldom Blues Cafe, Rich Man Poor Man Speakeasy, The Swinging Steakhouse.
“He would sit at the bar at Greenshields and drink Johnny Walker blacks until enough people implored him to play,” recalled Justin Scranton, who worked there in the ‘90s. “He would sit at the grand piano in what was called the New Bar, and it was just mesmerizing. He had these long, sinewy fingers that rolled all over the keys. His voice sounded like some swirl of blues and rock and soul and gospel all at once.”
Gone now for five years, Wilbur Tharpe may be best remembered for his longtime stint with The Branchettes, the gospel group headed by Sister Lena Mae Perry, who recruited Tharpe for piano on the strength of hearing him casually noodle around in church one day.
With The Branchettes, he would tour England and Ireland, where the locals dubbed him “the Black Liberace,” and he would appear in the documentary film “Stay Prayed Up,” which chronicled their powerful spirit.
But a part of him will always live as “Will Silver,” pounding the keys at the top of what once ranked as Raleigh’s tallest building — an eccentric landmark in a city of average beige blocks.
Whatever Hotel Indigo imagines for Silver’s old piano bar, there will always be a whisper of his voice closing out the night with “What a Wonderful World” serenading us all.
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