devoted drummer
Story By Mike Overall, Photo by Phil Pickle

Leland Blackshare, 67, a man who possesses a capacious heart and a sublime grace of spirit when it comes to helping children in medical need, is also a dynamic jazz drummer. He has devoted his musical life to playing his vintage 1958 Slingerland set with the technical brilliance and blazing percussiveness of his lifelong hero and mentor, the seminal pioneer drummer Gene Krupa, whose hand Blackshare, then 18, first shook in 1960, when he met the great drummer at a concert his mother took him to in St. Louis.

A 1963 graduate of ASU who majored in social sciences and minored in history, and who was the percussion section leader of the Marching Indian Band long before the university hired a director of percussion studies, Blackshare counts that long-ago meeting with the legendary Krupa, as well as a recent honor he received from the Arkansas Children’s Hospital (ACH), as two of the more important days in his life.

The Little Rock hospital recently featured Blackshare in its magazine, “The Achiever,” which paid homage to the Rector man as a member of the Ruth Beall Society, an organization of individuals, couples and families whose wills, trusts or other estate plans, of any amount, include ACH as a beneficiary.
“I decided to include a bequest in my will benefiting ACH because children are important, particularly the ones who are ill and need help,” the lifelong bachelor said. He also made a similar bequest to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, he said, because “nothing could be more important than healing a sick child.”

Blackshare, an extraordinary award-winning teacher who made his classes in American history and government “live” during the 31 years he taught in the Marmaduke district, is the genuine article: a man who put his money where his mouth is. Or just make that the sum total of his worldly possessions, which upon his death will go to those aforementioned hospitals, where every effort is made to give ailing children a new lease on their young lives.

A man of no few paradoxes, Blackshare, when seated behind his drums (playing what he prefers to call dixieland jazz), or spearheading his numerous civic endeavors in his hometown, exudes a commanding presence and charges the air around him with the electricity of his dynamism. Conversely, he is humbled when in the presence of genius (a la Krupa, who pioneered the art of the drum solo and made the instrument a legitimate addition to the jazz band or orchestra), and never more so than when he visits children who are beset by life-threatening illnesses.

“I felt humbled the first time I met Mr. Minx (Donald R., the legendary director who put ASU’s band program on the musical map),” Blackshare said. “And as a scared-stiff kid, I stood in slack jawed awe when, at a beautiful and vintage hotel in St. Louis, Mr. Krupa came over to our ringside seat table, shook my hand and asked me if I played the drums.” That meeting was made possible by Blackshare’s beloved mother, Thelma “Dobbs” Twitty Blackshare, who had written Krupa a letter before the concert and asked him to please meet her son who idolized the man whose name had become synonymous with the drums.
“Mother helped me buy the very same set of drums I play to this day,” he said in a wistful tone. “When I lost her (in 1990), I lost the best friend I ever had.” His father, Sam Blackshare, died in 1983.

And he was ever so humbled and thoughtful, he said, when he signed the forms of intent regarding his bequests to both children’s hospitals.

An active member of the Helping Hands Foundation Board for Disadvantaged Children in Rector, Blackshare said the goals and aspirations he set for his life could be traced to three men: Roy Horne, his first band director; Don Minx, “who gave me the confidence to be the best that I could be;” and, not surprisingly, Gene Krupa, who inspired generations of jazz drummers, and who today is regarded as one of the more important figures in the history of America’s classical music.

“When Mr. Krupa made time for this kid a lifetime ago,” Blackshare said, “he instilled within me the important and seminal role adults may play in the life of youngsters.”

“Without the drums, I would hate to think what my life would have been like,” he said. “Music gave me a sense of identity, self-worth and professionalism that I have carried with me all these years.”

The late Cecil Barnett of Jonesboro, a brilliant trumpeter who was graduated from ASU, was another musical influence. “We played many gigs together back in the ‘eighties,” Blackshare recalled. “What he taught me about music you don’t learn from a book.”

Ditto for what Leland Blackshare taught this writer about the drums and life in general. We have been close friends for almost 40 years.

When Blackshare retired from teaching in 2004, he did it in style. “I played Krupa’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” with the Marmaduke High School band.”

Blackshare played the Krupa classic the same way he has lived his life: in singular fashion, being the best he could be.

And as always, the crowd loved him for it.