Peninsula In Passage

Music at Midway Park Driver rocked in the early 1960s with Fats Domino, Sam Cooke, James Brown, Flip-Flop Stephens, Lloyd Price and The Marvelettes all performing at Midway Park. Not exactly Motown South, perhaps, but for three years the venue brought in some of the top names in the music business. Admission was generally $1 and the concerts were loud enough, local residents remember, to be heard on the Driver crossroads even with the windows down. Brenda Outlaw Duke, born in 1949, remembers sitting on the front porch just down Nansemond Parkway and enjoying the music. Segregation was still a way of life in July 1961, when Midway Park celebrated its grand opening as a black resort.

R & B singer Clyde McPhatter, best known for “A Lover’s Question” and launching the Doo-Wop group, The Drifters, headlined the three day event. “I see it but I don’t believe it,” McPhatter was quoted as saying as he toured the park on the corner of Nansemond Parkway and Sportsman Blvd. The 144-acre site held a 15-unit motel and restaurant, covered dance pavilion, swimming and fishing lakes and picnic groves. Floyd Cooper, the developer who had built another black resort, Sunset Park, in Deep Creek in 1955, created Midway in less than three months. “I was through this area just a while ago on a one-nighter tour and all that was here was a bunch of trees,” McPhatter told Cooper. “Now look at it.” The opening celebration offered free cold drinks to everyone on Friday, autographed recordings to the first 500 ladies attending the Saturday concerts and the raffle of a hi-fi stereo record player on Sunday. “Lots of touring black acts came in for the weekend shows and Cooper would bring them into the store – the big to-do’s with their bright shiny shoes and rings on every finger,” Leah Whedbee says. Whedbee and her husband, George Whedbee, owned Boney’s, a country store down the road from the park. “I remember James Brown came in to the store several times and I spoke with him.”

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