How do you find the best karaoke singer in Charlotte?
Only a handful of places in town now offer karaoke regularly, and clienteles appear not to overlap much – singers tend to find a bar they like and stick with it, I’m told. The task seemed impossible.
So I asked karaoke DJs at each of these places whether they had a regular who’s a standout, then went to see them for myself. Though most of the DJs were at great pains to narrow their choices to one singer, they did their best.
Here are five singers worth finding, and an introductory sketch of each karaoke place, for the uninitiated.
Joshua Harper at NoDa 101
“I know the perfect person,” DJ Louis Kaufmann tells me. “Joshua Harper. He will surprise you.”
Indeed, he does. When Harper lets loose with the first bars of Sam Cook’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” I get chills. It’s a thrill you can experience yourself, often – he sings karaoke at NoDa 101 four or five times a week, he says, and – if it’s not too crowded – five or six songs a night.
Harper, 36, says he moved to Charlotte in June 2016 from New Haven, Connecticut. He works two day jobs, as a psych tech and a CHS security officer, he says, but nothing gets between him and karaoke. “It’s fun, but it’s more than just fun,” he tells me. “I’m also tuning myself. Trying different songs. Trying to sing them different ways. So, it’s all about being able to step out of your box, your comfort zone.”
It was his mother, an R&B singer, who taught him how to sing, he says. “She taught me vocal exercises. And how it always pays to drink water. Water, water, water.” Even today, he will try out songs with her on the phone. “She’ll say, ‘Well, what if you sing it like this...’ The feedback is constant.”
Harper says he auditioned for ‘American Idol’ in 2000, and for ‘The Voice’ in 2015 and 2016, making it, the last time, as far as blind auditions. He recorded and released, on his own, a full album under the name Clark K3nt, as well as music videos (on his website: www.clark3nt.com). He writes his own lyrics and, using a keyboard and violin he taught himself to play, mixes the music himself in his studio at home. “I always come up with music in my head. The first thing I do is record it on my phone, listen to it, and then try to map it out on a piano ... Then I add to it. Next thing you know, I have a full song.”
NoDa 101 has proved to be a great place to network with other musicians, he says. “I’ll meet a drummer. I’ll meet a sax player. They want to work with me ... And the next thing you know, I’m singing on people’s hooks, or I’m doing jingles for people that I’ve met in situations like this. So it’s pretty cool ... And it’s something that if I just stayed in my house, it wouldn’t happen.” He tells me he has yet to score any paying gigs this way, but “I know it’s going to come.”
Sami Santoli from Jeff’s Bucket Shop
If you want to feel warm and fuzzy about the millennial generation, there is no better place to do so than Jeff’s Bucket Shop. Here, any singer who gets up onstage, regardless of talent, is rewarded with cheers and hoots of encouragement from an audience of 20-somethings.
The tone of the place is set by DJ Chris Davin, an amiable 30-year-old with blue hair, wire-rimmed glasses and a Duck Dynasty beard. He is eager to show off the sound system, which he says he took apart two years ago, when he first started DJing here, and built into what it is today. “It’s my baby.” Davin calls the singers to the stage “Price Is Right”-style, punctuating the end of their names with a deep, rumbling growl that bounces off the walls.
Jeff’s Bucket Shop is a classic dive bar, with red-painted cinderblock walls decorated with placards and mirrors from alcohol companies. You come here to drink, yes, but the heart of the place is karaoke and the setup reflects this. The bar, pushed back along the wall, is almost an afterthought. You can come here to sing any night of the week.
Davin’s pick for best singer is Sami Santoli, a 27-year-old administrator at Hair Club. She’s originally from Smithtown, N.Y., but moved to Charlotte 10 years ago to attend Catawba College. When I meet her, she is with her fiancé, Brian Cetina, whom she met two years ago – singing karaoke at Jeff’s Bucket Shop.
That night, at the bar, they start off singing a duet: “Closer” from The Chainsmokers and Halsey. When Cetina’s microphone starts to cut out, Santoli gives him hers and takes the bad microphone for herself. Cetina, bless his heart, sings as well as you or I, but Santoli has the sort of pipes that come from years of singing lessons. I ask her if anyone else in her family sings. She shakes her head: “My mother is loud and obnoxious and wants to be in the center of everything, but she doesn’t sing.”
Santoli’s talent was first noticed by her chorus teacher in fifth grade, she says, and she started voice lessons soon after, as well as performing arts camp, where she was often picked to sing solos. She gave up singing right before college to pursue softball and field hockey. “Screaming at games didn’t work with voice lessons.” She returned to singing only two years ago, she says, but she doesn’t appear to have lost ground in her time away.
Elizabeth Dial at Lucky Lou’s
Lucky Lou’s is perched on the edge of a shopping mall, but in a snug little building that’s nearly windowless, giving it a warm, secretive charm. It is Cheers-like, with a long, airy bar, capacious booths, pool tables and giant chalkboards in the bathrooms where one can write things like “Happy Birthday, Kelly!” in colored chalk.
The karaoke here is hosted by Chubby’s Karaoke, a mobile karaoke company founded in Charlotte in 1989. When I ask owner Keith Chubb (a.k.a. “Chubby”) and Try, his DJ, whom they would name as most talented singer at Lucky Lou’s, they both choose Elizabeth Dial, who goes by the stage name “Spin.”
“She’s a creative singer,” Chubby explains. “She almost never sings the same song twice. People always wonder what she’s going to do. She does stuff that the audience doesn’t see coming.” DJ Try agrees. “She comes out with friends every Friday night. She tells me I’m her therapist.”
When I finally get to meet Spin and hear her sing, she tells me the same thing, that karaoke is like therapy. Spin, 29, is a Spanish teacher at Fort Mill High School.
“Teaching can be rather stressful,” she says. “You deal with a lot of pressures from a lot of different directions. So, for me, this just becomes a release, in a positive way.” There are other benefits, she explains. Her friend, Kerri Marks, who is seated with her other friends in a booth, has cystic fibrosis, and karaoke helps to clear and strengthen her lungs. “For her, it’s almost like physical therapy... For me, it’s like emotional therapy.”
Jemini June at 8.2.0
Of the five bars I went to, 8.2.0 had the most racially diverse crowd, as well as the most posh karaoke room. It boasts a dark, spot-lit stage, with neon signs, high-quality acoustics, leather banquettes – even a smoke machine. DJ Melyssa Ryan, quick-witted and doll-faced, rules the room with a ringing voice, and suffers no fools. “There is a $100 fee if you drop the mike! There will be no booing! You get one warning, then you will be kicked out! This is not an American Idol audition! This is for drunk-a** people to have a good-a** time!” While this may be true for most of the singers, it does not seem to be the case for Jemini June.
Jemini is a professional singer with her own band – Jemini June and the Galaxy – and a website (www.jeminijunemusic.com) but that doesn’t stop her from coming out for karaoke every weekend. She dresses up for it; when I saw her, she wore a low-cut, black stretch dress. Most karaoke singers watch the screen when they sing, so as not to miss any words. Not Jemini. She is there for you. She sings to you. The day I saw her, midway through her song, she went off script and began playing with the vocals, brilliantly and with soul, improving on the original version. The crowd went wild for it.
Jemini tells me she is self-taught but grew up in a musical family in Atlanta, and was one of six kids, all of whom were musical. “We were super poor. I played the spoons. My brother played the shoebox. My other brother was a rapper. My two sisters were dancers ... So we started off doing it in poverty. But we had a passion for music.”
Though she is now able to get paid gigs as a singer, she says, she relies on karaoke to hone her act. “Karaoke helps you get rid of stage fright, be comfortable with your song selection and crowd engagement – without the pressure, because everyone is expecting you to sound bad.” No one at 8.2.0., though, expects Jemini to sound bad.
Laterriea Belk at Snug Harbor
Snug Harbor has karaoke only one night a week (Sunday) but it felt the biggest of the these five places. The interior looks like the hollowed-out hull of a pirate ship, with high ceilings, hanging lamps and dark walls decorated with nautical instruments and skulls and crossbones. It’s normally a live-music venue but Sunday night karaoke has been going strong for five years. It’s hosted by DJ Bryan Pierce, an actor and singer in his own right, having once been featured (in 2015) on a blind audition episode of “The Voice.” When I ask him his pick as best singer, he names Laterriea Belk: “She always brings down the house.”
Belk, born and raised in Charlotte, is 38 and goes by the stage name Ms. B. She was hard to track down – she works third shift (1 to 9 a.m.) as a machine operator for Pitney Bowes, which presorts mail for the U.S. Postal Service. Still, she makes it out to Snug Harbor for karaoke at least two or three times a month. “People are so cool here ... Everybody is just so laid back and accepting. And the sound system is amazing.” She likes to mix it up when she sings. “I can do country, R&B, hip hop, soul, motown. Just whatever I feel that crowd is feeling at that moment.”
I rustle through my notes, struggle with my tape recorder. She waits for me patiently, smilingly. I am immediately struck by her poise – she has the self-possession of a beauty queen or a TV host. Karaoke, she tells me, changed her life. When she first started singing karaoke (four years ago), she was a single mom, having just gone through a divorce. “I’m not one of those people who can just go to a bar ... I’m not one who can automatically start taking to somebody. I have to have a reason to talk to them.” Karaoke is that reason.
She sang at church, growing up. She sang at school – and the kids were always for it. (“Laterriea! Sing that song you were singing at lunch!”) Her biggest fan now is her 20-year-old son, Kordelle. “He actually critiques me,” she says. “He knows how I’m supposed to sound – and how I’m not supposed to sound.”
And she remembers well how she first got started – at age 5, watching a TV show on BET called “Video Soul” and mimicking all the singers.
“I loved hearing Whitney Houston come on,” Belk says.
“When they would play her song ‘The Greatest Love of All,’ honey, I would sing it to the top of my lungs!”
This story was originally published April 03, 2018 4:50 PM.