He once sang at the Apollo. His serenades at Raleigh hospital are a perfect R&B Rx
In a busy WakeMed hallway, Walter Moreland serenades a crowd that rolls past in wheelchairs, hobbles along on walkers and limps by on bandaged feet — all of them smiling, singing and tapping whatever parts don’t hurt.
Every Friday, this octogenarian volunteer belts out four hours of soul classics while clapping, shuffling, spinning on one foot, dropping almost to his knees and delivering a musical cure as potent as any pill.
He nods at doctors rushing into surgery, points to nurses hurrying past in scrubs and hugs strangers on their way to wound care or the heart center, offering a dose of Lionel Richie or the O’Jays:
“C’mon everybody, let’s get on the love train,” he urges, twisting his hips. “It’s right here outside the emergency room.”
From the Apollo to WakeMed
A lifetime ago, Moreland sang at the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem, holding down the tenor parts for The Mark IV, an R&B band that sometimes opened for Gladys Knight and the Pips.
“I was mesmerized,” he recalled. “I understand young ladies, when they see their idol and start swooning.”
So the man singing for patients totting oxygen tanks and connected to IVs knows how to connect with a tough crowd, having performed on a legendary stage where acts that failed to pass muster got heckled by a clown who ran onstage to shoot them with a cap gun.
“I try to bring smiles into their lives,” he explained, “to take whatever trouble they have for a just a few moments and put it aside. Bring the light in.”
The medicine he needed
Two years ago, Moreland was a WakeMed patient himself, laid up for nine days with prostate trouble. He appreciated the visits, but he realized what he really needed was someone to stop by and play checkers — better yet, sing.
So he went straight to the top and asked WakeMed CEO Donald Gintzig for permission to fill the void he felt as a patient.
“Can you sing?” asked the CEO.
“Yeah, I can sing. I sang on the same stage as Gladys Knight. I same on the same stage as Wilson Pickett. I have an idea what people are going through. I try to bring a little joy.”
Dark times
Moreland knows the darkest feelings life can deliver, the moods too hopeless for a song to reach.
In 2006, a stranger abducted his wife from a downtown Raleigh parking deck, killed her and left her body in an abandoned farmhouse. Facing the killer in court, Moreland called him “one of Satan’s angels.”
For a long time, he could not sing at all.
Then about 10 years ago, he heard a song coming together in his head, and he sat down to write it on a Casio keyboard. That song, “Alone,” and his CD, “Finding Strength,” is dedicated to Cynthia Moreland’s memory.
“This is temporary here,” he said from WakeMed Friday. “You’ll see all your loved ones one day.”
No soul?
With that, he starts a new song on his iPad, and at the first notes of “Supernatural Thing” from Ben E. King, he spins around and points to a wheelchair-bound patient coming out of the elevator.
“If you can’t feel that,” he says, “you’ve got no soul.”
And as Moreland sings, the crowd pushes through the day mouthing the words, tapping the hand grips on their walkers, clearly filled with soul up to the eyebrows.
