Percy Abell
Flip-Floppin’ the OBX
His students at the University of Lynchburg refer to him as the guy in the Tommy Bahama shirts and flip-flops. To the listeners of “Coastal Americana” music, they know him as the guy who had the number 1 song in the country on the Trop Rock Chart with Moon Over Manteo. He is Percy Abell.
Abell spent most of his adult life working in academia at the University of Lynchburg. It was there that he was the baseball coach for 2 decades. He is still a member of the faculty and teaches classes like canoeing, backpacking, paddleboarding, and kayaking in the Health and Physical Education Department. He, his brother Todd, and son Shawn, have all been inducted into the school’s Sports Hall of Fame for baseball.
Growing up on a dairy farm, a mile down the road from his uncle’s dairy farm in Virginia, Abell says, “I was the entertainment when our families got together.” He continues, “I picked up the guitar in middle school where it was taught as an elective. They taught us the G, C, and D chords, and taught us to play John Denver songs. And that’s
what I played.”
It was around this same time that Abell’s love affair with the Outer Banks began.
“My dad, he took one week off each year to go on vacation and my uncle would watch our farm. We would always go to the beach. My dad loved the beach. At first it was Myrtle Beach, but then my dad found the Outer Banks.”
And Percy hasn’t looked back since.
“I remember my first car was a Jeep CJ 7, and every chance we got, my 2 brothers and I would hop into that Jeep, top-down, and run to the Outer Banks. We loved the sand, the dunes, and the ocean.”
I first became aware of Abell when our mutual friend, Boomer Blake, a Coastal Americana artist
from New Jersey, told me to listen to Percy’s song Flip-Floppin the OBX. The first line of the song hooked me. “It’s 5 o’clock on Friday, this meeting is moving way too slow. I should be on the road right now, headed for the coast.”
“Yeah, it was those faculty meetings that ran every Friday from 3 till 5, that inspired the opening to the song,” laughs Abell. Continuing, he says, “it was my brother Todd who actually suggested I come up with a song about living in flip flops on the weekends in the summer and doing the things we loved to do at the beach.”
And that’s what Abell did in the song. In his lyrics, he talks of flying kites on Jockey’s Ridge, fishing for blues off the Avon pier, and driving to Corolla to see the “ponies in the sand.”
That is not Abell’s only Outer Banks-themed song. He recently wrote and recorded Moon Over Manteo.
The cool thing is that I had posted a picture of the full moon over the Roanoke Sound from my front deck. I tagged Percy, Boomer Blake, Jamie Trent, and Erica Sunshine Lee in it and challenged them to write a song about it. Percy commented almost immediately saying, “I got this!”
Got this he did. According to Abell, “I was on a Radio A1A Cruise to Jamaica with my buddy Rick Hoefel and told him that I’m doing a cool little project and asked if he’d like to collaborate.”
Hoefel, himself a songwriter from South Padre Island, Texas, and Abell put together a dream board for the song.
“One of my favorite things to do at the beach,” says Abell, “is to go out at night and look up at the moon and the stars. I love thinking about pirate ships that cruised these waters, and from that, the song was born.”
What’s cool, is that from a simple challenge to write a song based on a picture, Percy took the idea and ran it all the way up the charts.
In early February 2021, it was the number 1 song in the country!
“Yeah, it was pretty cool,” Abell admits. “I think people relate to it because it tells a story. It was my life story kind of a song. I like writing story songs.”
Even still, weeks later, the song is still in the top 5 (as of this writing).
His newest song, Life Looks Better With a Tan is also doing well.
“That song came about,” Abell says, “when a sister of a friend of mine, was talking about clothes, and said, ‘regardless of what you wear, you always look better with a tan.’ How can you not write about that?”
You can find Percy Abell’s music at places like CD Baby, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, and Pandora. Percy also plays live on the Outer Banks. You can check out his schedule on his Facebook page, Percy Abell Music.
Author: Greg Smrdel
Greg Smrdel, while his physical body lives in Ohio (for now), his soul will always remain on the Outer Banks.
Greg Smrdel, while his physical body lives in Ohio (for now), his soul will always remain on the Outer Banks.
