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He’s a ‘Hearty’ soul
The Hearty White Show can be heard every Tuesday at 9 p.m. on WVFS (V-89.) Videos of the show are also available for rental at Video 21.
By Jack Clifford
People all over the world have seen various religious images in the strangest places: the bark of a tree, the glass façade of a building, or even on the surface of a grilled cheese sandwich.
Local musician/artist/radio personality Dave Morris didn’t see a messiah as he looked down at the loaf of Pillsbury bread one day five years ago. He did, however, find a name for the voice that brings a weekly message to his loyal listeners on Florida State’s student-run station, WVFS: Hearty White.
For several years Morris had been mimicking radio icon Paul Harvey with his own incarnation, Lee Harvey. He wanted to create a simpler character, however, one who wasn’t so “mocking and snarky,” he says, because being like that “about complicated problems while not really offering any alternative seemed mentally lazy and too easy.”
For Morris, Hearty is a guy who means well, tries hard, and is definitely not smarter than the average person. But he is real, and he is earnest.
“If you really want to be sincere, you have to take a moral stand, but at the same time you want to be liked,” Morris wrote in response to an e-mail interview. “And that’s Hearty: a well-meaning, weak-willed, faithful, helpful but useless, soul who loves the Bible and loves people...in theory.”
The full title of Morris’ show, which airs every Tuesday on V-89, is “Miracle Nutrition Hour,” with the tag line of “Expect a miracle, but not really.” Hearty dishes out homespun advice on diet and health, yes, but he also dispenses down-to-earth guidance on spirituality and religion, which was Morris’ minor at FSU.
“I’m convinced everyone likes inspirational performance whether it’s church, temple, or theater, where ceremony and mystery and hope come together,” he says. “I don’t mean to sound like Mr. Rogers, but I think you can be silly and still talk about important things.
“Also I think people respond to a serious and non-judgmental discussion of the Bible since it shapes so much of our culture and yet no one has read it or read it with commentary.”
His approach seems to resonate with listeners, if comments left on Hearty White’s MySpace page are testament.
“Thank you for the wonderful work you do...my kids are learning a lot...I’m learning a lot...our community learns a lot...I hope...peace,” reads one post. “I always feel like a better person after listening to your show. I think your spiritual renewal will affect all of your Tallahassee friends/listeners in a positive way. Thank you,” praises another. Even the silliness that Hearty preaches is returned in kind: “we love you...p.s. we’ve licked some psychedelic frogs. got any miracle nutrition advice? it could get rowdy.”
Morris, who was born in Bermuda in 1964 to an American mother and Bermudian father, spent most of his growing up years in Boca Raton with his grandparents and mother. That period in his life had a big influence on Morris because his grandfather introduced him to oldtime radio, and stars like Jack Benny. Later in life, a teacher turned him on to the comic works of Firesign Theater, along with Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s “The 2,000 Year Old Man.”
When Morris came to FSU in 1981 he wanted to make movies, but he found himself enjoying poetry and creative writing, especially reading it to an audience.
“I was really into the performance aspect,” he says. “I started playing in bands as an undergrad and then in 1988 hooked up with the people with whom I started Coldwater Army. I became very interested in the relationship between the audience and the performer.”
Morris put on a memorabIe puppet show several years ago at Railroad Square for those in attendance, which he called “Confraternity of the Fatherless.” The performance was backed by sounds from a ukulele, and included teethbrushing, singing and orange eating.
“There’s always been a quasi-religious or mystical bent to anything I perform or present because I think there’s great power and excitement in wonder and mystery,” he says. “That’s why I try not to repeat performances, so that there’s a special moment-in-time nature to the experience.
“It makes for a terrible career.”
Speaking of career choices, Morris spent time as an “aggressively weird tenor sax player” for a band called Maaleche while he lived in France with his wife, Ann. The experience of feeling so out of place and not fluent with the French language left him disoriented.
“I was completely humbled, and I realized that people are people, and if you drop all pretense and like people, the world opens up,” he says.
It was shortly after he returned to Tallahassee in 2002 that he was driving to Panama City to play miniature golf, and he heard a caller to a religious program go into great detail about his hemorrhoid problem.
“He was telling the story about how it was affecting his financial life and personal life and the things he’d tried. It was very personal and honest and compelling,” Morris recalls.
That radio exchange became the inspiration for Hearty White. That and the loaf of Pillsbury bread. Now, being back in more familiar surroundings – and being a stay-at-home dad with his two children, Lucinda, 7, and Irving, 2 – has given Morris a more solid perspective, and the people who respond to Hearty’s simple way of living and eating right keep him going.
“There’s a lot of thoughtful people in Tallahassee, and that’s what you need to have [in order] to be inspired to create and communicate and interact,” he says. “I think Tallahassee is very generous to artists and performers. Artists would argue that it’s tough to make a living at it, that they are underpaid if you consider how many hours of work and mental anguish it took.
“But if you’re making something to sell, and you have that kind of inequity between outlay and your income, you should sell something else or go where people pay even more,” he adds. “Getting someone to pay attention is more important than getting them to pay money.”
Hearty White would likely agree wholeheartedly.
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