Singing chef

Over the usual restaurant din, a single voice rises.

“How many times must I prove my love to you?” Joseph sings in his soulful baritone. “How many ways must I show you?”

His nightly stage is the hot food bar at the buffet restaurant, where Joseph serenades his customers with gospel ballads while he serves up their roast beef or turkey, cooked up and cut just right.

“The songs just come out,” said Joseph between verses and servings of macaroni and cheese. “Singing, it keeps me. There’s no fear in me now.”

Joseph used to sing the blues before he came the the antique and restaurant district neighboring the city of Ashland, the birthplace of more noted entertainers such as Ashley Judd and her mother and sister, Naomi and Wynona, as well as a slew of other famed country crooners along this stretch of U.S. 23 known as the Country Music Highway.

Joseph didn’t know anything about the history of the place before he hitched a ride down Interstate 75. He just wanted to get away from the streets of Detroit.

“That’s where fear is, on the street,” Joseph said.

(More)