On the night of his last ever musical performance, a wedding in Charleston, South Carolina, Joe Hundertmark sent pictures of trees covered in Spanish moss to his stepmother.
“Beautiful. Where is that?” Anne Hundertmark texted back.
Giuseppe, as she nicknamed him, was always in awe of nature. He never failed to see the beauty in everything around him.
“I’m sorry I haven’t called. I can’t believe another week has gone by,” she texted him from Maryland.
“It’s OK,” he replied.
Later, he would play guitar with his bandmate, Nathan Harris, and other members of his band, Lucky Pocket, for the last time.
As they drove back to North Carolina during the morning of Sept. 7, the car crashed and overturned around 5 a.m. on eastbound Interstate 40 in Davie County, catching fire on the roadway.
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Harris, who was driving, and Hundertmark died at the scene. They were the only people in the car.
The crash left their families and friends devastated. Kim Newkirk, Harris’ mother, remembered him as an optimistic young boy who used to walk around the house singing. She is proud of what he had accomplished as a musician, and of how hard he had worked.
“I made sure every Friday I’d call him and I’d tell him be careful,” said Newkirk. “I always prayed for him.”
Harris, 44, the talented lead vocalist of Lucky Pocket and many other bands, was also a dedicated father of three young daughters, Sophia, 13, Laila, 12, and Natalia, 10.
Monday through Thursday, Harris spent his time picking his girls up from school and helping them with their homework, occasionally absconding with them on trips to faraway places like New York City. But on Fridays and Saturdays, he was on stage, Newkirk said.
“That’s what he always wanted to do,” Newkirk said. “He was a great father. I would tell him all the time, you’re a great father, the things you’re doing for those girls.”
Harris performed for many bands throughout his musical career, earning recognition for his ability to improvise and sing at a near perfect pitch. “Firewater,” a smooth jazz song with lyrics that described a beautiful woman from a distance, was Newkirk’s favorite song to hear Harris sing.
“Some of the best music that I’ve ever written was sitting beside Nathan Harris at the piano,” said Billy Stevens, a fellow musician and best friend of Harris and Hundertmark who helped write “Firewater.”
Stevens said he spent long nights writing with Harris, who was a groomsman at his wedding. Over the last couple of months leading up to September, Stevens said Harris would come visit his house every Wednesday to work on a new record in his studio. Harris brought his daughters over to hang out with Stevens’ daughters.
“One thing that should be known about Nathan Harris is that he was an incredible father,” Stevens said. “It is 100 percent our responsibility to make sure that those girls are taken care of.”
“Nathan was dedicated to his daughters,” said Michael Kinchen, a musician and friend who played in Lucky Pocket. “He loved them. When you heard him say anything about them, it was obvious how seriously he took them.”
The crash sent Anne Hundertmark, Joe Hundertmark’s stepmother, into shock. She watched him get his first job and use the money to buy a guitar, which he played by ear at 13. She marveled as he grew as a musician through the years, graduated from UNC School of the Arts, played in bands, and traveled the world with Cirque du Soleil as a musical director.
“I’ll miss his gentle voice and him calling me any time,” Hundertmark said. “When he was in Montreal with Cirque du Soleil, he would call and sing to me in a French accent.”
Both Harris and Hundertmark shared a seemingly endless dedication for musical expression, according to fellow musicians and friends. It was a passion that filled their lives with difficulties but also shaped them into uniquely adventurous people.
Clare Fader, who played with Hundertmark in her band, Clare Fader and the Vaudevillains, remembered well the difficulty of hitting the road for gigs. It’s an unglamorous life, in the age of dominant streaming service platforms. Hundertmark found a way to make it fun, Fader said.
“When I think of how lucky I am to have played music, meeting a kid like Joe and getting to play with him is one of those highlights,” Fader said. “It makes me glad I had that time in my life.”
Their band would oscillate between well-paying and free gigs, and even a front-porch garden party where they were paid in food.
“Joe was always happy to be there,” said Mary Kay Birch, a former band-member and friend.
But the life of a musician, always on the road, was often adventurous, too.
In the early 2000s, Harris was one of the emcees for “Solos,” a hip-hop group that performed music that was a constantly evolving fusion of jazz, funk, R&B, and techno-inspired dance grooves.
Solos used to perform for crowds of hundreds at Winston-Salem spots such as the Rubber Soul Bar and Ziggy’s, a live music venue and bar.
Hundertmark also performed in Solos as an instrumentalist.
Harris showed off his improvisational skills in 2005 when Solos opened for the rapper Common. When Common brought him up on stage in front of 20,000 people for a freestyle rap battle, Harris tore him to pieces, said John Ray, a fellow musician and best friend of Hundertmark and Harris. Whenever Harris performed at weddings, guests would come up and compliment him on songs he created about anything in his field of vision, like a wedding cake.
One of the highlights of Hundertmark’s career was when he arrived in Los Angeles after working with Cirque du Soleil. He worked on the set of “The Hateful Eight” with his favorite movie director, Quentin Tarantino, and taught actress Jennifer Jason Leigh how to play the guitar.
At one point during filming, the actor Kurt Russell slammed an expensive, antique Martin guitar into pieces. The act nearly brought Hundertmark to tears, Stevens recounted.
“Joe nonchalantly walked over to the remnants of the smashed guitar and with tears in his eyes grabbed the shards from the rubble and slipped it into his pocket,” said Stevens. “He had someone polish it, sand it and make a necklace out of it.”
Both Harris and Hundertmark will leave a void they built in musical connections with others, said Ray.
“I’m going to really miss the music,” Ray said. “We had such a tight connection. I knew what they were going to do before they did it.”
“Each connection has to be treasured,” Kinchen said. “There’s a kind of energy you take for granted. As a lifer, the way we communicate is on a truer level than a lot of interactions can be.”
When Newkirk, Harris’ mother, thinks of what she’ll miss most about her son, she remembers his strong will, his optimism, and what he would do for those around him. Sophia, his eldest daughter, already sings in talent shows at her school and Laila, the second oldest, can sing, too, but won’t do it just yet.
“I’ll miss his voice the most, and how he used to hug me,” Newkirk said. “And the way he treated his daughters. He was a great father.”
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