JONESBORO — Writing prose came so easily for Mike Overall that he often prowled around the Jonesboro Sun newsroom on deadline and urged his reporters to “Write, don’t think.”
He played his drums in area jazz bands the same way — with his own interpretation and feel of the music rather than using cliched beats, friends recalled.
Overall, 70, died Thursday evening at the Flo and Phil Jones Hospice in Jonesboro of lung cancer.
He is survived by his wife, Jane Overall, and a daughter, Lorraine Overall of Oak Bluff, Mass., and stepdaughter, Jill Bosche of Austin, Texas.
“He used words that were not in the normal vernacular,” said Bob Troutt, a former reporter and co-publisher of the Jonesboro Sun, where Overall worked from 1968 to 2000. “He loved language, and his use of words was interesting. He really showed off his skill as a writer.”
Overall grew up in Campbell, Mo., the son of a printer at a weekly newspaper in the southeastern Missouri town. He attended Arkansas State University in Jonesboro and developed a love of jazz music while there.
He hosted a weekly two-hour jazz program Wednesdays from 1966 to 1968 on ASU’s radio station KASU. Called The Sounds of Jazz, it was one of the first programs of its kind for the university, said Mike Doyle, an ASU radio-TV professor and KASU station manager.
As an ASU student, Doyle helped Overall with the show and learned about his love of the musical genre.
“He’d talk in the studio and I was in the control booth,” Doyle said. “We’d stack the vinyl albums and he’d tell me which tracks to play.
“I knew nothing about jazz,” Doyle said. “Working with Mike was my education in jazz. Listening to him was like taking a class. It was a rare thing for ASU. You can’t find anyone knowledgeable enough to host a show like that. Mike was perfect.”
Doyle said Overall’s show always opened with “Quiet Now,” by jazz pianist Bill Evans. Even now, four decades later, when Doyle hears the song, he immediately thinks of Overall.
When Craig Baker was a freshman at ASU majoring in music, he met Overall and the two forged a friendship based on their mutual respect for creativity.
“I remember once we were analyzing [jazz trumpeter] Chet Baker and how he was a combination of Dixieland and swing,” Craig Baker said. “In the 1970s, he changed his style and Mike knew that. Mike was a genius; he recognized that subtle change. He was such a deep thinker.”
Gary Gazaway, a professional trumpeter who has played with Joe Cocker, Phish, the Memphis Horns and Stevie Ray Vaughan, called Overall a “major influence” during his education at ASU.
“Mike did more to promote jazz music in Jonesboro than anyone else, ever,” Gazaway said. “He brought major jazz stars to Jonesboro … in the 1970s, including Dizzy Gillespie, Mel Torme, Louie Belson and others. He was a scholar of American blues and jazz history.
“Also, his literary talent and writing ability were world class,” Gazaway said.
Overall began his journalism career as a beat reporter for the Jonesboro Sun, covering two tornadoes that struck the Craighead County town in 1968 and 1973. Later, as an editor there, he helped direct coverage of the 1998 Westside Middle School shooting that left four students and a teacher dead.
“He was a solid reporter,” Troutt said. “As an editor, he was the epitome of a musician. He was laid back even under pressure. He may snap at you, but he’d show me what I did wrong in a story and teach me why it was wrong. We had the ultimate ‘good guy, bad guy’ combination of editors then. Mike was the ‘good guy.’”
He left the Jonesboro Sun and worked at the Craighead County-Jonesboro Public Library, recommending books to patrons and leading a book club, until his death.
“He was the artist, the reader, the grammarian,” Lorraine Overall said of her father. “If you gave him tools, he suddenly had two left hands and couldn’t do anything. But he was the best dad ever. We loved to laugh.”
She said she saw him lose his composure once when he taught her how to drive a stick shift in an old blue Volkswagen Beetle he owned on the Jonesboro High School parking lot.
“He was yelling and bumping his head on the roof,” she said. “I was just laughing and laughing.”