By Victor Greto
LEWES – Fever.
Chrystal Heidel can still hear her boss now.
In the quiet afternoons and evenings inside the Notting Hill Coffee Roastery and Lewes Bake Shop downtown, the smell of coffee and pastry filling her senses, she listened to owner Amy Felker repeatedly snap her fingers to Peggy Lee’s signature record, finding her beat, her love, her passion.
Rhythm, lilting voice, jolting stops between the lines, husky voice, an emphasis here, a heated passion there. Fever.
You give me fever/ when you kiss me/ fever when you hold me tight/ Fever
in the morning/ Fever all through the night
“I spent a month learning that song,” Felker says, sitting at one of the small tables scattered at the front of her shop.
Call it the culmination of a nearly four-decade singing apprenticeship for the 43-year-old. Owner of the successful Lewes establishment, she’s also becoming a noted local singer.
She says she’s loved singing since the age of 5.
Never pursued it – life got in the way. Until the right musician came along, anyway.
Dressed in faded jeans and a bright red sweater topped by black windblown curly hair, Felker just finished singing with her musician partner, Stuart Vining, on Second Street in front of Citizens Bank at Lewes’ First Thursdays.
“The whole thing’s a giggle,” Felker says, shunting aside with a belittling phrase that crazy, giddy happiness that comes with being taken critically as a performer.
“I don’t take myself too seriously,” she says, but adds: “If you want to sell pastries, it’s got to be good. Same thing with singing.”
Hence the early obsession with “Fever.”
“It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but I never told my parents.”
About 15 years ago, she sang karaoke, perhaps for a giggle. But she was thrilled when she heard her mother say, “Is that Amy?”
“I got the bug,” she says. “I started singing live.” Karaoke, anyway.
Born Amy Arnold in Westchester County, N.Y., she attended Yorktown High School, then Hartwick College, a small, liberal arts school in upstate New York, where she majored in sociology and from where she graduated in 1989.
She had thought of being a chiropractor, even an optometrist, but, like many teenagers, “I couldn’t get past the chemistry.”
In New York, Felker met a man, Obie Lee, who eventually became her business partner. She moved down to Ocean City, Md. “I wanted to own my own business,” she says.
She and her partner soon discovered Lewes, and she and Lee opened the Obie Lee Coffee Roastery on April 30, 1990.
She changed the name in 2003 after the partnership ended.
Meanwhile, she met John Craig Felker at a Halloween party.
“We clicked, and figured we’d give it a try,” she says. They married in 1999, and she gave birth to their only child, Blair, in 2001.
Her husband, in the Delaware National Guard, is currently deployed to Afghanistan.
“I could sit here and moan about it, but he’s got to do it,” Felker says. “If something happens, I know he loves it. He loves flying and the guys he works with.”
Both her husband and son sat by the curb while she and Vining sang in the chilly autumn breeze on Oct. 1.
Starting with barely a dozen, the crowd grew to three dozen by the time they finished. She waved at some of the automobiles passing by.
“So cool to see the cars pass by and know everyone in them,” she says into the microphone.
The joy of small-town life in southern Delaware, perhaps; but mostly, the indulgent crowd is enjoying listening to the duo sing the Everly Brothers’ “Let it be Me,” John Denver’s “Country Roads,” The Beatles’ “Please Please Me,” Simon & Garfunkel’s “Cecilia,” and Kenny Chesney’s “Back Where I Come From.”
“Stuart is my best friend,” Felker says after the gig. “A real gentleman about everything, and he takes the music seriously.”
If there’s anyone not singing and playing for a giggle, it’s Stuart Vining.
He first heard Felker sing at Irish Eyes in October of 2008, with Maribeth Fischer, who heads the Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild.
“I thought she was a singer,” Vining says.
He first noticed her six months earlier. But it wasn’t her voice that got his attention; it was her giggle. “I recognized her laugh when she was on stage,” he says.
“Stuart and I went to the bar that night and she sang one song,” Fischer recalls. “I needed a woman to sing for one of the Guild’s monthly ‘Nights of Song and Stories.’ I said she would be great for the music night.”
They both approached Felker. Vining told her that she should be in a band
I’m a baker, not a singer, Vining says she told him.
But they began to play together, and soon Vining, a veteran musician who recently lost his nearly 3-decade-long partner Peter Slayer to bladder cancer, told her, “Let’s do it.”
They’ve been doing it ever since.
It’s been a partnership that happened just at the right time for Vining.
“She has relative pitch and a great tone,” he says. “You can’t teach that.”
Vining dislikes karaoke because it teaches a would-be singer bad habits anathema to live singing
“The beat in karaoke is always the same,” he says. “But with a band it moves around and you’ve got to feel it.”
Vining, 60, grew up a lover and practitioner of folk music, and, he says, always wanted a female partner.
Like many folk artists, Vining doesn’t like playing in bars. He strums and sings to be listened to, and he and Felker got the chance when they rented out the Milton Theater last April and played for two hours to a crowd of 120.
They’ve also played at places in Lewes and Rehoboth Beach, including Beseme, Irish Eyes Pub, Jerry’s Seafood, Browseabout Books and the Ovations Restaurant and Lounge.
Felker says they’re careful not to play too much. “I don’t want people to get sick of us,” she says.
It seems that Felker and Vining never tire of each other.
“We enjoy each other’s company,” Felker says. “We’re singing as much as we can.”
Everyone who knows the duo knows this. Even Heidel, who hears her boss singing at the oddest times.
Felker says, “I’ll be doing dishes in the back here and practice singing with a hairnet on.”
“I think they’re a perfect complements,” Fischer says. “He’s got a deep, strong voice, and she’s strong enough to stay with him. He doesn’t drown her out.”
Even with the burgeoning attention accorded her and Vining as a team, Felker says much of her singing centers upon her emotions.
“It’s a very private and personal thing,” she says. “It’s all in the song and how you deliver it.”
But it’s also in the cultured and skillful voice, Vining says.
“I’m 43,” Felker says. “I’m not the next Kelly Clarkson, but I’m having fun. I sell sugar and coffee for a living. I’m all about having fun.”
Sounds like a fever.