Long before he stepped onto a stage, Jim Waive was putting on a show.
“Our household was filled with music,” recalls Patti Rightmier, one of Jim’s three older sisters. “My mom loved music. My mom listened to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass…”
“Tom Jones, the 5th Dimension—a variety,” adds Judy Crist, another sister.
“And Jim—as a young child—I remember him singing, and sometimes he would just make up words and clap and dance,” Rightmier says. “He was so energetic.”
Even so, Rightmier and Crist emphasize, young Jim was not a show-stealer or an attention hog when they were growing up in Portsmouth, Virginia. “He loved music, he loved performing, he loved the people that he played for,” says Crist.
Waive’s taste in music would eventually move beyond “What’s New, Pussycat?” and “The Age of Aquarius,” but his passion for performing would continue throughout his entire life. He was a staple of the Charlottesville music scene for decades, as a solo act, as a songwriter, and often as the leader of Jim Waive and the Young Divorcees, a band dedicated to the classic country sounds that he embraced.
Waive passed away from a heart attack on July 2 at the age of 61, and his memorial service was held last weekend at Live Arts theater.
Often when an artist passes on, people reflect on the work: the Oscar-nominated performance, the hit TV show, the album that sold millions of copies. Waive had plenty of credits worth commemorating: albums (Jim Waive and the Young Divorcees, Strike a Match); My Fool Heart, a movie in which he starred; thousands of concert appearances at an assortment of area venues (The Biltmore, Tokyo Rose, Uncle Charlie’s, Satellite Ballroom, among others), including a lengthy run at Blue Moon Diner, which promoted him as “the man with a velvet voice and an impressive beard.”
But in the weeks after Waive’s death, his friends and associates paint a picture of a man whose talent was equaled by his generosity and supportiveness.
Into that groove
Long before she was a Virginia Department of Public Health official and a Charlottesville City Council candidate, Jen Fleisher was playing upright bass alongside Waive; it was a musical partnership that continued on and off for more than 20 years.
Not every show was a night to remember. Audiences could be unruly. Songs were not always note-perfect, and Fleisher laughingly recalls being embarrassed by Waive’s habit of “telling really terrible jokes during gigs.”
“And yet I never felt more myself than when I was playing with Jim,” Fleisher says. “We would be in, like, Atomic Burrito. Someone would be throwing up. Someone would be spilling a beer on me. You know, late at night, some crazy crowd. And it did not matter because all of that was completely invisible to me.”
Instead, Fleisher would concentrate on Waive’s “rhythm that was very much his. … He had a real rhythmic way of playing and, for me, that’s where we could really sync up, get into that groove.
“It was just naturally how we worked together, every time. I mean, thousands of hours of playing together, and every single time we were like, ‘I love you, that was awesome. Thank you so much. See you next time.’”
“He was that rare musician with basically no ego,” says Kirby Hutto, who met thousands of performers during his 20 years of managing Ting Pavilion before retiring in 2023; he recalls booking Waive for Fridays After Five shows and as the opening act for headliners like Kenny Rogers and Dwight Yoakam. “He just was doing it for the joy of the music. You always got that sense from him. Always very easy to work with, very appreciative of the opportunities that came his way and, you know, just a very gentle, kind man.”
“Gentle” is the adjective that most commonly turns up whenever people begin to describe Waive.
The best giggle
“It’s like he traveled in this envelope of kindness,” says writer/performer Kay Ferguson, who got to know Waive during the seven years he worked on the grounds at her property, Native Meadow. “He embodied it: a gentle kindness. And it was clear as a bell. … And I think he was a skilled performer, but there was no showing off. There was just delivery, in an absolutely authentic way, you know? No fuss, no faux, no self-promotion, just authenticity. That was true of the way he performed, and it was also true of—just how he was.”
Ferguson worked alongside performer/producer Siân Richards in the Performers Exchange Project in the early aughts and observed the romance developing between Richards and Waive; a loving partnership still intact at the time of his passing. “This long relationship with Siân, just the gentle, accepting way that he leaned into her, was another testament to just what a wise one he was. … It was a beautiful thing to watch.”
Ferguson paused, thought of something and smiled. “He had the best giggle,” she says of Waive. “He had the best giggle in the world.”
Seated beside her, Robbie Shaw, the land conservation manager at Native Meadow, breaks into a smile of his own. Shaw was Waive’s supervisor and recalls a telling incident in which Waive called him after accidentally cutting his leg with a chainsaw on the job.
“It was an E.R. situation,” Shaw says. “It wasn’t bleeding, but you could see his kneecap. I mean, it was deep. He wouldn’t even let me come with him to the E.R. He’s like, ‘No, no, no, you guys stay here, you’ve got too much stuff to do.’
“Even in moments of panic, he was always calm, kind, respectful, and considerate of others. Even when he was the one really in need, he put others in front, ahead of himself. And that was just kind of how he was all the time.”
One guitar made all the difference
Rightmier and Crist credit their mother, Joan Waive, for Jim’s altruism and eagerness to help others. Waive’s father, Henry, passed away when Jim was young, and the five siblings became very tight-knit. “Our mother always supported any of us kids in anything we wanted to do in our lives,” Crist says. “Never said, ‘You can’t do that.’ She never said, ‘You’re not capable. Get a job.’ She never said any of that.”
Joan’s good fortune put her son on the road to becoming a musician. “My mom entered a raffle at one of the local music stores in Virginia Beach,” Crist says. The prize was a guitar, and Joan’s name was the one pulled. “And that’s when they got the guitar that Jimmy continued playing his whole life—with the many repairs he had to make!”
As a student at Roanoke College in the early 1980s, Waive initially majored in English. “He thought he might want to be an English professor,” Crist recalls. “But music grabbed him, and he went on from there.”
A country calling
At first, Waive was captivated by rock, playing for five years with the psychedelic-tinged jam-band Echoes Farm. Over time, his attention shifted toward traditional country music. He had a gift for persuading others to appreciate the music he loved, and he used that magic on Anna Matijasic Hennessy, shortly after she graduated from the University of Virginia.
Hennessy is a classically trained violinist, and she recalls that in 2003, “Country music was not a thing we were necessarily interested in. In fact, I expressly disliked it.”
But a friend had gotten acquainted with Waive and couldn’t stop talking about “this sweet, kind cowboy” who made daily stops at the Mudhouse Coffee stand where she worked. To please her friend, Hennessy attended one of Waive’s shows at the Blue Moon Diner, and met him after the show.
“He said, ‘Oh, yeah, you’ll have to play your fiddle sometime for me—come on down.’ Very welcoming. But I think I was a little shy, and I was toying around with Christian Breeden’s band American Dumpster, just here and there.
“Anyway, I showed up at [the now-defunct restaurant] Southern Culture one Friday night, thinking I was going to sit in with American Dumpster, but I had the wrong date, and it was Jim playing.”
Waive invited her to join him on stage, the start of both a friendship and an artistic partnership: Hennessy would soon become one of the Young Divorcees. But before then, she spent some time studying with Waive, sessions that she says had “the biggest impact on my musical life.”
“I felt very insecure because I was coming from a place of training and structure, and I wanted to do some serious practice, like classical musicians do,” she recalls. “And Jim was like, ‘Well, okay, just come on over to my house.’ We spent—I don’t know how many nights that January. … And he played through all of the country songs, all of his covers and some of his originals.
“And he was so patient with me, so patient. I had to write down every little chord. It’s embarrassing to say now, but he did not shade me at all for that. And, you know, I was looking for approval. And he never would say, you know, ‘Would you do a little more of this or a little more of that?’ He just always said, ‘I love it. Do what you’re going to do!’
“… All encouragement, all patience. And now that I’ve been in so many bands since then, and I’m a fiddler of many, many genres and have collaborated with many, many people, I think back on how special that was, and how he operated as a musician from a place of no ego.”
There’s a quiver in Hennessy’s voice, as she adds, “If you played with Jim, you can call yourself very special in my book.”
Fleisher feels the same. Performing with Waive, she says, brought her “that feeling of coming home, you know? This is where the crazy, 51-year-old woman who’s in public health is suddenly the most content: when she’s onstage with a Virginia country boy. That’s clearly where I belong. It’s what will keep him with me in my mind.”
Musician and actor Jim Waive poured his heart into the joy of music. Charlottesville remembers Waive as a rare talent without ego. Photo: Ellie Williams.
