Now He's a Believer

Neil Diamond's voice delivered a homeless man from the streets of Washington, D.C.

Lacking a job and a place to live, the only thing Theron Denson had going for him was his uncanny vocal resemblance to a sequined icon. Back when Denson was just a child singing in the pews of his West Virginia church, white women would turn and exclaim, "Young man, you sound just like Neil Diamond!" But most members of Denson's African-American community weren't bumping Diamond records, so Denson didn't know what they meant. "For years, I thought he was a guy here in my church in Charleston," he recalls.

Years later, a friend invited Denson to see the pop master perform in Charleston. Diamond's show left Denson feeling honored to be a vocal doppelganger.

"He's more than just a singer," Denson says. "Like Cher or Elvis or Donna Summer, he's an entertainer."

Inspired to get his life in order, Denson soon found a job at the front desk of a hotel, where he habitually entertained wayward travelers with a few bars from Diamond's 1981 hit "Hello, Again." Despite a resulting feature story in The Charleston Gazette, his coworkers weren't big fans. They tried to get him fired for his antics, and Denson responded to a shut-up-or-get-out ultimatum by leaving the job in the fall of 2000.

"It's got to be now," Denson says he thought then. "It's God, Neil Diamond and me. That's all I've got, and I have to make it work."

Calling himself the Black Diamond, Denson has been supporting himself with his Neil Diamond tribute show ever since. This weekend at the Heartland Pride Fest, the Black Diamond makes his official Kansas City debut (not counting his yearlong stay in 1995, when he sometimes dropped an impromptu "Cracklin' Rosie" on the streets of Westport).

Now Denson goes all out, performing Diamond classics in costume replicas created by the official Black Diamond seamstress. "I'll just look at his album covers and say, 'I think I want to try this shirt,'" Denson says.

Although the singer acknowledges that he rode Diamond's fringed coattails to a better life, he claims his show has increased Diamond's African-American following by encouraging closeted fans to buy his albums.

"I'm going to ask him for twenty or thirty dollars when I see him," Denson says. He hasn't actually met Diamond (though he did receive a congratulatory e-mail), but Denson says the two share more than a husky sound.

"Now that I've done it several years and know him and what he's about, I can say that he saw something he wanted and became very tenacious about getting it," Denson says. "I think I have exactly that tenacity."

Denson, who once studied to be a minister, sees his voice as a supremely whimsical divine gift. "It's proof that God has a sense of humor," he says. "He was like, 'I'm gonna give this voice to a white Jewish guy from Brooklyn.' And a few years later, he said, 'I'm gonna give it to a bald black man from Charleston, West Virginia.'"