R.Lum.R’s touted in Rolling Stone, and he credits Manatee School for the Arts

“Rolling Stone” has named him one of “10 Artists You Need to Know.” He’s about to set off on his first international tour and drop his first EP.

And he says it never would have happened if it hadn’t been for his education at Manatee School for the Arts in Palmetto.

His name is R.Lum.R (pronounced like “R. Lamar”) but his Bradenton friends know him as Reggie Williams Jr. He has a long story about the significance of each part of his stage name, but basically it’s his first initial and his middle name — Lamar — with some intentionally peculiar spelling.

“If you spell Lamar L-A-M-A-R, you come up with Kendrick,” he said. “My SEO (search engine optimization) would have been terrible.”

Frustrated

He was born 27 years ago at Manatee Memorial Hospital, and grew up in some rough neighborhoods of Bradenton. There was some unsavory stuff going on at the street corners, but he resisted the temptation to get involved. He was kind of an outsider in his neighborhood, and he was kind of lost until he got to MSA.

“I didn’t really have much of an identity, I guess,” he said. “I wanted to sit around and listen to Linkin’ Park. Not a lot of the black boys in the neighborhood were interested in that.”

That all changed when he went to MSA and discovered the guitar.

“My buddy Scott had a guitar and he could play ‘Smoke on the Water,’ ” he said. “I thought, ‘There’s no way I could ever be as cool as that.’ I was going to play drums and back him up.”

He started studying guitar at MSA, mostly because he had to learn an instrument and there was a guitar available. Teachers noticed he had talent and encouraged him to buy a guitar of his own. He saved up and bought a $200 Yamaha at Sam Ash. When he was 16, he started playing gigs in coffee houses around Bradenton. He also became a serious classical guitarist.

In fact, he seemed headed for a career in classical music. He started creating richly textured R&B tracks under the name R.Lum.R. as a side project.

He spent some time gigging in the Orlando area before he set off for Nashville, his home for the past 2 1/2 years. It’s a place with a strong music scene, obviously, but without its own identifiable subgenre of urban music. That appealed to him, as someone whose work doesn’t fit neatly into familiar categories. Since he’s been there, he’s created songs and videos that have garnered millions of hits.

On Thursday, his publicist called him and told him about the Rolling Stone honor. Williams was floored. It brought back memories of leafing through the magazine when he was hanging around Sam Ash, seeing the pictures of all his musical heroes. Now his picture’s there, too.

“It’s crazy,” he said. “It’s a thing that really resonates with people. Especially for them to put it up there on the top, with my picture and everything.”

He’s going on tour starting June 23, and he has dates all around the United States, plus one in Denmark and one in Korea.

“That’s really cool, that I get to go international,” he said.

There are none anywhere near Bradenton, but he’s hoping to change that.

“When I was in Bradenton, there was this band called We the Kings,” he said. “Every year they’d play a hometown show. I’d love to do be able to do that, play one show in a place in Bradenton every year.” (We the Kings is still around, and still performing the annual hometown shows.)

Meanwhile, fans in Bradenton and around the world will soon be able to hear more of R.Lum.R’s music.

The EP’s coming out Aug. 11,” he said. “It’s called ‘Afterimage.’ All one word. And I think I’m allowed to tell you that.”

This story was originally published June 2, 2017 at 2:50 PM with the headline "R.Lum.R’s touted in Rolling Stone, and he credits Manatee School for the Arts."