Stillwater’s Sebie Lacey: The Showman
Sebie Lacey’s drumming, singing, and charisma helped carry Stillwater from Warner Robins rehearsal rooms onto Southern rock stages during the Capricorn Records era.
In school, he was already a hometown figure as Mr. Northside High, a football player, and musician.
Over the following decades he built businesses and survived throat cancer, becoming one of the emotional anchors keeping Stillwater’s reunion spirit alive.
The nights when Sebie Lacey steps up to the mic at La Cabana in Warner Robins, joining Tony Elmore's Tres Hombres group and his own Stillwater bandmates, the room goes quiet before he sings a note. People who have been watching him for decades know what it’s taken for Sebie to get back behind a microphone after throat cancer. So when he opens his mouth you can feel the gratitude move in both directions at once; Sebie toward the crowd, the crowd back at him.
Everyone is aware this had not been guaranteed.
In Stillwater's story, Sebie is the drummer and singer who helped turn Warner Robins kids into a Capricorn Records act. But before any of that, he was a Northside High School kid, which, in Warner Robins terms, meant something specific. Warner Robins High and Northside were the only two high schools in town back then, and the rivalry between them shaped the community's identity for generations.
Football games were accompanied by pranks, stunts, and the foolhardy daring teenagers reserve for enemy campuses. The two schools existed in a state of cheerful, competitive hostility that everyone in town understood and many participated in during their senior year.
Sebie was on the Northside side of that line, and he was not exactly invisible there. He was a jock. A star athlete. He played football and was the athlete teammates and classmates gravitated toward, for what he could do on a field and for who he was off it. His senior year, Northside voted him Mr. Northside High, the honor bestowed on the person who seems to belong to everyone. He could also play drums and sing, which in any era is an unfair combination to inflict on the people around you. He was, in the fullest sense of the phrase, the all-around student and high school hero everyone knew.
Which makes it more remarkable that Ronnie Barnes, the drama director over at Warner Robins High, reached across the rivalry and brought Sebie in. Ronnie had been building his annual Follies variety revue into something genuinely serious. He had a gift for recognizing talent wherever it lived, regardless of which side of town it came from.
When the Warner Robins High auditorium was unavailable one year because of fire damage, the Follies moved to Northside, the rival school opening its stage to the program. The arts, as they often do, found a way around the football rivalry. Sebie in the mix made the crossing easier.
There was something in Sebie even then that Ronnie recognized. The same quality he'd seen in the great ones, a natural ease with people that couldn't be taught. Mike, who's watched Sebie’s phenomenon for fifty years, calls him Andy Griffith, not for any resemblance, but for the effect. Wherever Sebie goes, people relax, open up, and leave feeling better than when they arrived.
Three Guitars and a Thousand Rooms
From the early 1970s on, Sebie sat behind three guitars and in front of thousands of people as the band took its triple‑guitar Southern rock out of local rooms and onto bigger stages.
He was in college when the offer came. Mike and Bobby were up at Georgia College and asked if he wanted to be part of what they were building. He said yes, and the math after that was simple. "We dropped out of college for rock and roll 101," he says. "We wanted to write music, record in a studio, and get a record deal. We worked hard at that."
In those early days, they pooled money, went into studios, made demos, mailed them out, and drove up and down the East Coast until the answer they wanted finally came. In 1976, Capricorn said yes.
Reviews of those first albums talk about the “melodic vocals from Sebie Lacey and Jimmy Hall” riding over the guitars on Stillwater and I Reserve the Right, a blend that gave the band both muscle and lift. On songs like “Mind Bender,” you can hear Sebie’s voice threading through the arrangement, grounding the talking‑guitar trick with a human line.
On the road, he was as much ringmaster as timekeeper. He remembers Winterland in San Francisco with Stillwater opening for the Charlie Daniels Band, the crowd calling them back for an encore, the Fox Theatre Rebel Jam in Atlanta, the Carter inauguration ball, Volunteer Jam V when they walked offstage and watched Lynyrd Skynyrd return for the first time since the horrible crash.
He also remembers the nonsense, too, like the night in Florida when, killing time before a show, he kept climbing hotel balconies and diving into the pool, floor by floor, splitting the seat of his pants and only stopping when a horrified maid begged him not to go higher. Years later, when people ask which character he would be in Almost Famous, he jokes that you can probably guess.
Even at their wildest, though, he and the band held to a certain standard. They made a pact to save the serious partying until after shows, a decision other bands thought was “just weird” but fit Sebie’s instinct to take the music itself seriously.
When Capricorn’s machinery faltered and “Mind Bender” stalled, he was in the room when Phil Walden owned the mistakes in one blunt sentence. “Boys, we lost ‘Mind Bender,’ that was our fault. We’ll do better.”
Sebie filed the line away, another piece of the story he’d eventually have to carry.
Businessman by Day, Drummer by Night
After Capricorn folded and Stillwater's initial run ended, Sebie didn't walk away from music. He simply wove it into a new life. The path into business came through family. His father-in-law, Mr. Edenfield, had opened Strato Cleaners in Warner Robins in 1960, building it into a community institution over nearly three decades. In 1988, Sebie and his father-in-law Greg Edenfield took ownership together, adding a men's clothing operation to the dry-cleaning side and running both for years. It was entry into Warner Robin’s business culture, a family handing something they'd built to people they trusted.
Owning a dry cleaner meant long days on his feet serving neighbors, learning every family in the zip code by their shirts and their habits, then nights behind a kit with Mike, Al, and others at small-combo gigs and special events. A brief line in a 1990s interview with Bobby Golden saying Sebie "owns a clothing store in town and plays with Mike" only hints at the double shift. Sebie was businessman by day, drummer-singer by night. Like many of his bandmates, he chose a life where music remained central but not the only pillar.
His business life eventually expanded beyond the dry-cleaning counter. He partnered with Stanley Wright to develop the Landing Pointe shopping center in Bonaire, a 44,300-square-foot commercial development that brought upscale dining, shopping, and fitness to the south Warner Robins corridor. And it wasn’t far from the Kathleen fields where Stillwater once lived together in an old farmhouse owned by Bobby Golden’s mother.
The man who had lived in that farmhouse as a young musician helped build the neighborhood that grew up around it. He and Wright sold the shopping center a few years ago. He has since sold Strato Cleaners as well. After decades of running businesses and managing tenants, Sebie Lacey is officially retired.
Away from the business ledger, Sebie stayed woven into the life of the town. He served as master of ceremonies at Aviation Museum fundraisers, played in charity golf tournaments, joined Bobbie Eakes on the stage at McConnell Stadium for several Warner Robins' Fourth of July celebrations, with fighter jets overhead and his old Follies castmate beside him. At least once Sebie walked into a local school to talk to students about music. He showed up when the community called.
Then throat cancer stepped into his story, threatening his voice, the thing that had always set him apart. Treatment, recovery, and the slow, sometimes painful return to singing make nights like singing with Tres Hombres feel like a triumph.
When he took the mic there, his wife Vicky in the crowd, old classmates and friends watching, his presence carried years of hospitals, uncertainty, and silent work just to be able to stand and sing again. The way people clapped, the way faces softened, is its own declaration. It clearly says the people see what he's come through, and they're glad he's here.
One thread from those early recordings has never fully resolved. The master tapes from their first two albums, recorded at Studio One in Doraville with Buddy Buie, have never been definitively located. When Georgia State acquired Studio One, someone called Mike Causey and asked if Stillwater wanted their masters. Mike, not fully understanding at the time what possessing them would mean, declined, assuming the tapes would be catalogued and preserved somewhere. They weren't, or at least haven't surfaced.
"We can't seem to find the masters," Sebie said in a 2011 radio interview. The albums were recorded, released, praised, and then their source material vanished into the institutional shuffle that swallowed Capricorn's physical legacy.
What Sebie did take ownership of was the reunion. After the band disbanded in 1983, and they’d get together to just play, he was the one who suggested they play a reunion. That instinct launched what became nearly annual reunion shows, starting in 1984, continuing at Whiskey River for thirty years, and eventually extending to the Big House in Macon.
It turned out to be one of the decisions that have kept Stillwater alive.
The Hollywood Connection
Sebie also became, unexpectedly, the point of contact between the real Stillwater and Hollywood. In 2000, while home in Kathleen running his business, he received a phone call from DreamWorks explaining that a film called Almost Famous had been using the name Stillwater and needed legal clearance to continue.
At first he thought the call was a prank.
The band eventually read Cameron Crowe’s script, liked the story, and agreed to let the fictional group carry their name. The payment, $5,000 split seven ways, wasn’t life-changing, but Sebie has always viewed the experience less in financial terms than cultural ones. The film brought renewed attention to the band and nudged Stillwater’s story back into public conversation.
Musically, Sebie’s post-Capricorn years became their own map of persistence. He continued playing smaller regional shows and special events with Mike, Al, Bobby, and others, bringing Stillwater’s musical vocabulary into more intimate rooms. Recent photos of Mike and Sebie show a musician who still genuinely enjoys making music with friends.
Still Making That Music With Friends
What stands out as you watch Sebie now is how little ego seems to have survived the decades, and how much warmth has. That Andy Griffith quality of making people on a tour bus in 1977 feel at ease, the same way people at Tres Hombres do today, is just who he is. Given his résumé, he could coast on the fact that he co‑founded a Capricorn band, that his voice is preserved on records people still seek out, that a Hollywood film borrowed his band's name.
Instead, he comes across as open, approachable, genuinely delighted to have another chance to sing. The reaction when he leans into a mic these days is about recognizing resilience in real time. And talent.
Warner Robins remembers him as the young drummer‑singer who helped blast our town into something mythic. Seeing him now, older and battle‑scarred, holding a microphone, closes a loop. The band that played us into adulthood is still here, and so are we.
In a Warner Robins‑and‑Macon landscape full of guitar legends and front‑man myths, Sebie Lacey's journey is his Southern rock testimony, not written in album sales or arena crowds, but in the faces of people watching him sing in a Mexican restaurant, glad he's still here, still smiling. He still has that smile, the one that makes you feel like you've just said something funny, even when you haven't yet.
Mike calls him Andy Griffith, and if you've spent any time in Warner Robins you understand why immediately. This is his town. He didn't preside over it, he just belonged to it so completely people gravitated toward him. The way people gravitate toward anyone who is exactly where they're supposed to be.
After everything, it turns out that Sebie's exuberance was never a performance.
It's just Sebie.
Stillwater’s story stretches across decades. Explore these other voices that helped shape the band and the world around it:
• Stillwater: Hittin’ Like a B-52
About the Author
Cindi Brown is a Georgia-born writer, porch-sitter, and teller of truths, even the ones her mama once pinched her for saying out loud. She runs Porchlight Press from her 1895 house with creaking floorboards and an open door for stories with soul. When she’s not scribbling about Southern music, small towns, stray cats, places she loves, and the wild gospel that hums in red clay soil, you’ll find her out listening for the next thing worth saying.
