TILGHMAN ISLAND -- The oyster buffet is glowing at full Sterno in the dining room of Harrison's Chesapeake House. Oysters prepared nine different ways, some raw but many of them brown and fried, are perched invitingly on tables as Friday-night regulars line up for the mollusk feast.
If oysters could fly, some of the raw ones might propel themselves out the dining room door to the tributary of the Chesapeake Bay that laps on the shoreline a mere 50 yards away.
But oysters can't fly, and Levin Faulkner "Buddy" Harrison III can't sing, a fact that the mischievous 68-year-old proprietor of this family-run Tilghman Island enterprise is delighted to demonstrate to a couple of visitors from Baltimore.
Harrison sits in the restaurant's lounge, nodding greetings to the stream of folks who pass by his table on their way to the dining room. Most of the customers know "Cap'n Buddy" and the restaurant's down-home fare. They know that on Friday nights in "R" months, oysters reign and that in the summer months, the groaning board turns into a seafood buffet in which oysters share space with crabs and rockfish.
Some of the diners will venture out with him the next day on one of the Chesapeake Bay fishing expeditions that he and his son, Levin Faulkner "Little Buddy" Harrison IV, operate from the docks behind the restaurant.
But at this moment, Harrison is interested in displaying his newly discovered "talent" as a singer and songwriter. Teaming up with Ronnie Dove and his band, an ensemble that plays during the restaurant's weekend "best body" contests, Harrison recorded "Captain Buddy," a tune he had written while hibernating during the winter on the west coast of Florida.
In a style more spoken than sung -- think Jimmy Dean doing Big Bad John, not Luciano Pavarotti doing Tosca -- Buddy warbles, describing himself as a man with "a Rolex watch and snakeskin boots" who is "mighty proud of my island roots," and telling folks that when "that ole rat race gets you down, you need to get on outta town" and head for Tilghman Island.
It is corny, old-fashioned, not very smooth. And yet, it has a certain unvarnished appeal. It is, in other words, much like the restaurant itself, bedrock Tilghman.
If there are two Eastern shores, one where the fried eats are piled high and another where the entrees are poached and presented, Harrison's Chesapeake House is definitely deep in the fryer.
