Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 18, 1990 TAG: 9006180055
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A3 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER SOUTHWEST BUREAU
DATELINE: WYTHEVILLE LENGTH: Medium
Most obviously, Butt is a Wytheville dentist. He not only fills and caps teeth, he has also worked on new oral hygiene products ranging from mouthwash to toothpicks.
As for what comes out of the mouth, that is music to Butt's ears and to those around him. Not for nothing is he known as Wytheville's singing dentist.
Besides singing, he uses his mouth to blow a trumpet in several local bands. After a recent recording trip to Nashville, he has released a new cassette album of nine vocals and one trumpet version of "Help Me Make It Through the Night."
He wrote the others himself, as he has written perhaps 200 over the years. For him, he says, it is therapy. He has recorded a number of records and tapes on his own Super Star Records label, one of which once hit the top spot on radio in Hawaii.
"The ultimate high," he said, "is to be walking down the street and hear someone humming your song or whistling it."
The title of his most recent album is "Memories," a recurring theme in several of the songs he recorded this time. The cost of the album on cassette is $7, and it is available at stores including Greear's Studio, Central Drug and Wilderness Road Truck Stop. He does his recording as "Dr. Tom."
A Pocahontas native, Butt earned an economics and business degree from Roanoke College before entering dental school at the Medical College of Virginia. But he was apparently ahead of his time when he worked on a new mouthwash as a dental student in 1958.
When a Richmond newspaper published an article on his product, the dean of the dental school at that time called the product a "dental nostrum" and threatened to expel Butt if he kept pursuing it. Reluctantly, Butt dropped the project.
"I really did develop the first fluoride mouthwash, and no one seems to know it," he complained. "I was going to be kicked out of school. That was the end of it . . . but now it's kind of growing in my craw a little bit."
He has friends who were in on his development of the formula more than 40 years ago writing letters to the MCV president urging the belated recognition. "So we'll just see what happens," he said.
Now that fluoride mouthwashes are no longer novelties, Butt has switched to a different kind of toothpick. "This is something I've been working on for the last five years," he said.
He is now talking with a company in Charlotte, N.C., about distributing his sponge toothpick with fluoride and other decay-preventing substances in the sponge that also can be used to massage the gums. The opposite end of the toothpick is more slender and can be used the old-fashioned way.
Obviously a man of many enthusiasms, his enjoyment of music comes through when he demonstrates his latest tape on the stereo system in his Subaru. Occasionally he can't resist joining in, and performing a duet with himself.
In fact, he always travels with a tape recorder so he can get a line or tune down immediately when he thinks it up. He writes at least one new song each month, working out his guitar accompaniment. And he plays trumpet with a jazz ensemble performing locally at Words & Music, in his own Super-Star Band, and as part of the Wytheville Community College Concert Choir.
But even a renaissance music man can't do everything, he has found. "You can't sing and play the trumpet at the same time."
by CNB