So you're an 11-year-old black boy growing up in Charleston, W.Va., and every Sunday, you sing hymns in a predominantly white church. Nearly every week, various kindly white women lean over the pew and tell you, "You know, young man, when you sing, you sound just like Neil Diamond."

What do you do?

Naturally, you say "Neil who?"

By the time you turn 15, it's become a mantra and you figure you must find out who this Neil Diamond character is so you purchase the soundtrack to The Jazz Singer and your first reaction?

"I was sort of horrified," said Theron Denson, also known as the Black Diamond and creator of "The Unreal Neil Diamond Experience." He's arguably the country's top black Neil Diamond impersonator and will be performing at the Water Street Tavern in Kent on Saturday night.

"I remember running to my mother and asking her if I sound like that and she said, trying to appease me, `no dear,' but about a year later, she told me I did," he said.

Sometime later, Denson really listened to the album and "fell in love" with Songs of Life, prompting him to buy more and more Neil Diamond music and begin to appreciate his own unique... gift.

Years later, Denson would spend time in Los Angeles working as a personal assistant to June Pointer (of the Pointer Sisters) before moving to Washington, D.C., to start a modeling agency with a buddy of his. Surprisingly, the agency never happened and Denson found himself nearly homeless, living in a youth hostel and singing on the street to pay for the room each night.

Then fate appeared in the form of a Neil Diamond appearance in Charlotte in 2000. The local paper wanted to do a story on Denson and his buddy bought him a round trip ticket back home.

He never made it back to D.C. and he has since become a full-time Neil Diamond impersonator.

"It's how I live, it's how I pay the bills," said Denson, 40.

"After the Gazette ran a story about me and they put a phone number (in the story), the reporter was inundated with calls."

Since then, Denson has traveled coast to coast, playing bars, clubs, gatherings and festivals as the Black Diamond.

He is fully aware of the novelty factor of his success. A bald-headed black guy with a Southern accent performing the music of a Jewish guy from Brooklyn with (still) great hair is not something you see every day.

Water Street Tavern owner Mike Beder said it was the novelty factor that spurred him to book Denson after a few of his friends visited Charlotte and saw a line of folks outside a theater where the marquee read "The Black Diamond: An Unreal Diamond Experience." After Beder heard how much they enjoyed the show, he felt compelled to see it for himself.

"There's the novelty, of course, and we have a Neil Diamond CD in our jukebox and it gets more play then you'd expect in a college town and I think a couple years ago, Saving Silverman came out and that made Neil Diamond a little more hip possibly in younger circles," Beder said.

Though worried the first night Denson performed at the tavern three years ago, thinking that his weekend college crowd would chuckle at the spectacle, do a shot or two and then leave, Beder was surprised by the crowd's reaction.

"What's funny about when he comes in is we get our college crowd, who is here to have fun with it and the novelty, and then we get the these middle-age housewives who are huge Neil Diamond fans and they are at the front of the stage with their Black Diamond tour shirts, and by the end of the night -- after a couple of drinks-- the college kids are arm in arm with the fans and it's always a fun night. The novelty may bring them in, but he does sound good and he puts on a good show."

Denson's show is so good, it got him a spot on Jimmy Kimmel Live, allowed him to perform at a rally for John Kerry and enabled him to be invited by Neil Diamond's "people" to be part of the Diamond Web ring. That has raised the traffic at his own Web site (www.blackdiamondvocals.com) exponentially and garnered him fan mail from places such as Bangladesh and Israel.

Above the visual scrawniness of his act and his voice, Denson said it's Diamond's music that is the real star of the show.

"He's one of the great entertainers. You'll see people from 7 to 97 and everywhere in-between and they all enjoy his music," Denson said.