"WM. S. CARROLL # 512" was waiting at the curb while the rush-hour traffic crept forward in the darkness at the foot of the John Hancock Building. The press bus was on time, if I wasn't, and its fog-covered windows held forth some hope of reportorial warmth inside, even if those 14 black letters and numerals on its side dimmed my hopes that this would be a presidential campaign press junket worthy of Tim Crouse, Hunter Thompson or Teddy White.

"Wm.S. Carroll #512," you see, is the verbal-digital designation of a yellow, butt-bruising school bus. Hardly the Greyhound luxury-cruise type that the hotshots of the campaign press corps deign to ride in and complain about, but then again, the hotshots aren't riding Jimmy Carter's band-wagon--yet. Whether they will be come May and the second onslaught of state primaries was something I wanted to try to find out. But more than wanting to ruminate over darkhorse Jimmy Carter's staying power as a candidate for President in 1976, on a cold night two weeks ago I wanted to see the peanut farmer from Plains, Ga., and the surviving hero of Macon, Ga., Gregg Allman, stand together on the hustings down in the Providence Civic Center, and kiss each other on the cheek.

They didn't exactly kiss five hours later, but they did hug each other with evident enough emotion before 10,000 paying customers at The Allman Brothers Band-Jimmy Carter for President concert to leave me wondering what is going on in the New South--specifically, whether the kinds of minor generation-gap-bridging miracles taking place in the plush northwest suburbs of Atlanta are also taking place in Knoxville, Greenville, Pahokee, Biloxi, Bogalusa, Tuscaloosa, Arkadelphia, and Nacogdoches.

If they are, then Jimmy Carter, in his projected image as rock-music fan and friend of youth, civil rights advocate and friend of blacks, down-home farmboy and friend of city folks, deep-dyed populist and friend of everybody but big business, may be closer to the New South Zeitgeist than his less reconciliatory Democratic opponent George Wallace. Certainly, a strong showing by Carter in the states Wallace has dominated for a decade would seriously undercut the Alabama governor's paraplegic presidential bid. And obviously, a strong regional showing is a must for Carter, who must prove that he can carry the South before he can sell himself as a national candidate.

But if toleration and progressivism in the Southern backwaters are not growing apace with Jimmy Carter's brand of toleration and progressivism, then the hug of Gregg Allman, and all that it represents in terms of Carter's easy-going, all-embracing campaign style, though remunerative ($6.50 tickets to the Providence concert drew almost 10,000 takers, while a $25-a-couple cocktail party drew only a couple hundred well-heeled citizens), may prove to be counterproductive. Because harmony has, after all, hardly been the watchword for recent presidential politics in the South, and the former Georgia governor may just be playing Mr. Good Ol' Boy to too many people at once...

The last time I had seen Jimmy Carter before the Providence junket was over a year ago, when he was already stumping the land to feel out his prospects for '76. He was in Dallas, where he was giving his Christian testimony to a packed house of the faithful at the Southern Baptist Convention. The most distinct image I recall from the occasion is that of a mouse-like man with a choir-boy's face and a Sunday schooler's plaintive, sincerely righteous voice, leaning in to the mike to tell of his conversion experience and waving somewhat embarrassedly to the throng of Baptist delegates, his arm draped around president-elect Jaroy Weber, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Lubbock, Texas, a man who last made national headlines when he called a press conference this summer to denounce Betty Ford for her libertinism.

"I'm a Christian. And I'm a politician. I disagree with those who think the two can't mix. I think they have to."

When Carter stood on another stage some 2000 miles away, arm-in-arm with hell-raisin', needle-poppin', perversely angelic Gregg Allman, waving to a generally stoned-out, dismal and politically-indifferent throng of the type that drab-and-dreary Providence seems to muster best, he seemed once again ill-at-ease but nevertheless convivial. Once again, he gave the crowd what it wanted--this time, a short speech, and the Allman Brothers Band. To a chorus of chortles and hisses, Carter raised his arms like a quarterback beckoning for audibility, and said:

"I have just four things to tell you. (Holding up his index finger.) One, my name is Jimmy Carter. (Holding up two fingers) I'm running for president. (Three fingers.) I need your help. (Four fingers) I'm gonna win. And now I want to introduce some very good friends of mine from Macon, Georgia...the Allman Brothers."

As several thousand bodies directly in front of the stage roared in approval, I thought of Dallas and the kind of flexibility it takes to embrace first Jaroy Weber and then Gregg Allman. It was enough to make me shout into the ear of a photographer friend, "Politics makes strange bedfellows, I know, but how many different people can this man pack together beneath his wingspan?"

"Not as many as Don Cheney, but more than Richard Nixon, because his armpits don't smell," came the reply.

Jimmy Carter does present a clean image (his 1970-1974 governorship went without heinous scandal and was highlighted by Sunshine Laws that opened up closed meetings of state agencies; he is not a lawyer and is not from Washington, as he repeatedly tells acquaintances soon after the introductory handshake; and, federal campaign spending regulations notwithstanding, his grass-roots campaign is at a distinct financial disadvantage to those of other "liberal" Democratic candidates because Carter has relatively few fatcat backers). And his friendship with the Allman Brothers Band and other Capricorn Recording artists out of Macon is, it seems, genuine, if highly profitable of late--the four Carter benefits scheduled to date may net up to $200,000, with ticket stubs serving as proof of donation that will make Carter eligible for matching federal funds in January, Rolling Stone reported last week.

The Capricorn-Carter courtship began, legend around Atlanta has it, when the newly-elected governor paid Phil Walden, the Macon rock mogul, a visit, promising the nascent Georgia recording industry protection from tape-making copyright pirates. Carter got tight with Gregg Allman, Dicky Betts et al when they showed up late--5 a.m.--at the Governor's Mansion for a post-concert get-together that Carter hosted for Bob Dylan, the Band and the "Brothers."

"We sat up all night and listened to records," the 51-year-old, modishly-coiffed, naval-physicist-turned-peanut-farmer-turned-politician recalled at the end of a press conference before he left to join the Allman Brothers Band backstage. "I've listened to all their records, sometimes when I didn't want to," Carter said with his characteristic bridgeworked, sheepish grin, referring to the listening habits of his three grown sons. Then his face reassumed its rote, campaign-coached, presidential weightiness:

"I've had a long series of friendships with performing artists. Bob Dylan, Van Cliburn, Robert Shaw, conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Gregg and Dickie and Marshall Tucker and all the artists on the Capricorn lable.

"I'm proud of my relationship with the Allman Brothers Band. They are good people, they are my friends, and anybody who wants a President who doesn't like music like this, and who doesn't like people who make music like this, should just simply vote for another man."

Cementing his image as the most chic of Baptist deacons from southern Georgia, Carter--with a certain amount of pride--told a small entourage of newmen following him to the dressing room about his seven-year-old daughter Amy, who attends a school back in Plains where she learns her daily lessons in a classroom with more black than white students from a black teacher. He greeted lead guitarist Betts with an earthy, "Goddam, how are you, man." Then Carter admired the red-and-white-knit-baseball-jersey-type shirt that TV hipster Geraldo Rivera was sporting--it read, "Win, Lose or Draw...The Allman Brothers-Jimmy Carter Benefit Concert."

(Ribera, in introducing Carter to the multitudes some 40 minutes later, explained that as a talk-show journalist, he couldn't come out and endorse any one candidate. "But that doesn't mean that I can't say what I think about this man. He's an honest, open, progressive politician. He stands for the things that you and I believe in--civil rights and housing and the environment. Jimmy Carter's like a breath of fresh air coming out of Georgia, and he's sweeping the country, people...")

UP ABOVE THE CONCERT bedlam in the skydeck of the Civic Center, around an elegant open bar in the Royal Roost hideaway and at hors d'oeuvre-covered tables seemingly secure behind amber one-way glass, just that prospect--Carter's potential for "sweeping the country"--was the talk of paunchy potential donors, paunchier Rhode Island political hacks and lean-with-ambition Carter staff aides alike.

In the last six weeks, the Carter campaign has crossed that critical threshold from nonentity and oblivion to cautious, firmly-grounded optimism--and greater access to power brokers, big money and press attention. "It's been so frustrating for so long, so hard to get people to take us seriously, that now, with front page stories in The New York Times and this, 10,000 people, it's hard to believe," Linda Sullivan, a year-long Carter worker from Chattanooga, Tenn., who is taking time off from Northwestern, said fervently between fashionable puffs on a long cigarette.

The front-page stories Sullivan was referring to described Carter's surprising strength at two state gatherings of Democratic Party activists. In Iowa, where the first convention delegates will be selected January 19, Carter received more than double the votes given any other candidate. In Florida's "Bicentennial Presidential Democratic convention" in mid-November, Carter garnered 697 votes, or more than two-thirds of all ballots cast in an informal tally. Wallace, the favorite in Florida, received only 57. "How important those votes were is open to debate," the chief political reporter for a national radio network told me sagely. "But there's no question that the organization, state by state, will be there for Carter."

Carter personally is warming to the spotlight. "This is my best-attended press conference ever," he told the 100 or so newsmen in the Royal Roost. Then, mingling with well-wishers at the bar (though, true to a deacon's demeanour, not imbibing himself), Carter looked to and fro and said excitedly, "There must be 500 people here. We only expected around 25 or so." And in some impromptu speech-making under the klieg lights with the mayors of Woonsocket and Saugus, chairmen of his Rhode Island campaign: "Last week, I predicted for the first time that on March 9 I'll beat George Wallace in Florida. Tonight I'm predicting that there will be only two of us left at Madison Square Garden. The convention won't be deadlocked. Your next president will be the Democratic nominee--a nuclear physicist who grows peanuts in Georgia."

But the spotlight shows signs of burning Carter. His attempts at attention-grabbing in the last week--telling a gathering of state governors that he would divert all revenue-sharing funds to cities, and announcing that in the event of another oil embargo, he would declare "economic war" on the Arab bloc--tend to belie his more thoughtful positions on fiscal and foreign policy. His rationale for the first proposal lies in his preference for putting welfare burdens onto the states--rather than the federal government--to prevent future New York City's. The motive for Carter's wishful thinking on the Mid-East is probably more pragmatic: he needs to take an increasingly tough stance in support of Israel to head off Scoop Jackson in Florida, the state where only Carter stepped forward to challenge Wallace.

On busing, too--the issue that Carter press secretary Jody Powell says "only Jimmy, with his strong civil rights record and direct experience with busing's shortcomings, can give leadership in"--Carter shows some signs of slippage. On the one hand, leading Georgia civil rights figures who have backed Carter in the past, such as Julian Bond and Maynard Jackson, have shown maverick impulses--Bond attacked Carter's hiring record in a speech in Boston last month (causing Mark Zweicher, a Business School student and Carter aide, to grumble in the back of the bus, "Julian's looking for some limelight, and we think he's on the Harris payrole anyway"), and rumor has it that Atlanta Mayor Jackson is leaning toward Sargent Shriver. On the other hand, the compromise desegregation plan Carter helped negotiate for Atlanta--substituting voluntary for mandatory busing--is probably unraveling under court tests, and his opposition to both "forced busing" and an anti-busing constitutional amendment will win him few votes on either side of the issue.

Still, the boy wonder from the Peach State who shook almost every hand in Georgia to steal the governor's chair five years ago has potential appeal in his freshness and "pragmatic liberalism." He touts himself as a businessman and manager who knifed the Georgia bureaucracy from 330 departments to 22. He promises to restrain monetary growth while stimulating employment with New Deal-ish measures and busting the trusts. He backs a strong but "streamlined" defense posture and calls for reducing both atomic weapons and power plants. He wouldn't abolish the CIA but would assume responsibility for its actions. He is adamant on Israel, but attributes its recent problems in the U.N. to the United States's "tragic" policies toward Third World nations.

"I tell you," Jim Gammil '75 said, pulling up the sleeves of his "Win, Lose or Draw" knit shirt and speaking with a touch of nervousness from his seat in the Royal Roost, insulated against the amplified roar of "Elizabeth Reed," "I didn't think I was going to work for a candidate--I thought I'd work for the Democratic National Committee again this year. But when Jimmy came to Kirkland House last spring, we ended up putting him up for the night. He slept on our fold-down couch. I spent two days with him. And I was sold."

As Gregg Allman, ensconced behind his mushroom-gilded organ, fended off a barrage of hats, scarves and requests with his arm and told the house below, "There's no use making requests, cuz we're gonna play every damn thing we know," Dan Hunter, a reporter for WAMH radio in Amherst, stared into the bottom of his beer. I took a seat next to him and a middle-aged couple from Woon-socket.

"They don't even know why they're here," growled Hunter, an agriculture major at Hampshire College who wants to return to an Iowa farm someday, pointing to the couple. "They told me they have no idea what Carter would mean to New England."

I asked Hunter what Carter would mean to farming. "Well, I talke to him, farmer-to-farmer, and you know what I found out? Chances are, one out of every ten bags of peanuts you buy is from one of his farms. That's what Jimmy Carter means to farming."