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Although his own recording career doesn’t take off, the kid hits the road with other Chess artists, and is usually the only white guy on the bus, which isn't necessarily a good thing to be. The occasional bullet aimed in his direction is enough to persuade him he'd be better off working on the promotional side of things until the clamour of the Civil Rights years means that a white guy in Alabama driving a car with Illinois plates around a circuit of black radio stations is more than likely to attract unwanted police attention.

Having said good-bye to the record business, the kid releases the occasional album while living quietly. Along the way he gets to deal with personal disasters including scrapes with the law, a broken marriage, general excess, fires, floods, diabetes and cancer.

But he's still writing songs, which appear in his head fully formed, and can only be preserved by making a phone call and singing them into an answering machine, often calling from a pay phone.

For a while in the 1970s, Charles laid low in Woodstock, waiting for Albert Grossman to sort out a Nashville marijuana rap, recording an album for Grossman's Bearsville label along the  way. Backing musicians included The Band, which provides the basis for his inclusion in The Last Waltz.

That's as far as the movie scenario would need to go. 

It'd probably end with his performance at The Last Waltz being the sort of artistic triumph that'd deliver something like megastar status, and in the end everybody gets to live happily ever after.

Well, the happy bit would have been more or less spot on.

Back in south Louisiana, he continues to write, and although he'd lost some publishing rights and writing credits along the way, his royalty cheques gave him a comfortable lifestyle while he waited for the next song to come along. 

It wasn’t all beer and skittles, though.

In the mid-’90s, after his house burned down, Charles moved into a trailer on the grounds of his favourite recording studio before hitting the road with one of his four sons, winding up at Holly Beach, south-west of Lake Charles, where he disappeared for a decade until Hurricane Rita washed his house away in 2005.

He moved to a two-bedroom trailer on a property outside Abbeville, and kept to himself, until he collapsed in his home and died January 14, 2010.

Somehow, I doubt we’ll see his like again.


Some links:

Small Town Talk: Shannon McNally’s tribute to Bobby Charles

© Ian Hughes 2015