Wednesday, 24 March 2010
Cajun singer-songwriter and swamp pop pioneer (21 February 1938 – 14 January 2010) born Robert Charles Guidry in Abbeville, Louisiana
Bobby Charles
Your first reaction might be to ask Bobby Who?
If it is, Hughesy’s response would be to mention a few song titles. See You Later Alligator, Walking To New Orleans, But I Do and, especially, Before I Grow Too Old.
71-year-old Bobby Charles (born Robert Charles Guidry) passed away in mid-January 2010 after collapsing at his home in Abbeville, down in the heart of the Louisiana Cajun country.
Apart from his writing credits and an appearance at The Band's farewell Last Waltz that either wasn't filmed or didn't make the cut for the movie, Charles spent most of his life away from the spotlight, which was the way he liked it.
Who could blame him? A simple life, enough money to get by and a regular lunch at a seafood eatery where the waitress knows you well enough to be mixing your favourite cocktail while you park the car.
Sounds good to me.
A scheduled comeback at the 2007 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, was cancelled due to health issues. Dr. John, Marcia Ball, Sonny Landreth and other supporters performed his songs in his absence.
A quick glance over the man's career suggests that his unease in the spotlight is understandable. For a start, it's not as if the man set out on a conscious path to become a star.
Consider the following scenario. If some Hollywood mogul turned it into a movie, you’d probably have half the world’s film critics dismiss the plot line as highly unlikely.
Louisiana music fans would just say, Yeah, Bobby Charles!
A French-speaking Cajun son of a truck driver who can't play an instrument or read music sings in an R&B band at school functions is departing from a local eatery one night.
The kid farewells his mates with a See you later, alligator. A drunk overhears, and adds After while crocodile. To make sure he heard things correctly, the kid goes back inside, asks the drunk to repeat what he said, goes home and uses the two lines as the basis for a song that takes him about twenty minutes to write.
The owner of a local record shop hears the kid sing his song at a dance, and persuades him to sing his song to Leonard Chess over the phone. Chess is impressed enough to get the song cut in New Orleans using local Chess Records affiliates, and while the kid's version doesn't make it big, the song is covered by Bill Haley and becomes a smash.
After Chess decides he'd prefer the kid to record in Chicago rather than the Crescent City he makes a startling discovery as the kid alights from the plane.
Chess: You're not black!
Kid: I know.
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.
