“Out There In The Spirit”

Charles Bradley

November 5, 1948 – September 23, 2017

Talking on the phone with people you’ve never met but very much respect based on their humanity and musical ability is still new to me.

I interviewed Charles Bradley right around this time last year while I was working nights in Edmonton on the tools. This was during the Ferguson protests (yes, that was still barely a year ago), and I was kind of nervous leading up to it. I couldn’t think of a good question, which is the main thing that keeps me nervous about interviews. I’d read other of his interviews and but for one more extensive piece, the stories often hung on Charles’s feelings about being able to play music he loved, and his eventual triumph in a hard life through an abiding love for people, all valuable insights for a lifelong musician. His is a great story of perseverance in music.

I wanted to ask Charles something different, something I hadn’t already read, and only got one crack at it. The night before the call, it occurred to me that Mr. Bradley had lived through a lot of 20th Century history, and lived it first hand; the beginnings of rock n’ roll and soul music, funk and hip hop, the last, violent gasps of late-era Jim Crow in the south, the hope and belief in The Civil Rights Movement, and into whatever our current particular turbulence might be known as one day.

He expressed worry about leaving home and walking down the streets with an ingrained fear of what police officers can do and have done. That’s a genuine terror he felt, as has every black person in America, especially in urban centres. “Driving while black” only becomes a cliché through repetition.

“It scares me, it scares me so much, and that’s why a lot of times, if I don’t have reasons to be out in the streets, I’m home, staying around the house to keep busy or I’m in the studio. ‘Cause when I walk in the streets, I look into the policeman’s eyes, I look into the people’s eyes, I see the truth. That truth hurts sometimes, and I think, ‘God, what can I do about it?’ I feel these things, and sometimes I don’t wanna say something, I just come in the house and close the door and don’t wanna face the world. But when I get onstage, my heart opens up, and I see the traces on people’s faces, and I just let it all out the way I feel it in my heart.”

He saw divides more as spiritual, inside each person, rather than the most obvious possible distinctions people use to divide themselves and others.

“You know what I’m finding out today? It’s not a racial problem, it’s evil forces, and evil forces can go in any colour. They can be white, black, whatever, when a person got an evil force inside them, it has no colour, and that’s what we gotta realize, all over the world. You know, we’re all just bodies, but the evil force is out there in the spirit.”

Mr. Bradley got sick right after that conversation, and cancelled the dates that gave me the opportunity to talk to him. He never made it back to Alberta, where he and his music had been hugely popular among musicians and fans of independent music, as it had been everywhere he went. He lived the musician’s dream, of getting to make great music that was truly heard and felt, to play gigs for appreciative audiences who were genuinely moved by what he’d created and his performance, hang out with other wonderful, talented people, and make a living doing it.