Bobby Charles leaves lasting legacy

By Jim Bradshaw
jhbradshaw@bellsouth.net

obby Charles didn’t read music or play any instrument well. He performed in public only reluctantly and not very often. In fact, he would have been perfectly content to have lived as a virtual recluse, dividing his time among a few favorite haunts, his oak-shaded home, and a recording studio.

Yet he had a huge impact on our popular music, writing songs that have been sung by the biggest of the big stars.

When he was baptized in 1928 he was given the name Robert Charles Guidry. He became Bobby Charles as a young man when he began to sing and write hits such as “Walking to New Orleans,” one of Fats Domino’s trademark songs; “(I Don’t Know Why I Love You) But I Do,” the classic recorded by Clarence “The Frogman” Henry; and “See You Later Alligator,” a huge record for Bill Haley and the Comets in the days when rock was just beginning to roll.

Sonny Landreth called him “the champion south Louisiana songwriter,” but his influence spread well beyond Cajun country.

Bobby grew up poor in Abbeville, the son of a gas company truck driver. He joined a band that played at high school dances when he was 14, and already had an idea that he wanted to try to make a living through music.

“The first time I heard Hank Williams and Fats Domino, it just knocked me down,“ he said in a rare interview several years ago. “When I was a kid, I used to pray to be a songwriter like them. My prayers were answered, I guess.”

The fates were with him. As he was leaving an Abbeville café one night in 1955, he said to a friend, “See you later, alligator.” A drunk stranger overheard the remark and shot back, “After while, crocodile.”

The lights went off in his head. Bobby wrote “See You Later Alligator,” sang it over the phone, and landed a recording contract, sight unseen, with Chess Records, then a hot R&B label in Chicago. Chess executives thought he was black until he stepped off the plane in Chicago.

They were a bit dismayed when they saw him, but still put him on the road with other Chess artists, the only white guy on the bus. It was not an entirely agreeable experience. Not everyone liked the idea of an integrated performance in those days. There were threats, shots fired toward him if not at him..

When he came off the road, he stayed off the road, preferring to write songs and make records instead of perform in public. “I never wanted to be a star,” he said. “Thank God I’ve been lucky enough to have a lot of people do my songs.”

Those people included Ray Charles, Etta James, Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Bo Diddley, Lou Rawls, Dr. John, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Joe Cocker, Kris Kristofferson, Tom Jones, Marcia Ball and other names you know.

He didn’t piece songs together note by note or word by word. He always said they popped into his head, fully formed. Sometimes he’d rush to the telephone and sing into his answering machine to keep from losing them.

There were plenty of rough spots in his life. He had trouble with the law in his younger days; his marriage failed; he ingested a lot of stuff that probably did his health no good. But the music kept coming.

He lived for years on the Vermilion River outside Maurice. When his house burned down in the 1990s, he moved for a while to a trailer next to the nearby Dockside Studios where he made many of his recordings, then he hid for a decade in the isolation of Holly Beach.

He escaped just ahead of Hurricane Rita in 2005; the storm washed his house away. When he moved to a two-bedroom trailer on eight oak-shaded acres outside Abbeville, he kept his address and phone number secret.

Through it all, he kept writing and recording. He released the album "Homemade Songs" in 2008 and completed his latest album, “Timeless,” in December. It was co-produced by Dr. John and dedicated to Domino.

His longtime manager Jim Bateman said Bobby kept pushing to get this final project done. He knew his health was failing and he wanted to complete this tribute to the friend who had given him so much inspiration.

“Bobby must have had a premonition,” Bateman said. “He kept saying, ‘I gotta get this out.’ I said, ‘We’re trying to get it out as fast as we can.’”

They just made it.

Bobby was 71 when he collapsed and died January 14 at his home in Abbeville. His last album will be released Feb. 23, three days before Fats Domino’s 82nd birthday.