The nine-year anniversary episode of the podcast, featuring an award-winning singer, songwriter, guitar player and author who released a single last month and has a new album coming out this Spring. He is in his 40th year of being a full-time independent artist, and his autobiography is called, “Off The Record - The Trials and Tribulations of a Travelin' Troubadour.” His music has gotten widespread airplay, including “Bluesville” on SiriusXM, and he has been voted “Favorite Musician in the Mountain South” several years in a row. Plus, he has been featured on many national television music showcases and documentaries.
“During Covid, in the quarantine, where my gigs evaporated overnight, I went from playing 200, 250 shows a year, and it just, poof, gone.”
“(Wisdom) is the gift that keeps on giving. That’s the thing that will get us out of about any jam we can find ourselves in and it’ll keep us from getting in many jams.”
“(his blogs) got real popular, like, I’d get emails for example from, like, Japan and Australia… People would email me from, like, Tibet, and say, ‘Where’s the new (blog), Charlie’?”
“From playing music full-time, the crazy carnival of events… in my case, when I was playing the clubs for so many years, when you add alcohol, and maybe drugs, women, men, criminal activity, late nights, just all those things, it makes for a boiling pot of the potential for insanities is there all the time. I mean, Shakespeare couldn’t make up the stuff that used to happen to me with regularity.”
(on playing various genres of music) “That’s, I think, contributed to me being able to stay working, able to play a really wide variety of venues and gigs and just things that if I were just a blues singer and a blues band and I did that for decades, I probably wouldn't be as successful as I am.”
“I’ve never been able to have a good elevator pitch, for example… the 15 seconds when someone says, ‘What do you do’? ‘I’m a musician’ ‘Oh yeah, what kind of music do you play’?… I say that I play good music for good people.”
“People ask me advice I could give them, it’s like, don’t give up… If you know what your calling is, just don’t give up.”
“In blues particularly, right, you got all the names, the nicknames of – but, what makes a nickname legit is when you don’t give it to yourself.”
“My motto and my mantra with our kids is to leave things better than you found them, whether it be a car you borrow from a friend or a t-shirt or a room you walk in, you leave it nicer than you found it. And if everybody did that, the world would be a better place for everyone. And I’ve failed to leave my kids a country that’s as good as the one that my parents left me.”
“Wisdom”
“American Eulogy”