The soul singer Charles Bradley died from liver cancer on September 23 at the age of 68. His debut album, No Time for Dreaming, was not released until 2011, when he was 63 years old. These are probably the two most noted facts about Charles Bradley. Despite the fact that most only knew him during that five-year period, those 63 years play a complicated and problematic role in how we knew Bradley in life and how we remember him in death.
Up until recently, Bradley was a living, breathing archetype for many writers, a vessel unto which his story, which contains tragedy and ultimate redemption, was almost too good to be true. The soul singer—who battled homelessness, hospitalization, and family tragedy—had earned his soul bonafides on the mean streets. “Why is it so hard to make it in America?/I tried so hard to make it in America,” he wails on a 2011 track. In the musical commentariat’s broad search for authenticity, here was the genuine idol.
Why is it that every obituary makes sure to note his late-in-life success? Why is this so integral to how we talk about the musical output of Charles Bradley? Why does it feel as if our appreciation of his long road feels validating for the appreciators who get to take credit for finding him and saving him?
“Bradley had made it after all! Here was the ultimate success story of perseverance, where tragedy was the muse for Bradley’s art. Only because of what had happened to him was he able to “get famous” in his sixties. It was all worth it!” This is what the mass media discourse around Bradley has suggested from his improbable rise. This is an inappropriate narrativization of a man’s life.
We lament the passing of those gone too young. Music, specifically, has its “27 Club,” which counts Robert Johnson, Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, and myriad others among those who passed far too young. In those cases, their brief, bright careers followed the dictum of Neil Young, “better to burn out than to fade away.” We regret their passing both because they were able to do so much in so little time but also lament what they might have done with five, ten, twenty, or fifty more years of artistic growth.
With Bradley, this structure functions in reverse. The five brilliant years of creative output we knew about were tied lazily to what came before in an almost fetishistic way. His was a feel-good story, where we could all point to the redemptive justice of a man denied his just desserts until later in life. Watching the trailer for the problematically titled documentary Charles Bradley: The Soul of America, we see the camera’s lens exult in Bradley’s messy apartment, uncertainty, and, ultimate redemption. Why?
For Bradley, our appreciation of his work should not too-neatly connect the 63 pre-fame years to the five famous ones. And Charles Bradley’s rags-to-riches story should not be marshalled in the service of furthering the tragedy of his still-too-early passing. Charles Bradley’s death was no more of a tragedy because he was famous, and its cruelty was made no lesser by the redemption narrative that became his personal biography. If Charles Bradley died without us hearing his music, it still would be a tragedy, but not because he died without us hearing his music. It would be a tragedy because he died.
After the passing of the noted character actor Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2014 from a drug overdose, Dan O’Sullivan (then writing as “General Gandhi”) wrote a critical obituary for American Circus, a journal at which I was writing at the time. He lampooned the voyeuristic, salacious obsession with details of Hoffman’s death scene, the continued misunderstanding and victim-blaming of writing about addiction, and most importantly, a kind of disgusting emergent narrativization that suggested Hoffman’s private life and struggles with addiction sounded precisely like the kind of character the actor would be hired to play.
The same, I would argue, has happened here with Bradley, whose biography (or at least the way we handled it) turned him into a quintessential tragic soul singer. That authenticity—a premium that his label, Daptone, trades in—made him a figure we kept at arms’ length despite his propensity to hug anyone who came near. He was a figure more than he was a man, a storybook character more than a complex, living person.
Charles Bradley’s late-in-life success was not vindication or redemption. It was what happened. His final LP, Changes, is called “God Bless America,” and begins with a spoken-word introduction from Bradley.
“Hello, this is Charles Bradley/A brother that came from the hard licks of life/That knows that America is my home. America, you’ve been real honest, hurt and sweet to me. But I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
I would change it. Charles Bradley did not live for America’s sins. And he did not die for your stories.
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