It left a hole in this tightknit family of musicians. He learned that people were responding to songs he wrote.”īradley was the second of Daptone’s stars to pass away within a year Sharon Jones had died in November 2016. He didn’t realise there was power in those lyrics – he thought the power was in his screaming. And Charles, a very sensitive man, felt that response. But when he learned it after talking to Lee, the audiences started responding. “There’s a verse in there I completely love and he wasn’t singing it. “The song that really connected was Loving You Baby,” Brenneck says. At first it created problems: he sometimes didn’t learn the lyrics – the power of his voice was enough to sell a song – until fellow Daptone singer Lee Fields persuaded him to start doing so. He suffered stage fright, and couldn’t read or write music, so Brenneck acted as his interpreter and transcriber when they wrote together. And he had issues with his own sexuality and identity.” “He had lot of issues, from childhood, with his mother. What defined Bradley’s anguish, Roth says, was not the poverty in which he had spent most of his life, but his personal relationships.

And that’s when our relationship really transformed. It turned out the shit that moved me was really moving Charles. “His voice was so compatible with the mid-paced, moody music I was making between tours. Brenneck was looking for a new sound after touring with the Mehanan Street Band and the Budos Band, and happened on Bradley again.

Still, it was five years before they became musical partners. When Roth introduced Bradley to Brenneck, he found a collaborator who could take the time and effort needed to help him express his talent. He would bend over, his face squashed up – and that was before he’d sing a note.” Every song me and Charles wrote came from somewhere deep, and he carried that weight and anguish with him every time he sang. When he broke out of the James Brown act and took off the wig and became the Charles Bradley we know – and I literally held his hand through that process – we let out this monster of an artist. “People were being nice to him, but you got a glimpse into this real sadness – his whole identity was built on being someone else. “When Daptone was being built, I took a ride with Charles to go to Home Depot to buy building supplies, and people were saying to him, ‘What up, James?’ and ‘How’s it going, Black?’” Brenneck says. In the meantime, he was part of the Daptone family, even helping build the label’s studio. He turned up at Roth’s door around the turn of the millennium and announced: “I heard you were looking for a singer.” He sang for Roth there and then, and Daptone soon got him in a studio, recording Rodriguez covers, although he didn’t release his first album, No Time for Dreaming, until 2011. ”īradley sought out Roth when he decided being Black Velvet wasn’t enough. “Black Velvet,” explains Gabe Roth, who co-founded Daptone, “was this superhero that helped him transcend all the struggles of his life. ‘He carried weight and anguish every time he sang.’ Photograph: Kisha Bari “He showed me the versatility of the song – he took Changes to a new level.” “I remember how completely blown away I was the first time I heard it,” Ozzy Osbourne says of Bradley’s version of Black Sabbath’s Changes, which Bradley recast as a deep soul waltz.

“He had that thing that won’t let you sleep at night if you ignore it or makes your body move in a way you didn’t think it could, to touch the truly raw places of your spirit and let it take you somewhere bigger than you,” says Nathaniel Rateliff. I have never cried more tears of joy and sorrow watching someone perform.” You could see how happy he was on stage, but you could also feel his pain. “Charles genuinely loved his audience and his fans, and it radiated through him. “He made it look easy because he was a natural,” says country artist Margo Price. He was 100% right and that’s the difference between an entertainer and an artist.”įrom 2002, when Bradley made his first recordings for Daptone Records, until his death from cancer in September 2017, he found a voice that put his life into sound. He didn’t think a singer had soul unless they had experienced some sort of tragedy in their life and they were singing about that. “Pain was very wrapped up in art for him. Photograph: Isaac SterlingĪfter Bradley returned to New York, in 1996, he awoke one night to hear the sounds of police cars arriving at the nearby scene of what proved to be his brother’s murder. ‘Pain was very wrapped up in art for him’.

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