The Crux of Charles Bradley

I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around these images and cling:

The notion of some infinitely gentle

Infinitely suffering thing.

- TS Eliot

 

It's not every day that a singer bursts onto the scene just a few years shy of senior citizenship.

Charles Bradley - a former chef, former James Brown tribute artist, former struggling musician, former "nobody" - got his big break this year with Daptone Records and the single "The World (Is Going Up In Flames)."

And, unlike most breakthrough singles, Bradley didn't catch the ear of the music world with careless, puerile, danceable pop tunes. Instead, his voice - which echos the long-lost soul of James Brown, Wilson Pickett, and Otis Redding - is infused with raw power and plaintive cries of loss, suffering, and "heartache and pain."

What can we take from his music and his life? What is the crux of Charles Bradley?

First, we learn from his website that:

"Charles Bradley is no stranger to hard times...he spent the better part of his childhood living on the streets...He had his first taste of the stage when he was asked to perform for some female employees of Job Corps in Poland Springs. The ladies went wild and Charles knew that he was destined to be an entertainer. Unfortunately, his fate was put on hold when his band mates were drafted in the Vietnam War, and he was forced to find work as a chef in Wassaic, New York at a hospital for the mentally ill... 

He had saved up enough money to buy a new Ford but soon realized that he couldn't keep up with the payments; he promptly returned it to a dealer and began hitchhiking...He persevered through the dangers of the road (including one driver who confided in him that he had just killed his wife and children) and eventually landed in Alaska where he once again found work as a chef...Charles spent over 20 years in California, making his living as a chef, all the while playing music on the side...Things seemed to be looking up for Charles, but just as he was about to put a down payment on his first house, he was laid-off from his job of 17 years... 

Charles awoke in his mother's house one morning to the sounds of police sirens. He was devastated to find that his brother had been shot and killed. Life did not seem worth living anymore."

Quite a life.

But you don't have to read his biography to understand that this is a man who has been through some trials and tribulations.

Before a word is spoken, you see a furrowed face filled with soulfulness, hands wringing with anguish, and eyes that point beyond themselves just by their presence. Then with a charred voice brimming with the brutal lessons experience provides, he sings:

The world is burning up in flames
And nobody wanna take the blame
or,
Round and round the road we go again
Where we started, nobody knows
It's a cold, cold world
or,
My brother said to me
Charles, you gotta stand tall
Because life is full of sorrow
Heartaches, and pain

But pain isn't the crux of Bradley's message to the world. Not entirely.

When Bradley isn't singing about suffering and pain, he's singing about love and good works. In "The Golden Rule," he calls us to "go back" to the "golden rule," and that this "golden rule is love." Songs like "The World" call us to make the world right, the spread light; to see ourselves, in the words of Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov, as responsible for the pain and suffering of all others, and to do something about it. Not one day, not later - but right now.

What connects these ideas of suffering and love? Why are we, as TS Eliot wrote, captivated by the notion of "some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing"?

The crux of Bradley's message to the world is distinct - it's literally a crux, a cross where great suffering meets great love, a message deeply rooted in the Christian message. In the words of one writer: "The true King does not reign through violence, but through a love which suffers for us and with us. He takes up the cross, our cross, the burden of being human, the burden of the world..."

This concept is not always explicit in Bradley's music - but it's always there, in the steady pounding of the drums, the airy screech at the end of a high note, the clenched fist and teary, sweaty eyes: Charles Bradley knows that to love, and even to survive, you have to accept and embrace suffering with a higher ideal in mind. He knows the physics of a grain of wheat: unless it falls into the earth, lowly and trampled, and dies, it remains just a single grain - but if it falls, and dies, it bears much fruit.

Or, in the words of that same writer - the then Cardinal Ratzinger - "the way of the cross is not simply a chain of suffering, terrible events, but a mystery, the process by which the grain of wheat falls into the earth and bears fruit."

Don't believe us - but Bradley himself. An interviewer (below) asked him: "What was the long haul that got you to here?"

Without missing a beat, he says: "Trusting in God. When everything is failing, God is still the way. That's what kept me going. And if I didn't believe in God and trust in God, I would never be here talking to you now."

Thank God for Charles Bradley.