A lot of people have never heard Ted Hawkins, the singer-songwriter who spent most of his career busking on the boardwalk in Venice Beach, where he earned, he said, about $300 a week. Even public radio station WXPN barely plays his music, and when they do it’s mostly covers of songs he made sound original.
His hardscrabble, peripatetic life — fatherless son of a prostitute, in reform school by age 12, in and out of prison and drug addiction interspersed with several near-misses at commercial recognition — gave him a perspective that made his songs unique. The best description of his music I ever saw came from Austin singer-songwriter Jon Dee Graham: “Imagine blues and country and folk having no dividing lines.”
For example, the lyrics to this tune, a baby-please-come-home lament by a heartbroken father, would almost sound like a country song if they weren’t so raw and direct:
Wondering why you left me after all I’ve tried to do
You know I miss you baby and the children miss you too
Tonight we done the dishes just to keep your memory clear
I cooled the hot dishwater with my cold and bitter tears
Hawkins set them to a simple folk melody and delivers them with an anguish rare even in the blues. “When somebody plays in a way you’ve never heard anybody else play, that’s singularity,” said rock critic Dave Marsh. “You might be able to imitate it, but you couldn’t copy it.”
Hawkins never achieved commercial success in the U.S., but he found a bigger audience in the UK, where he spent several years before getting deported back to America. He appeared with Billy Bragg at a concert in Leeds in 1986, where they recorded a live version together.
I know Jason doesn’t care for Creedence Clearwater Revival, but maybe he just hasn’t heard some of John Fogerty’s deep cuts covered the right way. Hawkins broke out an affecting version of “Long As I Can See the Light” on his only major-label release, a 1994 LP for Geffen Records, “The Next Hundred Years.”
