REPLAY: Bobby Womack – Poet
in praise of a singular voice
2007-08-09
By Kevin Gibbs

A complete poem, according to Robert Frost, is one where “The emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words."  Omar, my grandmother, had a thing for Sterling Brown.  She was fond of saying, “He got a way with words.”  As a child (not quite sure of the role that poetry plays in the human experience), I thought her emotional response to reading Brown’s work and that of Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and others was a little over the top.  I mean, for heaven’s sake, sometimes those poem didn’t even rhyme! She would rock in her chair and let out an occasional, “Hmph! Yes!” even as she read works memorized many years before. But when she expressed a similar affinity for Smokey Robinson and Ray Charles I began to get it.  I had already been sharing her receptivity to words and how they might affect the individual, in the music I listened to.

The first 45 I ever bought was Barrett Strong’s, “Money, That’s What I Want.”  It was a very old record but I had 35 cents in my pocket and that’s what I spent it on.  The next record I bought, however, would be the first of many that impacted my life poetically as defined by Frost.

I heard Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” on the radio and I liked it a lot.  But when Bobby Womack’s version came out, I was floored.  How this cat took that song and made it his own was so novel.  Still, it was the song on the flip side of the record that had a profound affect on me.  “Harry Hippie” was all at once mellow, happy, carefree, and sad.  I was instantly drawn to its melancholy tone.  The words, a moving tribute to his brother, are laid across a lazy groove of cymbals, strings, and Womack’s sparse yet effective guitar.  Womack speaks of low aspirations in a world that promotes materialism.  He tells the story of a man happy in his skin yet one who makes those that know him impossibly uncomfortable with his contentment and his commitment to mediocrity.  He speaks of Harry’s girlfriend and her influence on Harry’s house.  Womack completes these ideas with the plain yet concentrated language possible only in what many call poetry – saying so much with so very little.

How telling it is that 20 years later the words to the song would find a place in my vocabulary.  After expressing great concern for a seemingly self-destructive family member, my younger brother, DeAngelo, told me, “You know, sometimes you just can’t be everything for everybody.”  It is a truth that the words to Womack’s “Harry Hippie” rang in my ears:

“I’d like to help a man when he’s down / But I can’t help you, Harry / If you wanna sleep on the ground / Sorry Harry / You’re too much weight / To carry around.”

I cried.

Unable to afford them or too impatient to wait until I had enough money to get the full albums, I began to collect all of Womack’s singles.  His voice – honest, graveled, and limited in range – served only to make the words more believable.  His sad warning to lovers, “If You Think You’re Lonely Now (Wait Until Tonight),” his lamenting, “I’m Through Trying To Prove My Love To You,” his rocking invitations, “I’m Looking For A Love” and “You’re Welcome, Stop On By,” and his homage to fading popularity, “Nobody Wants You When You’re Down And Out,” are all poetic masterpieces.  “I Wish He Didn’t Trust Me So Much,” his dangerous ode to infidelity, even has a poetic title.  And the list of gems he has penned for others is long and prolific.  How fitting that his major release of 1981 be called The Poet.

Since understanding Womack’s musical place in the poets’ world, I have learned to appreciate other musical artists correspondingly.  They include but are hardly limited to Marvin Gaye, Bernie Taupin, Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Chuck Berry, Bruce Springsteen, and many others who T.S. Eliot might describe as being able to “Cause words to mean more, not less, than ordinary speech can communicate.”

Perhaps if I had first read the words of Countee Cullen, a man who would later become one of my favorite writers, I could have learned sooner to rock in my chair the way my Omar did when she read Sterling Brown.  Of his own words, Cullen said, “I think [my poetry] has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.”  Bobby Womack’s great body of work might have meant more to me, and sooner.

“He’s like a bottle of water/Harry just floats through life...”

(Kevin "Chixo" Gibbs is a veteran music executive and critic. He covers classic music and throwback culture for EbonyJet.com. He can be reached at kgibbs@centurytel.net)