I Am Charlie Wilson by Charlie Wilson

Author:Charlie Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria / 37 Ink

Chapter 8

The Voice

Even when I was high, even when I was on the streets, even when I had not one penny to my name, even when The GAP Band was no longer in rotation on the radio and we were fighting Lonnie, even when I wasn’t sure I would live another day to see the sun kiss the dawn, the one thing I always had was music. Abusing drugs and alcohol destroyed my voice; out on the streets, I prayed that it would come back once I got sober. It did. This alone is a miracle, because years of alcohol and smoking could have easily destroyed my ability to make the noise. The vocal cords, after all, are not to be messed with. Neither are the lungs. Those layers of tissue, skin, ligaments, and vital organs I need to produce my unique sound easily could have been ruined by years of perpetual abuse, taken out by plaque from the smoke or dryness from the alcohol. The most serious consequence of all would have been losing the sensation that comes when the sound forms deep in the caverns of my belly and in my heart and rushes up through my throat and over my tongue and jaws and teeth and up to my audience, whether that be my fans or my Lord. When you are high or drunk, there is numbness—the absence of feeling, emotion, sensation—and making the noise sans these things is tantamount to singing way off key, akin to not being able to sing at all. Still, somehow, by the grace of God, after losing the physical and emotional connection to my instrument, I got it back.

I’ve long known that my voice is special—not just because people always told me so, but also because I worked hard at making it so. Of course, there are factors about the voice that one cannot control; you are literally born a singer or you are not. The shape of everything from the neck up determines whether you can sing well or whether you should stick to solo concerts in the shower: your nasal passages, how your teeth sit in your mouth, the shape of your cheeks, the way your tongue lies—all of these things and more work together to give those of us who sing the ability to make that pleasurable sound. But the soul, that thing that comes from down deep and bubbles to the surface, the thing that moves women to tears and inspires that guttural “yeah” from the men and gets everyone—the deacons, the grandmamas, the ornery neighbors, the music lovers, the fans all the way up in the nosebleed section, the quiet ones, and the sinners all—to feel it, takes serious work, and in the beginning, you have to literally cook up a stew of sounds to find your true voice.

When I first got into the business, I could blow, sure, but I wanted my fans to revere my voice like they did those of my musical heroes. Sam Cooke, James Brown, Marvin Gaye—I loved them all.

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