The runaway who became the Screaming Eagle of Soul

Charles Bradley ran away from home at 14. According to a profile in Seven Days, the Vermont newspaper, he lived on the streets of New York City for about two years, which puts that stretch between the ages of 14 and roughly 16. The article mentions that he slept in subway cars, but it does not give a year for this period.

The article does not describe exactly how he left the streets. It tells instead of the long working life that followed. He moved around the country, from Maine to California, with stints in Alaska and Canada, and worked as a line cook. In the late 1990s he came home to New York to care for his mother, with whom he had previously been estranged.

Music ran alongside the jobs. He performed as a James Brown impersonator under the name Black Velvet, picking up work at shabby nightclubs around the city, and it was in that role that he was eventually discovered. From 2002 he released a few singles on Daptone Records, though they were largely ignored at the time.

In 2011 the label gathered those singles into his debut album, No Time for Dreaming. He was in his sixties by then. He described that release as the point when he stepped out of the darkness and into the light. Bradley became an acclaimed soul singer, known as the Screaming Eagle of Soul.