My mind warps and bends...

Bobby Womack was the last great soul man standing – the one whose music seethed with the intricacies of gospel, the blues, rock and funk. In his approach, his intimate knowledge of those styles was immediately evident.

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His voice was a kaleidoscope of raw emotion – joy, pain, rage and sorrow. But at his grittiest, as he punctuated a song with spirited squawks and screams, horns blaring behind him and his guitar wailing, there was something soothing about the way Bobby sang. It was unmistakably the voice of a black man, a courageous one who was unblinkingly honest about the pain he’d caused others and what he had suffered. He didn’t just lay his burdens down. He powered through them. The sadness underneath the bravado was unmistakable, but you didn’t feel sorry for Bobby. He didn’t want your pity, anyway.

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Don’t be fooled by the imitators. There was only one Bobby Womack, the last pure soul man standing.

Now that the tears have finally stopped, the disbelief has subsided and the skepticism has been addressed; the attempt to organize my thoughts in a fitting tribute to one of the greatest recording artists that America has produced, seems a little more possible. Bobby Womack the Soul singer who gave us “A Woman’s Gotta Have It”, “I Can Understand It”, “If You Think Your Lonely Now” and “Across 110th Street” has died at the age of 70. At this time, no cause of death has been confirmed.

In my formative years – like most Black folks my age – I went to church often. Because the Civil Rights movement was organized and led, mostly, by preachers, the feeling of secularized Gospel singing had greater resonance. The church was the center of Black life, and it informed the politics and culture of the day. If you’re too young to remember, or you were old enough but unaware of the social and political fabric of the Black American community at the time: imagine this: A people engaged in a daily struggle for freedom to be educated in any fashion they chose, to live where they wanted, to vote for whomever they wanted to without fear, to earn a fair day’s pay in return for a full day’s work and equal protection by and under the law. And while all of this is going on, people trained in the church are singing of your hopes, joys, pain and triumphs in the deepest, purest and most emotional and inventive ways imaginable – that’s why the call it Soul Music. Bobby Womack, in that time, in that way and in that genre, was a master.

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These tributes are becoming more and more frequent, and unfortunately, more and more necessary. It seems that the truly great contributors to Soul Music are passing on daily, and with each one’s death, the living witnesses to one of the great eras in American culture passes on.

Not many left.  Only Al Green, Aretha, Smokey and a few others are left.

Just think, over the course of the last decade, we've lost: Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, James Brown, Etta James, Don Cornelius, Luther Vandross, Lou Rawls, Ray Charles, Barry White, Nina Simone, Levi Stubbs, Isaac Hayes, Marvin Junior, Bobbie Smith, Rick James, Bobby Bland, Donna Summer, Nick Ashford, Howard Tate, Solomon Burke, Ike Turner, Ali Ollie Woodson, Luther Ingram, Wilson Pickett, Gerald Levert, Bobby Womack, etc.

That type of crap has to be an absolute dagger to a man's soul.  I cannot even imagine the pain.

"When you hear Bobby Womack, there is such a mixture of heaven and hell coming at you...you can't but to hear the church and the streets."

Although hip-hop stars frequently sampled the soul music of his era, Mr. Womack refused most requests by others to use his recordings in their work, he told a British interviewer in 2004. Despite his well-publicized marital problems and struggles with drugs and alcohol, he said, he remained a gospel singer at heart.