Tuesday Night

I was born the fourteenth of seventeen children, to cotton-plantation parents in the Delta of Mississippi.

For a time covering some twenty-six years after my birth, in periods of one month to less than two years, I had spent time in different Mississippi counties like Sunflower, Leflore, Tunica and Choctaw; on cotton plantations like Joe Perry's and Joseph Pugh's; in various small towns like Wier, Itta Bena, Swiftown and Greenwood. Then it was out of Mississippi and into big cities like Memphis, St. Louis and Cleveland. And then, onto military bases in Illinois, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Hawaii, Japan, Kwajalein Island, Midway Island, Alaska and California.

Working, always working; as a cotton picker, a shoeshine boy, stock clerk, dishwasher, grocery clerk, aviation electronics technician, naval in-flight radio operator, electrician, steel mill laborer, television engineer and ICBM missile test technician. A working wanderer. To all of that--the places and the laboring--there are those who can bear witness.

In February of 1965 I left for Africa, where I lived for three years plus in Monrovia, Liberia. Still wandering–-as far north as Morocco. I returned to the United States in May of 1968. Those three years plus in Monrovia was the longest I had lived in any one place in all the thirty years of my life to that time.

During those many years there was no one, other than myself, who could have borne witness to the artists gestating inside of me; artists barely kept alive, but who could sing, write, act, and create visual art. At thirty-one the musician was born; at forty, the writer; at forty-eight, twins, the actor and the visual artist. Giving birth to those mysterious personalities, my bumbling attempts at nursing those babies, was not only an unnerving disruption to my own life, but extremely confusing and disturbing to family and friends as well.

At sixty, there was some disquiet in my life, but hardly about death. Life has showered me with too much sweetness to leave me fretting about the time when death will arrive to gather my bones. Any uneasiness revolves around the illusion we refer to as time; that I may not have enough time left to divulge my real life; to present my revelations, my mysteries. Not things about those places mentioned above or the people met along the way--the world is well acquainted with those places and faces. Sure, I’ve been to all fifty States and ten foreign countries. But do we really need another personal travelogue? How about some real biography; the feelings, the thoughts, the uncommon visions and singular experiences that we all have had, but which few of us can find the courage to share?

I carry the powerful hope that, even when there is no time left for me, through those half-nourished artists spoken of above, you will still one day get to taste, see, hear, touch, smell, and even balance against your own, my mysteries and revelations--the real biography of Mississippi Charles Bevel.

At 74, This CD "Not of Seasons" speaks musically to much of that past and hopefully to what musically and otherwise is yet to come.