A Mr Phil Mixtape:Bobby Charles - Street People.

01 See You Later Alligator - Bobby Charles
02 Street People - Bobby Charles
03 Small Town Talk - Bobby Charles
04 On The Jealous KInd - Allen Toussaint
05 The Jealous Kind - Bobby Charles
06 I Must Be In A Good Place Now - Bobby Charles
07 Save Me Jesus - Shannon Mcnally
08 Mexico - Bobby Charles & Rick Danko
09 On Meeting Elvis - Glen Hebert
10 Last Train To Memphis - Bobby Charles
12 Tennessee Blues - Bobby Charles
This mixtape compiled by Phil Demetrion - April 2016 - Paris.

Today in physical therapy I set the stationary bike to 22 minutes, then looked at my iPod to see what I had that was not too long a listen. I found this mix I did just a couple of months ago. It features the seminal Louisiana swamp singer-songwriter, the late Bobby Charles. When I lived across the creek from the Bearsville Store and Post Office back in the day, I'd periodically see Paul Butterfield's Mercedes pull up to the store, presumably on a mission of the spirits variety. They were running buddies back then, Butterfield and Bobby. Their partnership was a driving force behind what was arguably Bobby Charles' best album.

When I got back to my room I skipped ahead in the Woodstock book I'm reading -- Barney Hoskyns' Small Town Talk -- to see what he had written about Bobby: "As they strolled about the house, the guy in the overalls was heard to say, in an unmistakably southern accent, 'Ah see y'all are musicians.' When [Jim] Colegrove requested his name, the man said it was Bobby Charles Guidry. Colegrove did a double take. 'You mean Bobby Charles, the guy that recorded for Chess and Imperial?' Guidry nodded. 'Don't tell anybody,' he said. What were these swampy characters, grizzly men out of Deliverance, doing at large in a Yankee arts town? How had Charles, author of the timeless 'See You Later, Alligator' and 'Walking To New Orleans,' fetched up in the Catskill mountains, fifteen hundred miles from the bayous of Louisiana? It transpired that Charles was on the run from the law in Nashville . . . With a drugs charge hanging over him -- a neighbor had stashed some speed in his apartment -- he'd fled town and hidden out in Texas and the southwest. You learn to live with the underground, you know, with the street people,' he said in 1995."

For a limited time, download an mp3 file set of my Street People mix here.