Ted Hawkins (October 28, 1936 – January 1, 1995) was an American singer-songwriter born in Biloxi, Mississippi. He split his time between his adopted hometown of Venice Beach, California, where he was a mostly anonymous street performer, and Europe and Australia, where he and his songs were better known and well received in clubs and small concert halls.
Life and career
Hawkins was born in Biloxi, Mississippi. His mother was a prostitute and he never knew the identity of his father. He was sent to a reform school when he was 12 years old. As a teenager Hawkins drifted, hitchhiked, and stole his way across the country for the next dozen years, earning several stays in prison, including a three-year stint for stealing a leather jacket as a teenager. Along the way, he picked up a love of music and a talent for the guitar. "I was sent to a school for bad boys called Oakley Training School in 1949," he wrote in a brief piece of autobiography. "There I developed my voice by singing with a group that the superintendent's wife had got together." After reform school, he ended up in the state penitentiary and was released at 19. "Then I heard a singer whose name was Sam Cooke. His voice did something to me."
For the next ten years or so he drifted in and out of trouble around the country, living in Chicago, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and Newark. Bromberg lost contact with Hawkins until 1982, when was able to get him to agree to release the previously recorded songs as an album, Watch Your Step, which was released by Rounder Records in 1982.
In December 1984, Hawkins was released from the California State Medical Facility at Vacaville, after serving 18 months of a three-year sentence on a child molestation charge (due to indecent exposure in the midst of suffering nervous breakdowns). Hawkins reunited with Bromberg in 1985 for a second album, Happy Hour.
During this period Hawkins refined his musical style, a mixture of folk music, country music, Deep South spirituals, and soul music.
His widow, Elizabeth Hawkins, sold the rights for a film version of Hawkins's life story.
Hawkins is the subject of Mick Thomas's song "57 Years". In the novel The Island (2010), by R J Price (better known as the poet Richard Price), the fictional Graham and Linda are brought together at a concert by Hawkins in Glasgow, Scotland.
Cold and Bitter Tears: The Songs of Ted Hawkins was released in late 2015 by Eight 30 Records, based in Austin, Texas. The album was produced by Kevin Russell, Jenni Finlay and Brian T. Atkinson and features James McMurtry ("Big Things"), Kasey Chambers ("Cold and Bitter Tears"), Mary Gauthier ("Sorry You're Sick"), Shinyribs ("Who Got My Natural Comb") and several others singing songs by Hawkins.
Discography
{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders"
|+Ted Hawkins albums
|-
! style="text-align:center; vertical-align:top;"|Date
! style="text-align:center; vertical-align:top;"|Title
! style="text-align:center; vertical-align:top;"|Label
! style="text-align:center; vertical-align:top;"|Charted
|-
|1982
!scope="row"|Watch Your Step
|Rounder
|—
|-
|1986
!scope="row"|Happy Hour
|Rounder
| style="text-align:center;"| UK, No. 82
|Thorp Minister
|—
|-
|1989
!scope="row"|I Love You Too
|PT Records
|—
|-
|1994
!scope="row"|The Next Hundred Years
|Geffen
| AUS No. 20
|-
|1995
!scope="row"|Songs from Venice Beach
|Evidence
|—
|-
|1998
!scope="row"|Love You Most of All – More Songs from Venice Beach
|Evidence
|—
|-
|1998
!scope="row"|The Final Tour (live 1994)
|Evidence
|—
|-
|1998
!scope="row"|The Ted Hawkins Story: Suffer No More
|Rhino, compilation
|—
|-
|2000
!scope="row"|The Kershaw Sessions: Live at the BBC (1986–1989)
|Varese Sarabande
|—
|-
|2001
!scope="row"|The Unstoppable Ted Hawkins (live in London, 1988)
|Catfish Records
|—
|-
|2001
!scope="row"|Nowhere to Run
|Catfish Records
|—
|-
|2009
!scope="row"|Cold and Bitter Tears, compilation
|Rounder
|—
|}
Hawkins also appears on the Geffen Records 1996 compilation Just Say Noël.