Remembering Ted Hawkins

 

I've been listening to Ted Hawkins this morning. His vocals are searing, gritty and insanely emotive. This man had a hard and somewhat chaotic life.   A great deal of his music was delivered to tourists on the boardwalk at Venice Beach where he busked for spare change. His talent got noticed and he was "discovered" several times by record producers and music promoters in Southern California and England. He actually moved to the U.K for 4 years in the late 1980's and had a bit of success, but he got into some sort of trouble and was deported back home in 1990. Ted had quite a lot of trouble in his life, starting from the age of 12 when he was sent to reform school in Mississippi. As a teenager, Ted drifted, hitchhiking across the country and living on his wits and petty larceny. He was busted for stealing a leather jacket when he was 15 and ended up in an adult prison for 3 years - a ridiculous sentence for a youngster, but he was a black kid in the early 1950's - Jim Crow times - so he was abused.

Ted started singing while he was a kid in reform school, and he heard Sam Cooke while he was in the state penitentiary. He said that it was Sam Cooke that inspired him to focus on music. Ted got an old acoustic guitar and set it up with open tuning so he could strum chords while he sang. He moved to California in the mid-60's and started busking on Venice Beach.

Ted Hawkins wrote some great original songs. He was a genre-busting guy, very soulful, but he could kick out a killer country tune. His cover of the old Webb Pierce country standard, "There Stands The Glass," slays me every time I hear it. It is one of those covers that completely re-forms the original song. Webb's 1953 recording is the same song, but definitely does not have the same impact.

Ted wore a glove on his fretting hand - apparently he had some sort of injury that made it hard for him to play the guitar which led to his basic style. He was pretty ambivalent about recording - he did an album for Rounder Records in the 1980's that flopped. In 1994, Geffen Records convinced him to do a real album with studio musicians. That was the record I got my hands on - it's called "The Next Hundred Years." He did a stunning cover on that record of the John Fogerty song, "Long As I Can See The Light."   It transports me to some strange emotional place that I can't put into words. 

So "The Next Hundred Years" was well-received and had respectable sales. Ted began to tour and seemed to be having a career take-off in his late 50's. 

Of course, he had a stroke and died a few months after his record was released. He was 58 years old when he passed. Damn.

Here is one of Ted's originals, called "Big Things."  This song feels like a summary of his life and his philosophy.  This was an incredible artist that deserved more than he received.

The Crisis Text Line

 

So many of us were upended by the pandemic.  In my case, Covid-19 accelerated my retirement. My profession required a lot of face-to-face consultative advisory work. I just didn't have the energy to convert my work to the Zoom video world (ironic, since I am on Zoom almost daily now that I'm not working for money). I planned on doing a lot of service work in retirement, but that became tricky for older folks - the virus likes to kill us first, apparently. In April of 2020, I read an article about the Crisis Text Line.  I realized that I could be helpful while staying home & hiding from the novel coronavirus.

I applied to be a volunteer - it wasn't a cakewalk. I had to get a couple of recommendations from credible people, and the I had to pass a background check. Once accepted, I had to get through over 30 hours of on-line training, complete with tests. It wasn't easy. But about one year ago, I got my "stripes" and logged on to the Crisis Text Line platform for the first time.

One of my first texters was seriously suicidal - with thoughts, a plan, the means to complete the plan and a timeframe. This is what as known as an "imminent risk" texter. With the awesome support of my supervisor, we managed to  talk that person "off the ledge."  Since that start one year ago, I have spent over 350 hours as a volunteer crisis counselor and have communicated with 472 people that reached out for support.

The Crisis Text Line is like an on-line emergency room for mental health and emotional health issues. The tech folks in the organization have used data from millions of text conversations to construct an algorithm that identifies the highest risk texters by their word choice. Those folks are pushed to the front of the queue. It is a classic triage system. Telephone hotlines use a chronological model - first come, first served. This can leave folks in imminent risk of suicide on hold for long periods of time. This is obviously not a good thing to do to a suicidal person.

There has been a number of surges in volume at the Crisis Text Line during this pandemic.  Environmental anxiety has been sky-high and that is reflected in the number of texters seeking help. The peak hours happen at night - from 10 PM until 4AM or so. The demographics of the texter population is pretty young ( 70+% under 25 years old) and quite diverse (white, black, Latinx, LBGTQ, Asian, Native American).  Mental illness is very democratic.

Texting works really well for so many people, especially younger folks. I have had texters as young as nine years old. Sometimes folks are too upset to speak, but they can text. Or sometimes people are within earshot of someone that might be abusing them - they can't speak, but they can text. 

It's a free service, available all the time. How great is that?

Since May is Mental Health Month, keep the Crisis Text Line in mind if you or someone you know is in crisis. It can calm emotional storms and sometimes saves lives.