巴比·沃麦克

Robert Dwayne Womack ( WOH-mak; March 4, 1944 – June 27, 2014) was an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. Starting in the early 1950s as the lead singer of his family musical group the Valentinos and as Sam Cooke's backing guitarist, Womack's career spanned more than 60 years and multiple styles, including R&B, blues, doo-wop, gospel, funk, and soul.

Womack was a prolific songwriter who wrote and originally recorded "It's All Over Now" with his brothers, the Valentinos (a song that later became the Rolling Stones' first UK number one hit) and New Birth's "I Can Understand It". As a singer, he is most notable for the hits "Lookin' for a Love", "That's the Way I Feel About Cha", "Woman's Gotta Have It", "Harry Hippie", "Across 110th Street", and his 1980s hits "If You Think You're Lonely Now" and "I Wish He Didn't Trust Me So Much".

In 2009, Womack was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame in 2025.

Early life

Womack was born in the Fairfax neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, near East 85th Street and Quincy Avenue, to Naomi Womack and Friendly Womack, the third of five sons. Friendly Jr. and Curtis were Bobby's older brothers, and Harry and Cecil were his younger brothers. They all grew up in the Cleveland slums, so poor that the family would fish pig snouts out of the local supermarket's trash. He had to share a bed with his brothers. His mother told him he could "sing his way out of the ghetto." Recalling his childhood, Bobby said, "we came up very poor. My kids have had a much better life than I'd ever thought of livin,'" and, "the neighborhood was so ghetto that we didn't bother the rats and they didn't bother us."

Raised Baptist, their mother played the organ for the church choir, and their father was a steelworker, part-time minister, and musician who played the guitar and also sang gospel. Their father repeatedly ordered his sons to not touch his guitar while he was away, yet all five brothers regularly played it while their father was at work. One night, eight-year-old Bobby broke a guitar string, then tried to replace the string with a shoelace. After Friendly deduced that Bobby (who was missing a shoelace) had broken the string, he offered Bobby the chance to play the guitar for him in lieu of a whipping:

Man, I played Andrés Segovia, Elmore James and B.B. King. Even with one string short, I played classical music, soul, country and western, and rock'n'roll. I played my ass off. Every lick I knew and then some I didn't. When I finished, Dad was in shock. He couldn't believe how good I had got and he'd been real selfish holding on to that guitar for himself.

Soon afterwards, Friendly bought guitars for all five of his sons. Because Bobby was left-handed, he flipped his guitar upside-down to play, not knowing that the guitar could have been restrung to accommodate a left-handed player.

Career

By the mid-1950s, 10-year-old Bobby was touring with his brothers on the midwest gospel circuit as The Womack Brothers, along with Naomi on organ and Friendly Sr. on guitar. In 1954, under the moniker Curtis Womack and the Womack Brothers, the group issued the Pennant single, "Buffalo Bill". More records followed.

Sam Cooke, the lead singer of the Soul Stirrers, first saw the group performing in the mid-1950s. He became their mentor and helped them go on tour. They went on national tours with the Staple Singers. Even though Curtis often sang lead, Bobby was allowed to sing alongside him, showcasing his gruff baritone vocals in contrast to his older brother's smoother tenor. During performances, Bobby would sometimes imitate the role of a preacher, which later became his nickname. At just 16, Bobby dropped out of high school.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Cooke formed SAR Records and signed the quintet to the label in 1961, where they released a handful of gospel singles. Then, Cooke changed their name to the Valentinos, relocated them to Los Angeles and convinced them to transition from gospel music to secular soul-and pop-influenced sound. Cooke produced and arranged the group's first hit single, "Lookin' for a Love", which was a pop version of the gospel song "Couldn't Hear Nobody Pray", which they had recorded earlier. The song became an R&B hit and helped land the group an opening spot for James Brown's tour. The group's next hit came in 1964 with the country-tinged "It's All Over Now", co-composed by Bobby. Their version was rising on the charts when the Rolling Stones covered it.