10 musicians who overcame profound personal tragedy to make beautiful music
“As human beings we have enormous capabilities that allow us to rise above our suffering – that we are hardwired for transcendence.” – Nick Cave
Pete Townshend once proclaimed that “rock ‘n’ roll may not solve your problems, but it does let you dance all over them.” While that quote might be pithy, in truth, it distils an entire cultural movement down to seventeen words with a bludgeoning exactness. Modern music is a beautiful symbol of human defiance and transcendence.
The problematic seeding ground for rock ‘n’ roll was the plantations of old. Through the oppression of slavery, it staggered and soared as the inviolable voice of liberated souls. Rock ‘n’ roll crawled out of the mire and misery of one of humanity’s great atrocities and etched itself as gilded poetry written in the margins of one of the darkest pages in history.
The early pioneers of the genre are now cast amid the coals of time as the diamonds who harnessed the suffering that surrounded them, absorbed the pressures of the world’s woes and transfigured it all into music that glistened with humanities emboldened spirit in the face of tragedy. It is no surprise that given the treacherous terrain from which it rose, this early exultation from woe came embalmed in a hue of what be called: the blues.
Ever since, the blues have been extolled in a multitude of colourful ways, proudly rising above personal and collective pains to offer hope to the masses. As musician Wynton Marsalis once said, “Everything comes out in the blues. Joy, pain, struggle. Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance.” The multitudes of music reflect the same multitudes of existence. Sadly, some of that will be suffering, but we can be glad for the artistic heroes who have illuminated the path through pain with beautiful music that alleviated the heap of our burden with effortless wonder. These are the heroes we are celebrating below.
10 musicians who overcame profound personal tragedy to make beautiful music:
Robert Johnson
When it comes to the blues, Big Bill Broonzy said, “you’ve got to have it to play it”. Well, Robert Johnson’s dues to play the blues were overpaid and then some. His life was marred by hardships and discrimination from an early age. His relatively wealthy stepfather Charles Dodds was forced to flee the delta following threats of a lynching by jealous white landowners. Thus, Johnson’s early days wove a serpentine path through the South.
The scattered hoppings of census records suggest he never settled anywhere for long. His mother remarried, and Johnson spent the remaining days of his youth on a plantation. The emboldened young vagabond rejected the farming fate that lay ahead of him and chose to sing the field’s song rather than toil it. It was a choice that resulted in his sharecropper stepfather’s beatings, planting the first seeds of Johnson’s unwavering resolve.
When he later met his sweetheart, Virginia Travis, a girl of fervently religious upbringing, he was ready to hang up the guitar and turn his back on the devil’s music at the behest of her family. They married, and when Johnson was 18, his pregnant wife, with 2 weeks left of her term, travelled to her grandmother’s where she was to give birth. He set off for a final swansong. When he arrived back to greet his wife and child, he was met with tragedy — neither had survived the birth.
Condolences were not offered by her family. Johnson did not receive comforting words but rather further damnation. Virginia’s religious relatives blamed the deaths on Johnson, saying his accursed affliction for the Devil’s music had brought about the tragedy. So, he fell ever-deeper into the blues—only his lack of skill in the music department meant he was effectively chased out of the juke joints. So, he disappeared into the wilderness for exactly a year and returned with an extra string on his guitar and dumbfounding talent—a talent that essentially invented rock ‘n’ roll.
Billie Holliday
When Billie Holiday was in hospital dying of cirrhosis, the police came to her bedside and began trying to arrest her for possession of heroin. By this stage, she was arguably the most important artist in American history. They wouldn’t have bothered if she wasn’t. In some sad way, this scene serves as a pastiche of the triumphs and tragedies of her short life.
Her father abandoned her as a child and her mother would frequently do the same. When she was just eleven years old, on Christmas Eve, her mother returned home to find Holiday fighting off a neighbour who was trying to rape her. He was arrested, but once again, Holiday, as a child, was held in protective custody for two months following the harrowing incident. Soon after her release, aged twelve, she was working in a brothel attending to the upkeep.
In an ironic twist of fate, it was while working at the brothel that she first heard the music of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith and experienced the exultant boon of music that both insulated her from the cruelties of reality, while simultaneously making sense of them. Soon, she would sing her own song and quickly became a starlet. Fame and fortune, however, often meant solitude. Her closest companion was her excellently named dog Mister Downbeat. With money, fame and very little support, she succumbed to heroin addiction.
In 1947 she was arrested for possession of narcotics, and as she recalled: “[The trial] was called the United States of America versus Billie Holliday. And that’s just the way it felt.” She was guilty, but the trial was a pig circus, even her own lawyer wouldn’t represent her. “In plain English, that meant no one in the world was interested in looking out for me,” she said. In the years that followed she struggled with addictions and abusive relationships but always sustained a level of performative brilliance that would lead the jazz critic Nat Hentoff to remark regarding her famed 1956 Carnegie Hall comeback show, “Billie was on top, undeniably the best and most honest jazz singer alive.”
Nick Cave
When Nick Cave lost his son, Arthur, he not only turned that hardship into beautiful music, but also words of experiential wisdom. I will allow his writings to explain: “For a year it had been difficult to work out how to write, because the centre had collapsed and Susie and I had been flung to the outer reaches of our lives. We were kind of outlanders floating in deep space.”
“But what had collapsed? What is at the centre of our lives? In an artist’s case (and perhaps it is the same for everybody) I would say it is a sense of wonder. Creative people in general have an acute propensity for wonder. Great trauma can rob us of this, the ability to be awed by things. Everything loses its sheen and appears beyond our reach. We were surviving, but we were surviving in exile on the perimeter of our lives, way beyond anything that mattered.”
“So how do we return to our lives – to the awe of existence – and reclaim a sense of wonder? Well, for me, it had something to do with work but it also had something to do with community. Work and community. I kind of realised that work was the key to get back to my life, but I also realised that I was not alone in my grief and that many of you were, in one way or another, suffering your own sorrows, your own griefs. I felt this in our live performances. I felt very acutely that a sense of suffering was the connective tissue that held us all together. It was these two things – community and work – that showed Susie and me a way forward.” In the process, his music has provided that same catharsis for many, drawing them back towards wonder.
Roy Orbison
Crippled by stage fright, Orbison’s start as a performer was not an easy one, however, it was this same shyness that became a defining element of his act. For instance, his darkened spectacles were worn to help him overcome his fear and his stock-still stance was rooted in nerves. Orbison then poured this vulnerability into his songwriting and crafted songs that defied the era’s view on macho masculinity. It made him a star.
His introspective pop was transforming music and then tragedy struck on June 6th, 1966, when Claudette and Orbison were out on their motorbikes and on their way home Claudette struck the door of a pickup truck and was instantly killed. Thereafter, Orbison sought comfort in creativity and threw himself into his work. But the industry changed around him and his star diminished.
During this time of endless working hours to little avail, Orbison saw less of his sons and more of the studio and long roads of world tours. It was in Birmingham, England in September 1968 when catastrophe struck once more. News reached Orbison that a fire had broken out at his home in Tennessee and that his two eldest sons had tragically passed away.
This loss threw Orbison into a period of emotional turmoil. Some semblance of comfort would come in 1969 when he married Barbara Jakobs with whom he would later have two children. However, the grief he suffered severely hampered his ability to work, and while he recovered his life, his musical stock had fallen. But he persevered, and in the 1980s he enjoyed a revival with the Travelling Wilburys. It is a mark of his personal fortitude that he was able to use his talents to bring comfort to others through his art once more.
Jackson C. Frank
There may be no darker backstory in music than that of Jackson C. Frank. “I don’t believe in curses exactly,” says friend and biographer Jim Abbott, “but he sure was in the wrong place at the wrong time an awful lot of times.”
The first and most prominent of those wrong places was Cleveland Hill High School. The school caught fire and, in the resulting blaze, 15 of his classmates died including his girlfriend Marlene, the muse for his song of the same name. Jackson was in 6th-grade music class at the time. He emerged from the inferno with scars, both physical and emotional, that would pain him for a lifetime, in which he grieved the loss of Marlene throughout.
He was given a guitar as he received and shortly after his musical talents blossomed. So, he caught a boat to England, where amidst the burgeoning beatnik folk scene of Bond Street he crossed paths with Paul Simon. He would record his self-titled debut in 1965 with Simon as a producer. Fellow London-based folk guitarist John Renbourn would remember Jackson as being “a lot more highly thought of on the scene than Paul Simon was. […] but Jackson just dropped into oblivion.”
He moved back to Woodstock in the years after the record. There he would marry and have 2 children, only for his son to pass away in infancy. His marriage failed thereafter, and the despair proved catastrophic, resulting in the singer being institutionalised. Periodically he would be released from the institutions, during which he travelled to New York in the glim hope of tracking down Paul Simon, seeking some sort of spiritual and financial resurrection, but essentially roaming the streets in a state of dereliction and homelessness. This amble of abjection led him to a city bench, where whilst relaxing under the sun, a group of teenagers with an air rifle fired a shot, permanently blinding him in one eye.
He died of pneumonia on Massachusetts’s streets in 1999, a forgotten relic of the once-booming beatnik scene of which he was an integral influencer. His album remains a paradigm for the power of music because while the tale above might be heartbreaking, it’s because of his beautiful music that it’s being told. In that music, there is a slight lilting hope that cushions the blow as Frank is lifted from a cursed existence by sharing the burden of his sorrow in song.
Ray Charles
Born in Georgia in 1930, Ray Charles went blind at the age of seven owing to chronic glaucoma. The upheaval that caused was cushioned by the protective force that his Mother proved to be. Tragedy then struck again when his brother drowned at the age of four. Once again, his mother’s perseverance and refusal to yield to the harrows of despair proved to be a guiding light for Charles. “She saved me from a lot of trauma that I probably would’ve had,” he said, “because she knew I was going to lose my sight, so she started preparing me.” Music was the salvation she ushered him towards.
Tragically, his mother then passed away when Charles was only 14 and, from that moment, he left his studies at the St Augustine School for the Deaf and Blind and pursued the dream of music. “I’ve always had this little thing in the back of my mind that I can do it, I can make it,” he said, “It may take me a little time and I might not do it today, but I can make it.” A prominent rise to success followed as he turned his hardship into earth shattering tunes.
However, this rise was then suddenly halted in November 1961 when police searched his hotel room and found heroin. The search had been conducted without an official warrant, so Charles was fortunately spared jail. However, similar incidents would blight his career. In his 1978 autobiography Brother Ray: Ray Charles Own Story, he discusses vices that bedevilled his life since he lost his virginity at the age of 12 to a 20-year-old woman: “Cigarettes and smack [heroin] are the two truly addictive habits I’ve known,” he writes. “You might add women. My obsession centres on women—did then and does now. I can’t leave them alone,” he added.
Despite these harrowing tragedies and the afflicting addictions that howled around him, Charles managed to harness a flame of hope both in his music and his outward upbeat appearance. Even when the mother of his child, Margie Hendrix, died of an overdose in 1973, he tried to remain buoyant and transfigure his grief into soulful music.
Debbie Harry
New York in the 1970s was a cesspit of despair. However, punk rose from this ruin to give hope to the masses. Alongside poverty, punk was one of the few things money couldn’t buy in the crumbling city. Debbie Harry was at the heart of it, and she knew a thing or two about perseverance. At the start of this journey was the moment that she was adopted as a baby. Her quiet New Jersey childhood was forever permeated by the knowledge of her adoption. As she candidly writes in her memoir, “I guess somewhere in my subconscious, a scene was playing on a loop of a parent leaving me somewhere and never coming back.”
When she came of age, this daring pursuit of belonging had its own dangers. She found herself in an abusive relationship with a man who once held a gun to her head and threatened to rape her because he suspected she was sleeping with another man. Meanwhile, her attempts to make it as a singer were failing and she was drifting towards obscurity.
That is until she met Blondie co-founder and guitarist Chris Stein. Aside from describing the meeting as the best thing that ever happened to her, the pair also endured some truly harrowing incidents. They experimented with drugs and found themselves occupying dangerous neighbourhoods. One night in the early seventies, the pair returned home from a gig when a man forced his way into their apartment while wielding a knife. He tied them both up and ransacked the apartment for drugs. Then, setting a stash aside and stealing Stein’s guitar and camera, he proceeded to rape Debbie Harry while Stein helplessly watched on. In her memoir, she curiously remarks, “I can’t say that I felt a lot of fear. In the end, the stolen guitars hurt me more than the rape.”
All these incidents and struggles would come out in the shrug-off of punk. The CBGB was, in many ways, a homage to waywardness and hardship in the same way that Greenwich Village had been in the folk revival of the early sixties. This time rather than lean on the spiritualism of the past for exultation and cognizance of the current state of play, the proto-punks of New York were set to snarl their way into a visceral future.
Nina Simone
As possibly the greatest singer of all time, an unflinching performer and a songstress of unquestionable majesty, you’d be hard pushed to argue that Nina Simone’s career was anything but stellar. However, despite her brilliance and the boon that it provided for the masses, things should have been very different if it wasn’t for sickening prejudice. Fortunately, for our sakes, she transfigured the injustice she suffered and illuminated issues with the sort of grace and bravery that summoned change with beauty.
When Nina Simone was first making headway as a musician, she too wanted to enter the classical world that had stirred her as a child. Tragically, when she applied to the prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, she was turned away from the classical field because of the colour of her skin. As her own daughter, Lisa Celeste ‘Simone’ Stroud, would opine: “Can you imagine putting in five hours of practising every day for five to seven years and you get to your audition and they reject you and it’s not because you weren’t good enough but because of how you look?”
Simone would later reflect on her activism and remark: “You can’t help it. An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.” This bold defiance imbues her beautiful work with unrivalled power. While we have been the benefactors of this, it is also our duty to ensure that the same hurdles she faced are levelled in future.
Paddy McAloon
“The first time I heard the title track we were in Hong Kong,” Charlie Sheen of Shame tells us. “It was 5am and we were driving to the airport as the sun was rising over the water. I have no delusions as to how fortunate I am to have had this experience, but I also have no doubt anyone listening to this song can be transported to a similar place of serenity.”
He adds: “One of our managers, Paul, played this to me and it’s a song that will never leave me. I have no idea if what he told me was true, but I chose to believe it. The story goes that the lead singer of the hit ’80s band Prefab Sprout [Paddy McAloon] started going deaf at a later stage of his life. Traumatised by the idea of this, as his entire world revolves around music, he decided to put everything he had into the last record he’d have the ability to indulge in and create. If this is true, he conquered all that he set out to do. Listen to this as soon as you can, there’s nothing quite like it.”
It is, indeed, true. McAloon decided to throw the kitchen sink at his diagnosis and triumphed with a song that continues to wow and inspire people to this day.
Ian Dury
Life for Ian Dury was not the pie he made it out to be in music. When he was seven years old, he spent six weeks in a full plaster cast where all you could see of him was his smile. He had contracted polio seemingly from a swimming pool at Southend-on-Sea during the 1949 pandemic. He spent the next year and a half in hospital. Of course, you already know this, but it’s worth reiterating that this was a man who went on to write ‘Reasons to be Cheerful Pt. 3’.
After that, he went to a school for disabled children where they encouraged trades like cobbling and printing, but it was always the arts that held Dury’s heart. After all, you’d have to be one hell of a fucking cobbler to still be a vital cog in the engine of alternative music decades on from the last brogue you darned.
Thus, when he left school at the age of 16, he ventured off to the Royal College of Art to study painting. It was here that a lecturer dubbed him “a lunatic” owing to his disability which he later transfigured through rose-tinted eyes and self-defiance in the ‘Rhythm Stick’ line, “It’s nice to be a lunatic”. Rather than a wry line, there was a sincerity that held true for Dury when he was standing behind the thrusted middle finger of music.
