Charles Bradley, the journeyman soul singer whose beleaguered rasp and passionate live performances turned him from an itinerant worker and small-time James Brown impersonator into a late-in-life headliner, died on Saturday in Brooklyn. He was 68.
The cause was liver cancer, said Shazila Mohammed, a publicist for the singer.
Mr. Bradley had stomach cancer diagnosed in the fall of 2016. He underwent treatment and returned to touring this year, but canceled his remaining live shows earlier this month and announced that the cancer had spread to his liver. “I love all of you out there that made my dreams come true,” Mr. Bradley said at the time.
Known as the Screaming Eagle of Soul for his serrated cries of pain and longing, Mr. Bradley released his first album, “No Time for Dreaming,” in 2011 at the age of 62. The New York Times critic Jon Caramanica wrote that the LP “wants to be part of no movement, heralds no shift in the sonic landscape; it just wants to be. It has the feeling of childbirth, messy and noisy and urgent.”
Mr. Bradley followed that with two more albums — “Victim of Love” in 2013 and “Changes” last year — all for Dunham Records, a division of the modern Brooklyn soul label Daptone.
In a statement, Gabriel Roth, a founder of Daptone who discovered Mr. Bradley as the James Brown tribute act Black Velvet, said: “Charles was somehow one of the meekest and strongest people I’ve ever known. His pain was a cry for universal love and humanity.’’
Like his idol Brown or his fellow soul revivalist Sharon Jones, whose career closely mirrored his own, Mr. Bradley sang wearily of personal travails and social concerns, often emphasizing the overlap between the two. “Why is it so hard to make it in America?” he cried on his debut. On “The World (Is Going Up in Flames),” he added: “This world/is going up in flames/and nobody/wants to take the blame.”
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But he also began “Changes” with a rousing rendition of “God Bless America,” prefacing it with a monologue in verse:
Hello, this is Charles Bradley
A brother that came from the hard licks of life
That knows that America is my home
America, you’ve been real, honest, hurt and sweet to me
But I wouldn’t change it for the world
Charles Edward Bradley was born on Nov. 5, 1948, in Gainesville, Fla., to a single mother. He was raised by his grandmother until he was 8, when his mother returned and moved him to Brooklyn with her. “I didn’t know who she was,” Mr. Bradley told Rollo & Grady in a 2011 interview.
By his early teens, he was largely homeless, living on subway trains and in old cars, wherever he could find shelter. Mr. Bradley went on to find work through the Job Corps program, moving between Virginia, New Jersey, Maine and upstate New York, and eventually finding his way to California. But it was a trip with his sister, at age 14, to see Brown at the Apollo Theater that sent Mr. Bradley on his musical path.
“That’s what really gave me a lot of impulse,” he said.
In 1996, Mr. Bradley returned to Brooklyn to care for his ailing mother. He soon began performing Brown’s songs as Black Velvet while also working as a handyman. (When Daptone was founded as a label and studio in 2002, Mr. Bradley helped to install the plumbing.)
His rise as a musician coincided with a familial reconciliation. “I used to think my mom was evil, but we were able to find forgiveness at the end of her life,” Mr. Bradley told The New York Times Magazine this year. “Now I can go out into the world without animosity or anger and show people the love in my soul.”
Over the years, he performed with the Menahan Street Band, His Extraordinaires, Budos Band and the Jimmy Hill and the Allstarz Band.
In concert, he often dedicated his heartbreaking cover of Black Sabbath’s ballad “Changes” to his mother; in the music video, his expressive face is a portrait of anguish. Survivors include six siblings, Andrea Brown, Rowena Bradley, Willie Bradley, Nathaniel Bradley, Virginia Evans and Arago Welch.
Mr. Bradley’s live shows were known to be sweaty, exhilarating and ultimately cathartic. (His appearance last year on “CBS This Morning: Saturday” was nominated for a daytime Emmy for Outstanding On-Camera Musical Performance.) Concerts often ended with Mr. Bradley in the crowd, embracing people one by one, with the singer near tears.
“I think he wanted to hug each person on this planet individually,” Mr. Roth of Daptone said. “I mean that literally, and anyone that ever saw him knows that he honestly tried.”
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