♪ Opening theme music ♪
Hello, and welcome to this episode of ArtAbly in Conversation.
My name is Diane Kolin.
This series presents artists, academics, and project leaders who dedicate their
time and energy to a better accessibility for people with disabilities in the arts.
You can find more of these conversations on our website, artsably.com,
which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.
♪ Theme music ♪
Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Charlie Mosbrook,
a singer, songwriter, and a music educator living in Cleveland, in Ohio.
You can find the resources mentioned by Charlie Mosbrook during this episode
on ArtsAbly's website in the blog section.
♪ Charlie Mosbrook plays Remember who you are ♪
Remember who we are as we
come from near and far.
Women marching in the streets of bent-need athletes.
We are refugees and dreamers.
The immigrants you blame, we will come from near and far.
Remember who we are.
We carry open scars.
Forward in our wheelchairs, you cannot disregard.
As we block the halls of Congress.
for the fear of a graveyard.
We will come from near and far.
Remember who we are.
And stood up to the Klansmen
and the Nazis, just the same.
And to a tone-deaf president for whom the victim shares the blame
for a deadly act of terror,
to him it's just a game, and we will come from near and far.
Remember who we are.
We are scientists and teachers
and reporters on TV.
Investigators, lawyers, the facts are plain to see.
And the evidence is obvious, don't look the other way.
We will come from near and far,
oh remember who we are.
And we know that all lives matters,
but it doesn't seem that way
When the consequence of living is dying every day.
If the motto of your force is self-service and neglect
we will come from near and far
oh remember who we are.
Schools are filled with children, to live with different rules.
Drills and lockdowns put in place can't save them from these fools.
As you pander to the worst in us, friends are laid to waste
We will come from near and far, oh, remember who we are.
We will come from near and far,
remember who we are.
♪ End of the music video ♪
Welcome to this new episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
Today, I am with Charlie Mosbrook, who is a singer, songwriter,
and a music educator living in Cleveland, Ohio. Welcome, Charlie.
Hey, Diane. Good to be here.
Thank you for being here.
Sure.
Okay, so let's talk about your rich career
because you have a long career in music.
I wanted to start by asking you if you could give a bit of background, tell me who you are...
Well, I am Charlie Mossbrook.
I am in Cleveland, Ohio,
and I'm a singer-songwriter.
I've been at this for over 30 years now.
As a musician living with a disability,
I've been at this about 14 years,
which is a different world for me, but I've made the most of it.
In some ways, it's has been a better fit for me than previously.
When did you start your musical journey?
I'm guessing I was probably a toddler and I was taking spoons
and pounding on my high chair.
Then in about the fourth or fifth grade, maybe, I started playing drums
in the school and took drum instruction for about four years as well
as being in the choir.
Then I started listening to some...
Well, I'd always listened to songwriters and such, but I was a poet, and
I discovered that I could write songs, and the guitar was a good tool for that.
I think I switched to bass briefly from the drums and then thought
the guitar was more suitable for me because it became a drum.
The acoustic guitar is drum-like in the approach, and for songwriting,
it just made a whole heck of a lot more sense.
I got into it that way, and I think I just
had a foolish belief in myself and just
started going forward and writing songs and trying to play them for people.
I think I thought I was great.
I don't know how good I was, but I was passionate and persistent.
That carried me a long way to really being a little more accomplished.
I did a lot of street music for a while, and that helped me to develop my skills.
Did you do music studies or were you studying something completely different
than just doing- In school, I took the drum lessons.
More recently, I've been studying Piedmont Blues styles
with with a guy who's very good at that in this area.
I've excelled quite a bit, actually, much more recently than I think I
have over any other period of my life.
But more or less, I just find the right people to spend time with
and watch their fingers and ask questions from time to time.
I did study audio engineering, so I have that background and did a good internship
with a good record label here in northeast Ohio.
That was most of my music study was actually in recording, more so the music.
But I've always been a self-motivator.
When it was time to learn how to play the instrument, I figured it out on my own.
When it was time to do whatever I needed to do, I just studied whatever
I could and then went with it.
Every once in a while, I got lucky and found a good mentor who could help me out a little bit.
Studying sound engineering, it might have helped you when you were
working on your own productions, right?
Yeah, it helped me to better organize what I was doing and to just think about
how things worked a little better.
At the time I was studying, though, it was early 2000s.
All of our instructors were well-versed in more of the analog world,
and everything now is software-based.
My desk is very clean as opposed to what I had in mind when I
started building my recording setup.
Now it's really, how much can I keep in the box?
While I am attracted to new shiny things like most people in music are,
for most people, I think, that's just the consumer, at least in the US,
I don't know about on the other side of the lakes, but
we are driven to be consumers, and we are horse-fed every
shiny new object that comes our way.
There are a couple of little shiny objects sitting in front of me
other than the software.
I think it's the same over there.
I know that you were performing.
In the '90s and 2000s, you were performing a lot
in a lot of different places, actually, right?
Yeah.
Well, I I spent a lot of years.
When I was younger, I would go play open mics as most songwriters would.
I came back to Cleveland and started working
in a coffee shop I had previously worked in.
The owner said, What can we do to make Monday night more profitable?
I said, Let's do an open mic. He said, Do it.
I had no idea what I was doing, but I grabbed a couple of friends
and said, Let's figure this out.
That was very successful for about 14 years before the coffee shop.
We lived in the coffee shop, actually, and moved to another coffee shop.
Another 10 years added to that.
But during that time, I ran.
There were years where I was running probably four open mics a week and then
running around on weekends doing three or four different shows.
So very, very busy.
I don't maintain that schedule anymore as far as shows go.
Though when I do a show today, I get paid a lot better than I
used to at that time in my life.
Were you performing mostly your compositions or were you
performing artists you liked?
These days, I prefer a house concert
or some venue, more like
a concert presentation or a festival.
I don't really like playing bars or coffee shops very much anymore because oftentimes,
they put me in an awkward position where I find
people who have had maybe too much drink
are tripping over me, and I don't want to have to spend the time
defending myself or my instrument or my chair.
So I just find that
If I'm not going to have fun doing the gig because I'm spending time
trying to protect myself, my instruments or my chair, I tend not to go back.
It just seems too much work, and I want to focus on the music.
I look for concert presentation opportunities.
It's really artist-wise, it's your own music, right?
Or are you also doing- Well, I really started off with the idea
that I was a songwriter and I would be doing my own music.
I also got really interested in Woody Guthrie's music and wanted to
carry that a little bit.
I played at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame during a big...
They did a big program on Woody Guthrie, and they had a couple of us come in
and sing a bunch of his songs.
But today, because of my teaching, and
I work so much with the traditional songs
just on my own or through teaching that I usually include some of that.
I think it's important.
I think the traditional music for folk music, if you're doing original folk music,
for myself, it's informed heavily by traditional music.
To help people better understand where the music
I'm playing today comes from, I like to...
There's some inclusion to the past.
I think it's important for people to know who Elizabeth Cotten or Woody Guthrie or
Mississippi John Hurt are and where those songs come from and how that tradition
It's all part of the same story.
I do tend to do some of other people's music, but yeah,
primarily I'm a songwriter.
Is that what I answered your question?
Yes, it did.
Once - you had an accident, right?
Not really. They caught...
Well, it was degenerative disk disorder
is what they put on all the forms.
The disks between five and six of the cervical part of my spine
started to break down and they started bouncing against the spine.
They went in and they cleaned it up.
Nobody could really tell me how they broke down.
I have some suspicions based on my lifestyle and some goofy things
that I may have done, but I couldn't nail it down.
I remember being in the physical therapy in it my first night.
I was going to be in there for a while trying to figure out some basics.
How do you put your pants on
and how do you get in and out of a car and blah, blah, blah.
I remember the question going round and round and round.
All of a sudden, I put the brakes on. I said, Stop.
You're going to think about this your whole life and it's going to make you crazy.
It doesn't really matter how or what happened.
The goal here is to move forward.
That's basically become my mantra.
Move forward, just keep moving forward.
Except when I have to back out of places, that's pretty good.
Moving forward in music, what did it mean?
You had your career and your journey, and now
you were in this new situation sitting.
Yeah. I had to rethink everything.
Just the way I perform, I would stand.
There's a guitar that's on a strap around my shoulder, and I can move it
so I can get up the neck with this hand. I can do...
All of a sudden, it's sitting on my lap.
Just that had to change a little bit.
The way I do a lot more finger picking these days
than strumming across across the neck because it's just more comfortable.
I had to rethink how I play.
Plus, these two fingers on both hands, I get a lot of tingling,
and they don't always land properly.
These two, these are the workers.
These get involved, but not as well.
I needed to really rethink and retrain some of the muscle memory to make sure
that, well, this needs to get to that string, and if it's there, do I feel it?
Bad days, I don't feel it.
On good days, it does what it needs to do.
Bad days, there's definitely a little clunky action, and I try to
ignore it and just move on through or adapt to that situation.
Performing, because I stood, that obviously changed.
But I had gear back in the '90s and through the early 2000s,
I was rolling around with 50, 75-pound speakers and amplifiers that were
200 pounds, it felt like, and so much gear. So probably the very first
thing I did was to go on to one of these sales sites.
I don't know if it's Craigslist or eBay or what.
But I sold off all my gear and replaced it with things
that I can physically pick up.
So when I go out and do a small,
like a farmer's market or a house concert,
I have a little seven-pound all in one package that really sounds great.
It's wonderful.
When I travel across the country, I've got a little luggage thing on the front
of the chair where I can put the guitar.
I put my backpack back here.
I put a smaller pack hanging from the chair.
Then I have my little speaker sitting on my lap in between my torso and my guitar.
And the country is mine. I can go wherever I want.
Or I come into your country.
I'll be in Montreal next February, I believe.
Ah!
As long as I can get across the border, I'll go there.
I travel mostly by Amtrak if I can because it helps me to carry what I need.
I can have it all with me in the seat.
I can get to and from the restroom.
When you travel Amtrak, it's a good idea to have a plan
to have somebody pick you up.
Everything's always taken care of, and I don't have to be as self-sufficient
as I once was when I would
drive around the country and do that. I've never started driving again either.
I'm frankly afraid of it.
It takes some time to adapt, to every situation.
And this way works for me.
But yeah, we adapt.
Everything really did change.
I I think also just as a musician
or as a folk musician and doing
topical songs and singing in favor
of people's rights and humanity, and that being
a middle class, white male, straight white male,
my voice was only in observation for the most part.
I didn't ever experience...
You know, I experienced some moments of this isn't fair, but
I live in privilege, and I know that I did.
Being in a marginalized group as a disabled person,
all of a sudden, my voice, my perspective changed quite a bit because
now all of a sudden I understood what it was like to live in a world
that was not built for me,
that quietly excuses me or
even undermines my ability to succeed.
I'd never experienced that before, and now I understand that better.
I don't let it happen, but I understand it better.
I am - again, where I began was persistence,
and persistence has always been a big part of that whole moving forward plan.
With your work, you also work with a lot of voices.
You want to, I think,
be involved in these communities
where there is a right to be
and a right to be present and a right to... This is Advocacy Community.
Can you talk about this advocacy work you're doing?
I work with a group called Roots of American Music.
It's an educational organization based here in Cleveland.
We have I have a number of programs.
One of them is called Stop the Hate, which is based around...
Why am I blanking the word?
Basically, we go into the schools and we do a songwriting workshop with students
to write songs that hopefully answer the questions of
giving people an opportunity to simply live, giving people an opportunity to
excel, pushing back against the voices of hate.
We'll write songs, it's as a class. One of the most...
To me, we've run a number
of awards with these songs,
but one of the most important ones that I was involved with, I went into a school
in the Glenville neighborhood.
Glenville is a neighborhood in Cleveland where Superman was born.
The two young men who drew Superman.
Their high school has produced quite a few very good NFL stars,
but it's a very poor neighborhood.
It's a neighborhood that has a lot of challenges in many ways.
One of the big challenges is nutrition, and they don't have grocery stores.
One of these food deserts where the kids don't have access to good food.
I went into the school and I said, What issues are really concerning you?
What impacts you?
Where do you see change in this community, in your world?
They said, Food. We can't...
So we wrote a song called Skittles.
They said, We need better vittles, and all we have here is Skittles.
Because that was their perception.
They go, Where do you get food?
At the gas station.
We wrote this song, and the judges in the contest, in the songwriting
contest, are oftentimes people with a lot of resources.
My hope was that that song would reach the right ears and people would say,
Yeah, these kids really do need food, and we need to do better as far
as bringing nutritious food into different communities.
Good groceries shouldn't just be available to very affluent neighborhoods,
which that's the way the grocers work.
I mean, any one of the big ones, they come in and they survey the area and they say,
Is this profitable or is it not?
That's not how we should look at the distribution of food or medicine
or housing or anything like that. But that's where we're at right now.
We use these opportunities to give the kids an opportunity to really
think about changing the world and think about what parts of their world need
to be changed and what could be better.
In so doing, I learn a lot from them.
Then we also teach a program called Blues is the Backbone.
I look at that teaching American history through the lens of the blues.
We start in about 1850
as slavery is at its peak,
but there's a big fight going on. They need it.
The underground railroad is a big part of the beginning of that story.
Banjo is being played on a gourd.
You can find videos of Rhiannon Giddens playing a Banjo like that.
This year, we finished the class after eight weeks with Bruno Mars,
and I was able to trace the lineage of American music from Bruno Mars back
to an old Banjo made with a gourd, or as I would say to the kids, like a pumpkin.
That made sense to them.
That's fantastic.
It's really important to make them understand that the music we play today
have roots and that if you're able to play what you're playing today,
that's because of all these musicians that were before us.
And I think it's important for the children to understand or adults to understand
that they come from something, that they come from a huge history,
that their roots of the history of the universe winds up in them.
And then what they do today will impact what's ahead of them.
To me, that's a very, very important lesson.
In music, we can illustrate that.
You're also a member of Folk Alliance International, right?
Yeah, I'm currently on the board of trustees for Folk Alliance International.
I was formerly the President of Folk Alliance Region Midwest, which serves
the Midwest United States and Canada.
I'm a first-year board member with Folk Alliance right now.
That's fine.
It's a great group of people that I'm serving with.
We're serving a lot of needs, I think, within the music industry and for helping
helping people in the folk music world to be able to establish them
and have the tools available to them that traditionally go to the money makers.
Anybody in folk music knows if you want to make a million dollars
in folk music, start with two.
So trying to find...
find ways to help our community grow
and to become stronger and to have those resources and tools and
to know that they're not alone, that the musicians who are playing,
and it's not just folk music, but anything that's not...
I think as a young musician, to me, success in music was
doing what Mick Jagger or Michael Jackson were doing.
In truth, and I said this to somebody this morning, waking up and being able
to put a guitar in my hand and making music, that's success.
I get to do that every day.
That's fun. I get to perform for kids, I get to perform for older people.
I get to perform for people my age.
I get to record, and I get to help other
people to make their musical livelihood,
something practical and sustainable.
And to me, that's success in music, almost more so than...
I'm not saying I would walk away from Mick Jagger's opportunities,
but I like where I'm at today. It's pretty good.
I wouldn't have imagined it as a teenager, but looking at it now,
I'm like, This is cool. We're doing good stuff.
Is there a specific project that you might want to highlight?
Currently, I've got a handful of songs that I'm working on right now.
I just finished up a few streaming records.
One was a collection of Grateful Dead songs
performed as pure folk songs, single instruments. Each instrument -
It's called Song Hunter, and it's a tribute to Robert Hunter.
Each song, I'd highlight a specific instrument, such as Fire on the Mountain.
I used a Mountain Dulcimer because it seemed to fit the song.
Or Shiva Fool, I used an ukulele, and it really seemed to fit the song.
I really just wanted to highlight the songwriting
because people had said to me for years, What's so great about the Grateful Dead?
They sound all the same.
I'm like, Oh, listen to those songs.
It's not just a mind-numming jamming going on.
It's wonderful songwriting.
I also recently put out a streaming record
called They Deserve Better, which was
a collection of old songs of mine that I'd recorded previously that may have
been recorded on a cassette four track or something like that.
They weren't really presentable any longer.
I went and reworked them and just had a lot of fun
recording them and putting them.
I think those two are the most recent ones that I've worked on
that I feel really strongly about.
The next one will be all new original music,
and that's what I'm working on now.
The new stuff is always the most difficult place for me is
figuring out what do I want to say.
What do I want to say?
Once I have that in mind, all of a sudden, the floodgates open up and
the lyrics start coming. I think they're coming right now.
I think I know what I want to say.
It's just capturing that.
In what you want to say, maybe there is something that you could explore
at a certain your life, which is about
working in what I call disability arts
for quite a long time now and learning and adapting.
What it is for you to work in that environment where you have access needs,
you need to have an accessible stage, and you need to have people who understand
that artists with disabilities exist?
What is it for you to work in that environment?
Well, I've always said to presenters, they'll look at me and say,
Well, we're not sure if we can actually accommodate you.
I said, You know what?
If you tell me it's a stage, I will get on the roof if it's necessary.
You let me answer that question. Never answer that question.
The one thing that I've always encouraged music presenters whenever I'm sitting
on a panel or anything like that is ask the artist what they need.
Don't assume that I can't because you look at me and you say, Oh, he can't.
I would say, revise that thinking and realize that I'm a lot more persistent
and I have a lot of challenges from day to day that I have to figure out.
I'll figure this one out, too, it is always my thought.
I always hope that the music presenters give me an opportunity to tell them
what I need and what I can and can't do rather than
for them to quietly just write me off, assuming that I can't do it.
I've dealt with all kinds of weird...
I mean, like any performer who lives with disabilities, we deal with all kinds of
strange stages and a ramp that was meant for kegs
or not to bring a human being up
that I feel like I'm going to tip over backwards if I try to go at that angle.
There's always challenges, but for me, there's always a way.
There's always a way, and it might look awkward.
I try not to be on stage
and make that the focal point.
I want the music to be the focal point.
I want to forget about those struggles as much as I want the audience
to forget that it's happening.
But I also want them to be aware of the struggles, too.
To me, there's a big part of performance
as an artist with a disability
where we're educating people.
We are letting people know that we are more than capable.
And we're letting people know that Yeah, there are some things
that aren't that easy for us, but we are more than capable.
So ultimately, when I'm on a stage, I want the audience to know that they're looking
at people who shouldn't be written off, shouldn't be marginalized
in any way, that we will figure it out.
Then working within an organization like Folk Alliance International
or Folk Alliance Midwest or locally Folknet, we are always looking for ways
to even the playing field.
I'm fortunate I get to go on site search committees to find where
we're going to do our next conference.
With that work, I had the to look at showers and say, why does your hotel
put the wand 6 feet in the air on the other side of the tub from the bench,
and then the soap is another 6 feet?
It's like, why are you making it harder?
This is supposed to be an accessible room.
I have the ability to go into hotels with huge financial resources backing me
and their desire to have those resources come into to their hotels
and say, I don't think you're really serving everybody, and I think that
we'd be more apt to come to you if you served all of our people.
I find a lot of benefit in being able to work with nonprofits that are presenting
these conferences because I think in that capacity, I have the ability
to educate people about our needs.
Then just being able to serve on panels
and things like that, festival organizers
in different venues, they come to our panels, they say,
What do I need to do to become more accessible?
I said, Well, when you... On your website, have a line
where I can spell out my needs for you.
We would love to be able to serve every single disabled person
in the world, or person with a disability, I'm sorry.
I always try to maintain that people come first.
A person with a disability.
But from my perspective, the most important thing we can do is to
encourage people to ask, what are the needs?
What will make this a more enjoyable event for people?
I find that working in that capacity, I have the ability to make some change
because I can be a part of that conversation and help to foster that
and make sure that the conversation actually happens.
I think before I got involved with Folk Alliance Midwest,
that conversation didn't happen.
Once I was involved, I was a workshop coordinator, so it became a workshop.
Positioning ourselves, I think, is really important.
If you want to change the world, you got to get in line and
figure out how do I position myself to be a part of that change.
We're both part of an organization called RAMPD, which is doing
a fantastic work on that for the music, the musicians with disabilities.
Really, they really try to get this conversation ongoing
in a lot of different fields and in musical styles, too.
I really, really appreciate that.
There is a diversity in these group of musicians that RAMPD highlights
which I really, really appreciate.
Yeah, I'm fairly new to RAMPD.
Oddly, I was very surprised the other day.
I got an email saying I'd been nominated for vice president.
So I guess I'm running for Vice President of RAMPD right now,
but I really like the work that the organization is doing and
really appreciate being able to be a part of it and being able to represent it and
to use it as a resource learn about things that will help me to
be a bigger changemaker within the other organizations that I'm involved with.
There is an interesting work that they're doing with the professional RAMPD musicians,
they're doing some meetings every month
where they are presenting the latest
activities or the latest collaborations,
possibilities, also meeting other people from all across.
It's mostly the United States, but we are several from Canada.
There are several people from the UK, several people from Europe.
Just to be able to chat a little bit and know what others
are doing, that's already great.
It's going so much further than that.
But just that part with the conversation between us and how people are doing
in their career and how they are able to connect with other
organizations, that's fantastic.
I have a last question for you. Okay.
This is about - speaking of collaboration and meeting people, this is about
collaborations and also inspirations.
Are there people in your life who really counted or had an influence
in the way, guided you, had an influence in the way your music journey progressed?
Yeah, there are a lot.
One musician that comes to mind is a woman named Avin Baird,
who's a very accomplished finger picker and songwriter.
She's really a fantastic musician.
She's later in life now and recently had a heart attack,
which has limited her ability to sing.
But when I was younger and when I was newly
dealing with a spinal cord injury, she really helped to nurture my talents along
and was a big part of that and making me, in a lot of ways,
the songwriter and the player that I am today.
More recently, I've been working with a songwriter or musician, a blues musician
named Kevin Richards, who's been teaching me the Piedmont Blues styles
and all kinds of other blues styles.
When I was in school for recording, I worked with a...
I had an internship with a group called Telarc International,
which records, where they recorded Dizzy Gillespie
or the Cleveland Orchestra or the Atlanta Symphony.
They did these amazing recordings.
I'm in Cleveland, Ohio, and I walked into the lobby, and there's a
case of Grammys that I never even knew we had one in Cleveland.
They had hundreds of them for these amazing recordings.
Everybody was involved in that.
It was really a big part of helping to shape the way I look at
presenting music and what is important in the production of music.
Probably most importantly would be early in life, my mother
and my father were big music lovers.
My mom play guitar for me and sing Jim Croce songs.
My dad is a big jazz historian and would
impress upon us all the great jazz music.
We would go out and see classical music, and there was just always music around.
That really set me up for my love of music
and my love of the history of music
and the traditions that were involved.
Then now, later in life, I've been married for about seven years, and I've been
with my wife about 14 years.
She's been here with me through this whole journey as a person
with a disability and supporting me.
I was telling you a story before we started the interview about
We were coming home from a baseball game, and I got caught in
a big puddle that I couldn't see what was underneath it, and I got stuck.
And she stood back and waited until I figured it out, and I did.
And a lot of times that's what she will do, which I love,
because until I'm really saying help, she knows who I am, and she's going to let me figure it out,
because if she doesn't, then I don't figure it out, and she knows it.
But she's always there to support me once.
If I can't figure it out, she's going to climb in that puddle and pull me out.
And she's always been right there with me, supporting every little thing I do.
I think those are the primary people who have set me up to be who I am today.
Well, thank you for the conversation.
It was really nice chatting with you about your career
and your journey as a musician.
I wish you all the best with your projects.
Are you touring again?
You told me that you're going to Montreal.
We'll be in Montreal for the Folk Alliance conference, and
I'm going to be in Chicago in about two weeks at the Two Way Street Coffee House.
I've got performances set up around the country here and there, sporadically.
I haven't set up a tour since the pandemic.
I almost did a couple of years ago.
There was a great rail pass deal, and I put out feelers, and people weren't ready
to come back to doing house concerts.
When I tour, house concerts are really my first choice.
I mean, obviously, if I could find a big venue of 500 seats, and they're
going to fill those seats, I'm there.
But house concerts are my bread and butter when I tour.
We're getting close to that, but my teaching schedule has become so busy that
I'm trying to manage it.
I'm trying to shut up a couple
of nonprofit organizations, so I have a little more time for it.
Okay. Well, good luck with everything and enjoy.
Well, thank you.
Thank you for having me and spreading the word about how capable we all are.
Yes.
We're an important voice in the music world, so thank you.
Well, have a fantastic day and talk soon.
Okay. Thank you.
Bye. Take care.
Thank you.
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