Chuck Brodsky

Chuck Brodsky first drew notice through his sharply sarcastic songs such as “Blow ’Em Away,” “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” and “Talk to My Lawyer,” yet his recordings also reveal a gift for narrative balladry in pieces including “The Hands of Victor Jara,” “Bill and Annie,” and “Long Story Short.” Several of his baseball compositions now reside in the archives of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York: “The Ballad of Eddie Klepp,” which recounts the sole white player in the Negro Leagues during the 1940s, “Letters in the Dirt,” a tribute to Richie Allen, and “Lefty,” honoring his boyhood idol Steve Carlton.

Brodsky began piano lessons at five and took up guitar at twelve while enrolled at Penn State University. In 1981 he hitchhiked to San Francisco and started playing open-mike nights in local coffeehouses. He spent 1983 and 1984 in Europe, alternating between street performances in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany, and Holland and harvesting citrus fruit in Israel. After returning to San Francisco in 1985 he became more involved in scheduling his own appearances at neighborhood venues. The self-produced cassette Live From Spam City appeared in January 1991, prompting him to devote himself to music full-time; he launched national tours after performing at the Kerrville Folk Festival the next year.

His first CD, A Fingerpainter’s Mural, came out on the Waterbug label in January 1995. Five months afterward he relocated to North Carolina with his partner Annie Gallup. The follow-up albums Letters in the Dirt and Radio were issued by Red House. Kathy Mattea recorded his song “We Are Each Other’s Angels” for the 1998 film In Search Of Mr. Goodlife, while “Blow ’Em Away” received covers from David Wilcox and the Fast Folk Musical Revue. Two years later he released Last of the Old Time.