When he’s not playing music, Charlie Parr is helping the homeless in his home of Duluth, looking only a few short missteps away from living on the streets himself, where he probably could get along just fine since he’s used to bedding down in the back of his van as he drives to and from gigs, nibbling on hand-me-down leftovers from the restaurant he played the night before. Charlie Parr always looks cold, like he carries a piece of the most frigid moments of Minnesota winter with him wherever he goes. He’s 50-something, looking 75, with gray disheveled thinning hair, his arms as frail as matchsticks, a flannel shirt draped over his shoulders like a slim wire hanger, and a bent back.

You don’t have to suspend disbelief to to see that Duluth, Minnesota’s Charlie Parr is a damaged soul, and making music because he knows no other way forward-not to fulfill some version of the American-bred rock n’ roll fantasy.

Same for the tuberculosis-stricken Jimmie Rodgers, The Carter Family, The Maddox Brothers & Rose, and so many others when there really wasn’t an “industry” behind roots music, and no model for how to be successful doing it. Hank Williams wasn’t fulfilling a dream, he was scratching out a living as best as he could. He started singing and playing guitar on the streets of hardscrabble Alabama towns to help provide pocket change for his fatherless household, and only took music as an adult profession because his back ailments precluded him from doing any physical work. Hank Williams didn’t start off to be country music’s original superstar. For some, music is truly the only thing they can do to remain gainfully, or at least sustainably employed. Some play music to fulfill their lifelong dreams, while others do it out of a necessity, and not necessarily because they feel it’s their life’s purpose and they must heed the calling. Playing music isn’t always the glamours or adventurous profession it appears to be to many fans and observers on the outside, especially within the lean, meager levels of underground and independent realm.

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