It’s no secret that Bobby Womack experienced a lot of turmoil in his life, some of it was his fault and some of it wasn’t. In the case of Mr. Womack’s 4 month old son, he said that he was the sole cause for his death and was never able to recover from that extreme heartache. After his son’s passing, Bobby says he spiraled out of control like never before. Read what he explained happened on the day his son died…

The Tragic Death Of Bobby Womack’s Son

In a prior interview with WENN, Bobby Womack explained:

Via Contact Music: “I lost a son, [named Truth], which was my fault and the only reason I can talk about it now is because I know what I’m saying. I’m not hiding behind anything.

I came in one night… from a convention and I was telling my lady, ‘Baby, you’ve gotta get up, I’ve got something to show you!’ And she said, ‘Can we do this tomorrow? You know the baby…’ I said, ‘That little baby can’t move. He can’t even walk. He’s taking five minutes to hold his head up…’ 

Bobby Womack continued:

“So she jumps up and I was telling her all these stories… It was no more than two minutes before she said, ‘OK, go and get my baby.’ I went running in to get the baby. The baby had fallen down between the bed and the wall and he suffocated and that was the biggest hurt ever in my life.”

Following the tragedy of losing his son, Womack turned to hard drugs which according to many reports, stripped him of his creativity. He then spet decades trying to regain his love for songwriting back:

“That death led to ‘There’s gotta be a better way… and from there, away I went. Every time I heard somebody had died – Johnnie Taylor or somebody else – instead of going to the funeral, I’d go and get high. Eventually I reached out to God and said, ‘Look, I’m in trouble. I don’t even know who I am.’ I wanted to get the true feeling back… My passion for music never died; I was just trying to figure out how you get it back.”

[Source: Contact Music]

Here’s How He Lost A Second Child

Unfortunately that was not the only child Bobby Womack lost. His son, Vincent, committed suicide in 1986 at only 21 years young. This is something that no parent should ever have to experience because it just doesn’t feel like the natural order of things. The parents are supposed to go before their children, but obviously it doesn’t always go the way we want it to.

This doesn’t justify Bobby Womack’s drug addiction, but it explains a whole lot. The fact that he felt that he was to blame for his 4 month old son’s death is enough to push any person, no matter how strong willed they may be, over the edge in some form or fashion. We’ll probably never understand why such horrific tragedies have to happen to such innocent children, but maybe it’s not meant for us to fully understand why…well at least not more than it is meant for us to learn from the tragedies, the heartaches of ourselves and others, with the hopes that we can somehow find some way to prevent things like this from happening in the future.

May Bobby Womack and his two sons, Vincent and Truth, continue to rest peacefully.

-ILoveOldSchoolMusic, Old School news with a new point of view