“Roots and Rhythm” with Charlie Peacock
At the Allender Center, we love stories—and this week, we’re honored to hear from Charlie Peacock as he shares his own. His brand-new memoir, “Roots and Rhythm: A Life in Music,” offers a deep dive into the journey that shaped his legendary career.
A Grammy Award-winning music producer whose work has shaped the sound of multiple generations, Charlie opens up about his journey through music, his creative process, and the stories behind his life — and the stories he’s chosen to tell in his memoir.
Join us for a conversation that explores artistry, spirituality, identity, and the cost of seeing the world in a different way.
You can find Charlie Peacock’s latest book, Roots & Rhythm: A Life in Music, wherever books are sold.
About Our Guest:
Charlie Peacock is a Billboard chart-topping musical creator, a (6x) Grammy Award-winning music producer (Folk, Country, Rock Gospel), and (3x) recipient of the Gospel Music Association’s Producer of the Year award (his recordings and productions exceed 25 Million). Named by Billboard’s Encyclopedia of Record Producers as one of the 500 most important producers in popular music history, Charlie has produced music for film and television and held executive and A&R positions at EMI/Universal and Sony/ATV. Charlie is a cofounder of The Art House, Wedgwood Circle, and founder of the Universal Music Group imprint, RE:THINK; and founder and Director Emeritus of the Commercial Music Program at Lipscomb University. He is also a long-time advocate for social justice, working directly with International Justice Mission, and the ONE Campaign beginning in 2002 when Charlie and wife Andi hosted co-founder Bono in their home, putting the rock-star activist in front of Nashville’s artist community. Charlie is the creator/host of the Apple Top 100 music podcast, Music & Meaning, and continues to create his own jazz/improvisational and singer-songwriter recordings, including Every Kind of Uh-oh, a full-length vocal album (08.30.24), produced by Charlie and his son, Grammy and Oscar-nominated songwriter and producer Sam Ashworth (H.E.R, Andy Grammer, Leslie Odom Jr.). His books include, Why Everything That Doesn’t Matter, Matters So Much, Roots & Rhythm: A Life in Music, and contributions to It Was Good: Making Music to the Glory of God and Mission: Africa: A Field Guide.
Episode Transcript:
Dan: I think I have confessed before that I have the capacity to be a fanboy, but there are very few people who hold that kind of august esteem for me. But I happen to be with one who does. And to have this privilege of talking to Charlie Peacock is one of those sweet beginnings to the years. So Charlie, what an honor and delight to have you in this conversation. And Rachael is not with us, but she was gracious enough to say that, I know you just want to have Charlie alone. And it’s really, I’m like, I love working with Rachael in every regard, but this was one of those where you go, what a sweet gift.
Charlie: I understand. I understand. Thank you, Rachael. And it’s great to be with you, Dan, again. And yeah, I value any minute that I can spend talking with you.
Dan: Yeah, same as well. But we are in a conversation about something that I just find to be a taste of fine wine, a taste of just some of the finest palette that body can enjoy and that is a memoir. I love memoirs because they are in some sense the ultimate risk of a kind of self-absorption. That when you enter into reading someone’s memoir, you know that if it’s if’s a high scale rope work, the high wire is so potential to be nothing but a structure of absorption, self-absorption. So a good memoir takes my breath away. And this is a stunning memoir, Roots and Rhythm: A life in music. So it’s coming out February 4th,
Charlie: That’s right.
Dan: Of this grand year, 2025. And obviously I want people to buy this, but before we jump in to a conversation, essentially, really as the book, it’s a reflection on your life. So just for a moment, what was it like? Because your writing is stunning, your music is stunning, your life is stunning. But what was it like to write a memoir, which again, I sense that you would agree with me that it is a high wire act. Either it veers into structural narcissism or it’s indeed a almost elegy a kind of praise and gratitude. And that’s what I experienced in reading this.
Charlie: Well good, I’m glad for that because also, not only is the memoir challenging, but a memoir or autobiography from a musician is actually its own niche genre. And so you have to balance that as well. It’s sort of like if you’re a storyteller like me and you love literature, then, and if I was planning on leaning into that, which of course I did, I also had to keep in mind the music book reader who really needs to every few paragraphs or every pages or so, Hey, give me something that I’ve heard of. Give me a name that I know. How come you haven’t told me about how you made that particular record yet? And there’s a thousand of those things that you could let sort of haunt you. You have to have them be present without haunting you. So it has to be more like a love for your reader where, well, of course, I’ll give you this. Who wouldn’t, let’s tell this story. This is a good story. But everything to me sort of had to be in that good story category for me, how I define that. But it had to fit into the emerging ethos of the book and the emerging connective tissue of the book. And it had to do it in a very natural way, and it had to do it in a way that excited the writer in me, which, because a lot of folks don’t, and this is not a judgment, it’s just an observation. But I do know that there will be friend/fans of mine who read the book and will be delighted with every part of it. And then those who are more used to not used to reading literary memoir are going to be expecting more encyclopedic kind of biography. And that’s not exactly what it is. Like I said. I mean, I hope there’s enough of that in there, particularly for that reader. But there’s always… because people will see oh he’s a musician so he’s just going to say these things. And part of that is that when you have any, you know this yourself, when you have any sort of public awareness or people that are publicly aware of you in some way, whether it’s to be, as I say in the book well-known or famous or infamous, expectations are different. People come to it with different expectations and you just adjust and you go for it. But for me, for the beginning, I mean, you’ll love this because I know that as much as your work is a work of love and service to all of us, you still live in the commercial realm as well.
Dan: Indeed, indeed,
Charlie: Indeed. And you’ve got a new book coming out, so there’s always that challenge that is set before you. But I know you’ll get a kick out of this, because originally my idea was that I’m writing a book about epistemology, so you can imagine that’s your agent’s pitch, right? Okay. We have this musician who everyone only perceives as a musician. They don’t perceive him as whatever, as this Joan Didion style writer. And he wants to write a book about epistemology. Let’s see. And so I quickly stopped using that word when I would talk about the book, but essentially it’s 270 pages of how I know what I know.
Dan: Oh, it’s a brilliant way of putting it. When I think of you from the early first encounters with you and your work in the eighties, I think the last time we were together, I forgot to tell you this, but I’ve always had your face attached to a particular passage in Romans 1:20. Let me read it and then invite you to ponder this with me. But. “Since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made so that people are without excuse.” And the phrase being made is the Greek for poema where we get the word, obviously, poem. But you have always been for kind of the face of that passage. Your creativity from in some ways, as much as I have used your music, I’m maybe even more so a fanboy of your writing. And in that the interplay, both of the music, but the poetics, the lyrics, but also the essay. In some ways this is a strange memoir and that it’s almost more of a essayist reflecting on the matters of how his life has come to be. But in that sense, do you think of yourself as a poem, poema, the Creator?
Charlie: Well, that is really one of my life verses, it really is. It really is. As a very young follower of Jesus, that was a verse that ranks so true to me. It’s like a bell that has been sustained ever since. And really, so much of my interest in curiosity, exploration, innovation, all of that is based in what has been made based in sort of the glory of what has been made. And in fact, I really spent my entire Christmas vacation reading at the intersection of music theology and quantum physics. So I give you an idea of how much this interests me. Yes, I believe that there’s just analog after analog, after analog leading to poetry, and that you just have to have the eyes to see, and ears to hear, and that we’re given these senses, and then we’re given these brains that create extra sensical in a sense of technologies to which we can see deeper into what has been made. And music is one of them. Music is certainly one of them. One of the things that I did over the break was I created an imaginary piano that had bass notes long enough to stretch to the moon. So it was like 240,000 miles of a single base note, which took 23 days for it to go from peak to peak, for one wave shape to go from peak peak. But the idea is is that the math is there, it can be done. It’s just that we can’t fabricate it or embody it. And this goes to the whole idea that there’s so much about reality that has to be fabricated and embodied by Christ for us, in order for us to know.
Dan: Yes, yes. Well, and another way of saying that is I have to have people like you take me into realms that I would never… what you just, first of all, I don’t understand almost anything that you just said, but in that it creates what true good poema, poetry, brings. And that is intrigue. First of all, what are you talking about, and then who is the person talking in a way in which their minds actually begin to create what is a reflection of the infinite God that we cannot imagine the idea, the humility of God, that he would let that witch is physical finite reveal that witch is not. So in that sense, I think you probably have owned up to the fact that you are a bridge. You’re in so many ways a human being who’s invited us into realms that we have not been willing or able to experience or put words to. And so in that transitory transitional sense, there’s a cost to you and your body because as we know, that notion of a bridge is everybody walks on you and oftentimes not even aware that you are this transition into a larger realm. So I’m just curious for you, as you wrote and with what you wrote, how are you aware of what it has cost you to be the person you are?
Charlie: Well, you and I have talked about this. I think we talked about it last year even about the hypervigilance and sort of the upside and downside of hypervigilance. Let’s call the upside of hypervigilance, curiosity.
Dan: That’s a lovely way to put it.
Charlie: And the downside, making yourself sick. But it is that I can remember even 20 years ago telling Andi, to put on my tombstone just, you can use Charles William Ashworth or Charlie Peacock, or whatever name you choose. I don’t care. Just put the man who saw too much. And there is a sense of that when you do have that distortion of hypervigilance, which for a hyper imaginative person, which I would humbly put myself in that category, I’m not saying that what I create out of my imagination is good. I’m not making that claim. I’m just saying that the way my brain works as a part of how I’ve survived as a young person, that did create in me this repetitive need to just be curious 24/7. And so I think it does play into some of the neurological issues that I’m having now. But at the same time, it’s also something that I still find a great deal of delight in. So it could be a heaviness, it could be a weight to find yourself in a place of where you’re seeing too much hearing, too much unable to filter those sorts of things. But at the same time, as an artist, it’s also a huge benefit.
Dan: Well, to underscore that the cost is you’re getting closer and closer to the face of God, and nobody can survive at this juncture seeing the face of God and the capacity for imagination is that we’re given a glimpse of the backside of God, yet in the…
Charlie: Good way to say it.
Dan: …cleft, he hides us. And yet there is sufficient light to draw our eyes into the imagination of what the face of God would be. And you’re one who has seen too much, and we spent more time on this than our last interaction with Andi, particularly in terms of it has broken your body, and some of that is trauma. Some of that is your past. Some of that is the situation or the consequences of living as imaginatively as you have. So give the reader, just in this case, the listener, just a sense of what brought you into the renaming of yourself into the reality that you’re the great-grandchild of a musician. I mean, your story in and of itself is so freaking fascinating. It just needs to be at least a bit invite people into.
Charlie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So risking hubris right now, we’ll just say like, yes, it is a very unique story, and so please do come on in. Everyone’s welcome and read the book. But yeah, Dan and I started out, my father was a musician, and so it was interesting that out in the garage, like every little boy at some point in time, I was assigned to clean the garage. And I remember each time that I would clean the garage, I would encounter this metal soap container that my dad had from the Air Force. And on it said, Bill Ash. Okay, so our family name is Ashworth, but he just put Bill Ash. And then I later found out that he played with his group at various times, just called the Bill Ash Quartet. And then as I got older, I kept encountering these problems with people remembering my last name, which I thought was not that difficult, but it’s because there’s a lot of Ashwood, Ashcroft and so on and so forth, various derivations of that. And so when it came time for me, when I started thinking about, okay, am I going to be a jazz musician or a pop star or both, or am I going to be a poet? Eventually kind of did the whole punk new wave movement at the time, a lot of friends of mine had these goofy sort of punky sex pistols kind of names. And I was like, well, if I’m going to change my name, I’m going to have something that’s memorable. And there was a jazz bass player named Gary Peacock that had lived in a commune for a time up by Chico, California. And so a lot of us young jazzers knew about Gary, and then of course, he would later go on, he had played with Bill Evans later go on play with Keith Jarrett for years and years. And so I literally thought, Gary Peacock, Charlie Peacock, perfect. And that’s about as much thought that went into it. And from that point on, I started going by the name Charlie Peacock and built an entire and built an entire career on it. And then when I was 45 years old, I received all of this information from my Aunt Connie about our family ancestry. And I had never seen a family tree before. As far as I knew in my mind, on my father’s side of the family was just really one great grandmother. And that was it. Didn’t know anything else. My dad and mother had told me that my grandfather would not talk about our past in Louisiana. He just literally refused to talk about it. So my dad had a relationship with an aunt that he loved dearly, who he would spend time with. And eventually when they passed away, they left him the land from that side of the family in Louisiana, which was left to me. And I’m the guy that pays the $167 on the 40 acre uninhabited plot of land in no man’s land in Louisiana. But the story is that what I found out through this family ancestry was that I come from on my father’s side of the family, that up until a hundred years ago, our family was Black and multiracial, designated mulatto, all these different kinds of descriptions over the last 300 years prior to that. And so then when I dug into it, I kind of took her research and dug into it and realized, oh my gosh, the Ashworth family has been hiding in plain sight for hundreds of years as a documented free Black family in America, in lots of sociology books and so on and so forth, particularly in Texas in terms of cattle ranching or the development of cattle ranching amongst the original Black cowboys. And so of course, imagine my head just blows up where these really remarkable people like Carter Woodson, who was a great Black academic in America, still incredibly respected, who had started the, one he had done these incredible assessments of families, both enslaved and free, and just remarkable lists of people, which of course, any person, any Black person that you would meet who has tried to do their family ancestry will tell you how incredibly difficult that is. And Carter G. Woodson was huge in helping people be able to trace their stories. But anyway, the long and the short of it is that over the last almost 25 years, I have done the work of collecting all the books that our family is in. And even up until last week, I’m talking to, I have a number of people in my circle now because I’m such a direct descendant of this particular family group that they work with me to try to continue to extend what we know about the family. And I’ve just even just recently found out that from the Scottish English Irish side, that Ashworth is really not my male legacy, and that I’m more than likely a Milliken or in America would probably be a Milligan. And then the Black side of my family is almost, I mean, of course at one point, once people are multiracial and then it shifts. So that was five generations ago, but prior to that, then all of my great grandmothers would be Black. And so that’s how that whole journey started with our family. And of course, you know enough about the way the world turns to know that the last thing anyone wants to hear is a white man talking about his Black history. And so that’s an incredible challenge that I have willfully hid from and faced over the course of, like I say, the lust almost 25 years. And I’ve been so fortunate to be surrounded by people that have been very helpful to me in working through my own false assumptions, working through a lot of issues, having been raised white and so visually white and living in white spaces to really come to the point, I could say, well, yeah, my grandfather moved from Louisiana to California and passed as white.
Dan: Yeah. So the appropriate concern about any form of accommodation, of misuse, honor and respect that yet the reality of what we know about epigenetics, you’re a troubadour from a family of troubadours and from a community that has profoundly shaped much of, shall we say, American music and the reality that jazz to the blues, it’s a community that knows in and of itself, the notion of note and space is a form of engagement and exile simultaneously. So you’re in a complex body, my friend, and with an incredibly complex story.
Charlie: Yeah, very complex and very much a migrant story. I mean, Dan, yeah, between where even my family was from my great grandparents to where I am now, music in some ways, music saved our lives. And of course, that was God’s grace using music as a way to tell part of the story that he’s telling through humanity.
Dan: Yeah, I’m not sure there’s any more powerful means. You have, in Ephesians 5, that music becomes the basis for not only praise, but for community, for healing, for almost all that becomes, that which reveals glory somehow comes in the realm of music. And again, the interplay between, it is the homesickness of our own hearts that sings something of the goodness of what we see, but also what we long to see, and that has been such a reflection of my experience, but again, as a Grammy Award winner, as a producer of, I mean for you to go down the list of people that you have worked with from Al Green to the Civil Wars, to Switchfoot to Audio Adrenaline, again, I’m barely even scratching the surface of the kind of profundity that you have brought into the world. This is somewhat whatever, but just an anecdote of someone you work with and you go, wow, that was sweet.
Charlie: Yeah. Yeah. Well, first of all, where I grew up, which in California was a small farm community, and I was fortunate to have some older high school kids that when I was a freshman in high school, kind of opened up the world to me. I had driven through Haight Ashbury, I think prior to eighth grade with my family and seen the hippies, and then drove back home to our safe little suburbs. And these two high school kids, one gave me Jack Kerouac and the other one gave me an antenna to hook up to my receiver, to put in the window of my bedroom so that I could pick up KPFA and other radio stations that were in the Bay Area that were broadcasting this new eclectic radio format where you could hear everything from Miles Davis to Albert King to Jefferson Airplane on the same radio station. So I grew up, I could go to Oroville, California 35 miles up the road with my parents and meet with my dad’s aunt and uncles, and my dad’s uncle Tommy would get out as fiddle and he would play Louisiana fiddle tunes, right? Then I would go back home to my dad and he would have Miles Davis on the stereo and be working on an arrangement on the kitchen table, writing out an arrangement for band play. Then I could go into my bedroom and listen to records and tune into these different sort of eclectic, multi-format radio stations. Then I started going to concerts. Some of the older kids started taking me to concerts. And so before I was 21 years of age, I had seen Bill Evans, Ray Charles Ike and Tina Turner, Stan Getz, Chick Corea. I mean, the amount of people that I saw play music before I was 21 years old is pretty, pretty remarkable.
Dan: Staggering.
Charlie: And part of that is it’s the power of place, because that was Northern California and the late 1960s and early seventies. And so there were people that were living in the Bay Area or living in Los Angeles that were my heroes. It could have been Herbie Hancock living in the Bay Area, or it could have been Jackson Brown living in Los Angeles. I remember thinking, when I first started writing my own songs, I had heard that David Geffen had discovered Jackson when he was 17, and I think he had just come back from hanging out at Andy Warhol’s factory. And then he had had him in development for several years before they released a record. I just thought, well, he was a teenager. I’m a teenager. Maybe David Geffen would be in. So I literally took the very first two songs I ever wrote and took them. My dad, we went on a vacation in Southern California, and my dad drove me the extra three hours to David Geffen’s office on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, and I dropped off my cassettes.
Dan: Incredible.
Charlie: So I give you that introduction just to tell you that there’s so many people around me. I did see Al Green sing live when I was a teenager. I loved those records. I was a dishwasher at a restaurant, and I washed dishes to those records. So there were certain people growing up that would be like, yeah. I mean, I remember when I was first given the opportunity to meet Herbie Hancock, I had a job at a hardware store. I quit it immediately. I mean, I was married, I was 19 years old, I was married. This is the only job I had. I had no money, and I quit the job because what could be more important in the cosmos than meeting Herbie Hancock and spending the day listening to him rehearse a band with all of these great musicians that I was listening to. And so one of the musicians that was there that day was a trumpet player named Eddie Henderson, who was in Herbie’s Band, the Mwandishi band. And this was the early sort of fusion, funk, jazz music. And I went on to record with Eddie Henderson and have spent time with Herbie on a number of occasions. But in the same way, I mean, I went on to record with Jackson Brown as a guest on Holly Williams record. And funny thing about that was I remember Jackson asked me, well, what are you looking for? And I said, I just want the essence of your voice to answer Holly. So why don’t you just go up with a couple ways to answer her vocal as a kind of column response? And so he tried it a couple times. I was like, man, I’m a big Jackson Brown fan, and this is just not Jackson Brownish enough for me. And so he says, well, tell me what you’re hearing. And so right there in a split second, I sang Jamaica Say, You Will, in my mind, it probably occupied literally one second of time to grasp the essence of that. And I took Holly’s lyrics and use them as the basis with the Jackson Essence. And then I just immediately sang something back to Jackson, and he said, oh, okay, okay, right. And so then I pushed record and he sang it. It sounded just like Jackson Brown.
Dan: That is hilarious.
Charlie: But in a sense, I had to remind him of, this is your essence. This is what we’ve come to expect of you. These are the essential elements to which when we hear your voice, we think that is Jackson Brown and no other,
Dan: Is that… Shall we say, the genius of what a producer truly brings, that you hear their voice in a way that they may have forgotten.
Charlie: Well, yes, you have to those analytical skills, whether you can articulate it in some complicated apologetic or not, but you have to at least be able to sense that, and at least to say, you could say something very complicated or you could say, Hey, man, you’re just not sounding like yourself. But I didn’t have the same kind of luck with Al Green because when I was there with my friend Brown Banister, and we were working on a Christmas record that had Roberta Flack on it and a bunch of other people, and Al was on it, and I had, this meant so much to me, I put all this work into this arrangement of the First Noel. And what I tried to do with it was I started out with a string quartet and kind of went into this groove, and then to me, it had to end in just this big gospel showdown. It’s like with Al on the top of every writing on the top of all of these great gospel vocals. So I built this big arrangement, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that you could just wing it. So I’d sent Al the tape hoping that he would listen to it. Well, he had never received it or didn’t listen to it or whatever it was. So I had to go out into the studio, put headphones on with him, and stand next to him. And while I had sung a, what we used to call a scratch vocal or a work vocal, which is really a demonstration vocal to show the real vocalist, Hey, here’s the arrangement. Here’s some sort of quirky things that you’re going to have to memorize and pick up on in order to make your way through this song. So we’re standing together, we listen to the entire song, standing to each other, and I’m sort of kind of, we’re listening, but I’m also saying, so see right here, let the background vocalists do this big build. Then you come in there, right? So tell ’em the whole thing, right? I’m super nervous. I’m just sweating like crazy. So I go back in, and of course it sounds amazing, cause it’s Al Green, but I’ve made it clear that, hey, the guy singing on the tape, that’s me. And sorry, you have to hear this kind of thing, but I had to sing this. Well, of course, I’m hugely influenced by Smokey Robinson and Al Green Green and others in terms of when I sing R&B or soul style music. So I go back in the control room and I ask him to sing it again a couple more times. I can tell he’s like, man, I put my thing on it. I’m done. But I say, Al, because I know like, ah, it’s just not great Al Green yet. So I said, please, please just sing it two more times. And he starts to take his headphones off, and he says to me, if you want to hear it again, you’re going to have to get the boy on the tape to sing it.
Dan: Oh, baby. Oh baby.
Charlie: And I thought, okay, yeah, you win. You’re Al Green, and I’m not.
Dan: Yes. But again, lemme go back to that framework of I’ve never ever thought of my work as a therapist in any way whatsoever related to the notion of a producer. But when you said that, you can hear Jackson Brown’s essence. I think there are moments, and I won’t claim it’s true across the board, but when I’m working well with someone, I have a sense of their essence in a way they have forgotten, or for whatever multiple reasons have chosen to say, I do not want to live in and with, for what I’ve been most uniquely made for, and that sense being able to hear what the other brings into the world, looking to what maybe obstacles or burdens that they have not wished to engage. It’s a lovely picture of what you are as poema, you are, again, stunning, beyond gifted musician writer. But the reality is your deepest, deepest gift is you love glory, and you love glory within others, and you love for that glory to somehow shine onto the glory of God. And In that all the other gifts, which you are replete and remarkable, nonetheless, that gift of not merely being a poem, but actually wanting the poema to be revealed within others. I think that’s part of what has made your life such that for me and many others, you have captured and been captured by the face of God without seeing the face of God and yet revealing the face of God. So I simply want to say again, folks, Roots and Rhythm: A life in music, it’ll not only intrigue you as well, it should, but it’ll capture something within you about your own poetic presence. You don’t have to be as stunningly gifted as Charlie and his wife Andi, but everyone’s been gifted. Everyone’s been gifted with the presence of the face of God, and we are meant to be poems to one another, and in that creative process, to imagine, again, a base that travels as far as to the moon and sounds, again, my brain can’t hold it. I only know that there’s something in, in your life, in this work, and certainly in that image that ought to compel. So Charlie, may your body may, your life may all that is true about you continue to grow on behalf of the kingdom of God. Thank you. Thank you my friend for joining me again.
Charlie: Thank you for that blessing. Thank you.