Local musician returns to stage after stay-at-home

Sarah Colburn
Special to the Times

Charlie Roth has traveled the world, bringing his storytelling style and the timbre of his rich baritone voice to the reaches of the UK and Ireland.

The local musician, a modern-day troubadour, is slowly returning to the public stage after a COVID-19 hiatus that darkened arts communities around the world.

Charlie Roth

With his acoustic guitar, rack harmonica and a bit of foot percussion, Roth is his authentic self on stage, weaving stories, telling truths and presenting his music in a calm, metered style that begs the audience to sit for a spell.

Whether he’s playing originals or covering music he said he wishes he wrote, his voice rings through. He snares the audience with his words and immerses them in a story that paints a picture with the sounds of folk, Americana, country and blues.

Roth released his newest CD “I’m the Smile” in 2019. He funded the album with a Kickstarter campaign and raised the money he needed to hire a publicist who distributed the album internationally.

The album went number 11 on the FAR charts and number 7 on the Euro-Americana charts. He recorded and produced the album with some musical elites including Lloyd Maines, John Inmon, Pat Manske, Javier Chaparro, Mike Morgan, Redd Volkaert and Bill Kirchen.

The album came together, he said, in much the same way his musical career has. As his gigs dried up and doors to public places closed, so did his main source of income.

As he took to Facebook live every day at 3 p.m., which he’s taking a break from for the summer, audience members started sending him money via Venmo and PayPal, tipping him for his services. His repertoire spanned the hundreds of songs in his internal catalog.

“People were really generous to me,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m so lucky.”

He said just as his car insurance was coming due, he received two big tips in his online jar and has been able to keep up with his financial commitments.

Though he’s excited to return to the stage, he said he’s also learned a lot staying home. He and his wife Bev live in northern Benton County where she runs a boarding operation at their property, teaching riding lessons in dressage and hunter/jumper disciplines. He’s become a farmhand, helping maintain the fields, painting the garage, adding a mural to the side of a barn. They’ve lived there since 1995, purchasing and updating the old farm house, building pole barns and a chicken coop they call the Clucky Star Motel.

“I kind of made peace with what happened and that I missed out on all that work but I gained a lot of other stuff,” he said. “I’m just so driven and in order to make my living at this for all these years I’ve had to be. I’ve been doing it so many years it’s just like a reflex.”

Ring of Kerry

As the Celtic band he plays in, Ring of Kerry, shut down its calendar for the year and he canceled a tour to Germany, he said he made a conscious decision to slow down and told himself “Be the guy your wife needs you to be for a change.”

Now, slowly, he’s emerging from the hiatus. He’s booked a private house party in Minnetonka and a driveway party. He said the phone is starting to ring again.

Every Thursday night beginning at 7 p.m. at the Old Tavern Inn, Roth begins playing to a full house, or as full as it can be given the current situation. Last week so many people showed up they couldn’t get a seat because they didn’t have a reservation, he said.

“People are hungry for it,” he said. “They’re out and they haven’t been out and they know I haven’t been working. It’s a good way to get back into playing live again.”

Before the pandemic Roth had been booking performances in a number of senior living facilities.

“It might be the most rewarding work I’ve ever done,” he said. “In my younger days I would have looked down my nose at it.”

He recently did an hour-long recorded show to share in the city of Canby. He was originally booked for a live show there and turned it into a recorded video to share with the residents of a senior facility. He’s gone on to make copies of the video he’s aptly named “Senior Session Vol. 1” and distributed them.

He’s also been writing children’s songs for a program aimed at children in need called “Sing Me a Story.” Kids draw out their own stories in crayon and write down their thoughts, Roth turns them into a full-fledged song, most recently writing one about a space adventure with Billy the Bouncing Ball, Lil Stickman and Larry the Chapstick.

“They’ve just got this vivid imagination that’s been beaten out of us adults,” he said. “I’d like to write that song rather than change the world with my vast knowledge. (Songs can be) pretty arrogant, I don’t like preachy songs, that’s not me. I’m a healer and I’m more interested in healing the world than adding to the division.”

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