TOUCH THE NAMES

Chic Street  Man: Musical Ambassador

Born in Augusta, Georgia, Charles Streetman moved to the Roxbury section of Boston with his family when he was three months old. He got his first guitar when he was seven.

"I didn't know how to play it but it was mine. We didn't get too many things back then and when we did it would belong to all of the children. But, for some reason I got a guitar and it was all mine. It would just sit there in the corner and I'd look at it and marvel over it. Then one day our house was burglarized and somebody put their foot right through it. I couldn't understand why anybody would do that. Why they didn't leave it alone or take it with 'em. Why put their foot through it? It didn't make any sense. Of course, that's when mama said, "Son, sometimes things just don't make no sense. They call that nonsense. But, out of nonsense...you make sense." Mothers are good like that sometimes."

A decade passed before Chic got another guitar. By then, however, he showed enough athletic ability to play semi-pro baseball and subsequently ended up at Northeastern University in 1964 under the auspices of a program intended to expose promising young blacks to higher education.

Chic's interest in music was growing, however. "My older brother brought home a guitar one day and showed me a couple of chords." Still unsure about his calling, Chic placed music on the back burner and eventually earned a degree in psychology from UC Santa Cruz in 1971.

After these tentative forays into sports and psychology, Chic had come full circle and was ready to channel his energies. He took off for Paris, France where he met Pierre Barouh of "A Man and a Woman" fame (Pierre had written the lyrics to the theme song for this film. He'd opened his own recording company "SARAVAH" and later, upon meeting Chic, invited him to do his first recording). Chic recorded that year and toured all over France. The standard blues he played in France earned him continual appearances on national TV and radio. But, "the music," he said, "wasn't serving my total person. There were spiritual and social and political issues going on in the world that weren't being addressed in my music and I wanted to learn how to integrate it all." It took a while, but that one year stint in France in 1975 helped Chic determine a direction for his music.
Chic's musical tree is rooted in the blues but branches out into many different directions. It has been placed by critics into a potpourri of esoteric musical categories: acoustic funk...cat-gut jazz...black people's folk...and urban folk. It bears the fruits of reggae, folk, pop, and jazz. It may be all of that. "The feeling with which I express the music comes from my own experience," said Chic, whose moniker stuck when his uncle Willie called him "chicken" because he thought the child was afraid of the nearby train, cars and dogs.

Chic's vocal style is perhaps influenced by his own mother, Jannie Streetman, who'd sung on occasion with Fats Waller. (Waller wanted to take Jannie on the road with him and she asked her mother if she could go. Chic's grandmother saw stardom and fame. She consented. But, Jannie saw a difficult time as the only girl and too many men. Only sixteen, she declined.)

Chic returned to the States and settled in Santa Barbara, CA where he founded Chic Street Man's School of Performing Arts while continuing to perform shows with some of the folks who were at one time his idols...Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Lightnin' Hopkins, B.B. King, Taj Mahal, etc.

Chic earned the title of "Musical Ambassador For Peace And Human Rights," in part through appearances at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, three appearances as a performer at the United Nations in Geneva, and with his involvement in three Peace Child theatrical productions touring to Russia and Poland.

For more information about Chic Street Man’s music and to hear audio clips, click here.

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