An autodidact reckons with his past

Tension between grace and the need to prove himself runs through Roots & Rhythm: A Life in Music (Eerdmans, 389 pp.), the memoir of Nashville music producer Charlie Peacock. Peacock, a self-described autodidact, mines the meaning of place and providence in a dizzying trip through the people, venues, and artistic projects he has touched.

Some may quibble with Peacock’s decision not to make chapters chronological. Rather they become literary, blending “jazz-like improvisation and tangential riffs.” It’s a more interesting ride, as Peacock circles back again and again to themes of place and providence—and through many attempts to prove himself.

Many of those attempts succeeded. From 1989 to 1999 alone—Peacock’s Nashville Christian music decade—he produced more than 70 recordings, had over 1,000 credits on albums and singles, and garnered six Grammy Awards. Christian music artists like Amy Grant and Switchfoot and mainstream artists The Civil Wars and Holly Williams saw projects come to fruition by his help.

But his story didn’t begin there. Born Charles William Ashworth, Peacock came of age in the Northern California farm country of Yuba City, a place and time he credits with making him the kind of artist he became as he spent time with grandparents who were subsistence farmers.

“They didn’t have the kind of intellectual verbal prowess that often comes with people that are intellectuals, but they had an intelligence that was off the charts in terms of survival and in terms of imagination,” Peacock told me. “I think growing up in that kind of place made me a particular kind of artist.”

Music, particularly jazz, became an early obsession, with regular gigs in the Sacramento and Bay areas, both as a supporting musician and with the Charlie Peacock Trio. But so did alcohol and drugs and Beat writer Jack Keroauc. “There was a nonconformist artist just starting inside my teenage self, and Keroauc put language to it,” he writes, yet he later realized that the Dharma Bum was a poor surrogate parent.

Things were unraveling at home. He met his wife, Andi Berrier, in 1971, days after turning 15. “Due to circumstances in both of our families, it was fast becoming apparent I would need to take care of myself and possibly Andi, too.” By 1975 he was married to Andi. There followed the hardscrabble existence of a musician with responsibilities, a time he describes as “seven years of youthful fails, uncertainty, chaos, blood-dripping wounds, and deep trauma and pain undealt with.”

It was a fellow musician, Mike Butera, who supplied the missing piece. “God, in his mercy, sent me a jazz saxophonist to tell me the story of Jesus, and I believed that story, and there was a line drawn in the sand of my life,” Peacock told me. “And you know, I knew that if I stepped over it into this life with Jesus, life truly would never be the same.” Hoping he’d live, he cried out to God for help in 1980, admitting he was powerless over drugs and alcohol.

In the early ’8os, Peacock was spending less time with the Sacramento art crowd after diving into a thriving alternative Christian music scene fostered by Sacramento-based Warehouse Christian Ministries, an early attempt to mainstream Christian music. In six years there alongside artists like Mike Roe (The 77s) and Jimmy Abegg (Vector), he produced nine records and released his own, 1984’s Lie Down in the Grass.

But it was after parting ways with Warehouse in the late ’80s and his move with Andi to Nashville that his career took off with a full stable of music production work. Among artists he worked with were Margaret Becker, Out of the Grey, Switchfoot, and Twila Paris. Roots and Rhythm contains an exhaustive discography that catalogs a man bent on making sure that he would always be able to take care of his family. And yet after a decade of work in the Contemporary Christian Music genre, he took a hiatus.

“I love that I’m around all these brothers and sisters,” he recalled thinking. “But also, I didn’t realize, ‘Oh, they’ve created this genre of music, right?’ And they think it’s the highest and best use of music, and they’re monetizing it and focusing all of this branding and marketing energy on it. And then I had to … pause and say, but no, that’s not really what I’m about. You know, that’s not my calling. My calling is to be God’s musical person everywhere and in everything.”

What came next was a year’s stint in seminary, heading up a commercial music program at Lipscomb University, and a series of jazz albums that harkened back to his roots in music. In short, more feverish work, more striving to succeed.

“In my early 60s, I began to accept the life I had lived: five decades of festering anger, exhausting hypervigilance, a fierce survival instinct, and the unrelenting need to protect and provide for my family, no matter the cost,” he writes.

There’s something for everyone in Peacock’s story—gear talk for musicians and audiophiles, anecdotes and trivia for fans, a discography for historians, a panoply of influences from John Coltrane to Francis Schaeffer to Wendell Berry. But at bottom it is an extended reflection on how life is shaped by family, place, and circumstance—and by a loving God who superintends all things.

Even a seven-year neurological disorder called central sensitization, manifesting in a 24/7 headache, hasn’t taken the wind out of Peacock but has brought him peace, as the reduced endurance and energy he’s left with has allowed him to put his “empire-building and -maintaining” behind him, he writes.

You wouldn’t know he’s dialed back. In the last six months, he released two albums—the rootsy, spiritual Every Kind of Uh-Oh and the pop ear candy of Big Hope, Big Love, Big Everything—as well as the EP Mad Funky and Some Chill. Not to mention his career-capping memoir.

“Any good that has ever come my way is all of grace—a long string of undeserved incidents where God took a tiny speck of creative appropriation and made it into something beyond my dreams,” Peacock writes. Yet, a bit tongue-in-cheek, he admits that “he did it knowing full well I would take credit for it.”