Family and playing guitar are the two main loves of Charlie Lacy’s life.
By Michael Ransom
The article below appeared in the March 2023 issue of Generations of Today magazine. My thanks to Paulette Hanson for publishing the story and to Charlie Lacy for working with me on it.
Reading time: 5 minutes
A recent photo of Charlie and Martha Lacy with their three daughters
As far back as Charlie Lacy can remember, he has loved music. None of his family members sang or played an instrument, but his parents enjoyed listening to Louis Armstrong, big band jazz, and Miles Davis at home. Elvis Presley and the Beatles caught Charlie’s ear in grade school, and during that time, his cousin introduced him to country music. When Charlie was ten, his dad bought him a $10 guitar at Sears and signed him up for lessons. His teacher taught him to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in spite of his wanting to learn Jimi Hendrix songs.
Working with other talented musicians and interactions with the audience when they like what they’re hearing fuels Charlie’s passion for playing guitar.
“Hardworking” and “unassuming” are Charlie’s middle names. He admits, “I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, and I didn’t have rhythm, but I refused to quit. If you keep at something long enough, you get to a point where you are ok at it.” At age seventeen, he and some of his high school buddies formed a band called Sparrowhawk and played their first gig at a bar in Evergreen, Colorado. They had a blast, as did the crowd, and they played often before breaking up to go their separate ways to college.
While in college, Charlie decided he’d become a professional musician. He says, “I realized I could make as much money playing in bands as I would from other jobs.” A big musical break came during one of his lowest points in life. He had just quit drinking and was soon after fired from his band. Charlie surmises they thought he wasn’t fun anymore. He got a phone call out of the blue from a family country band, Night Shift, that needed a guitar player, and he traveled with them to play in western Nebraska, South Dakota, and Iowa in the early 1980s. They treated him like one of their family, for which he will forever be grateful.
Night Shift was elected to the Nebraska Music Hall of Fame in 2009, and Charlie was inducted with them. “I didn’t feel I deserved the honor,” recalls Charlie, “but they were kind to include me.” One of the band members married Mike Johnson, four-times-awarded ACM steel guitarist of the year. Charlie jams with the band, including Johnson, a few times each year. “As great a musician as Mike is, he’s an even better person.”
Charlie (wearing cap) and Night Shift, with whom he played in the early 1980s
Charlie has always been critical of his own playing. The most validating moment for him came on stage with Annie Mack’s band at Buddy Guy’s Legends club in Chicago. The crowd went wild over the band, but they particularly responded to Charlie’s playing. He thought that if he were a terrible guitar player, he wouldn’t be standing there next to Buddy Guy, blues guitarist and club owner. After the band finished, when Charlie came back to get his gear and walked on stage, the audience gave him a standing ovation. “That was pretty cool,” he says.
The strangest on-stage moment that Charlie recalls happened at Boomer’s Bar in Rochester. He was playing with the Gopher Tones. A woman, quite inebriated, began dancing in front of the stage. She fell down and somehow kicked one of the microphone stands. It flew high in the air, then, like a falling javelin, speared their guitarist, Tom Kochie, in the arm and tore his biceps muscle from the bone. Charlie recalled: “It looked awful. Tom left the stage to go outside for some fresh air, returned, and toughed out the rest of the show.”
Working with other musicians to create music, whether it’s writing new songs or finding new ways to cover old songs, is what Charlie likes best. He calls the process “fascinating.” He also enjoys the interaction with the audience when they like what they’re hearing. “As a musician, you can find another gear when the audience is into what you’re doing.”
One of the best moments for Charlie, where the audience was one with the musicians, happened in 2014 with Annie Mack’s band at the National Blues Challenge in Memphis, Tennessee. They made it to the semifinals, which had never been done before by a Minnesota band. They were playing to a packed audience on Beale Street where the blues began and the greatest blues musicians played. Charlie reflects, “That coming together at that time in that place transcended everything. It was such a musical high. If that were the last time in my life I ever played the guitar onstage, I would have been happy.”
The Lacy family in the early years, when playing guitar came second to raising daughters
Early in his music career, Charlie made the conscious decision to keep music to a “weekend warrior thing.” The reason for this was his commitment to family. He and his wife, Martha, attended the same grade school in Denver, Colorado. They began dating in their teens, married, and were in their late twenties and thirties when their three girls (Mollie, Maggie, and Madeline) were born. While Martha pursued a career in medicine, Charlie remained a stay-at-home dad. “I felt it important to be a basketball dad, a speech-team dad, whatever kind of dad the girls needed as they were growing up. Today, dozens of bands and several thousand gigs later, as he looks back on that decision, he has no regrets. “My music experiences have been great, but none of them compares even to a day of being a husband to Martha and a dad to my daughters.”
Martha was the first woman on staff in the Mayo Clinic Rochester Hematology Department and its first woman chair. As she prepares for retirement and the girls are grown and busy with their lives, Charlie continues to enjoy playing guitar, mostly blues and country. “One of the main things that keeps me going is that I get to play with talented players and wonderful people like Tom Kochie (recently inducted into the Minnesota Blues Hall of Fame) and Jimmi Langemo (leader of the Twin Cities band Jimmi and the Band of Souls).” Also, he’s learning different styles and digging deeper into songs he knows. He recently acquired a dobro acoustic guitar that will lead him to new musical places and people. “The cool thing about music is that you don’t age out. There’s always something new to try.”