Womack was ostracised by the soul community. The session work dried up. “Everything dried up. Whether you was a good guitar player, it didn’t matter. They had to punish you. I was going into radio stations and they’d say, ‘We can never play this record…’ So I left my brothers, cos they had nothing to do with it.”
He talks of karma, and connecting “everything bad” to that misguided attempt to do right by his friend. The bad stuff encompasses many things. His eldest surviving son, now 35 and nearing the end of a 16-year prison sentence after (in Womack’s words) a man he hit died. Having an affair with Cooke’s daughter, Linda – that is, his stepdaughter – which caused her mother/his wife to shoot then divorce him. Then, an estrangement between him and his brother Cecil, who married Linda. The failed marriage to Regina, mother of his two eldest children. The separation from the two young sons who live in Chicago – or, in his perhaps indelicate account of that relationship: “After Regina and I got divorced I almost got involved with another woman. I mean, real close. We had two kids together…”
And Womack’s regrets would also include being with Janis Joplin on the night in 1970 she died from a heroin overdose. “I was sitting there with cocaine, telling her, ‘Why you waiting on this cat calling? Have some of this.’ She said, ‘No, I’d rather be down than up.’ And the guy called. And she said, ‘You’re gonna have to leave.’ And as I was getting in the elevator, I could hear him running up the steps. And I often wonder, who was that? I don’t know if it was a deliberate killing or what. But whoever the guy was, he’d have been in jail today.”