The pain, then, piled up, in mind-boggling fashion. But Womack seems to pin much of it on marrying Barbara. “That’s why I started wearing shaded glasses on stage. Cos I couldn’t look at the people. I was embarrassed, and I was ashamed by the way that people reacted,” he says, his dry, papery voice fading slightly.
“So I understand my life. There are so many things that happened. Everybody gonna lose something.” He pauses. Womack’s sentences can, at the best of times, be inconclusive, and it’s occasionally hard to discern what he’s saying. “The death of my son, something that I never talk about, he was stillborn…” he drifts. “The death of my – he committed suicide, my oldest son, he was 19…” he says of Vincent, his son with Barbara.
“And then me and Barbara had…” he begins, going back to Cooke’s widow. “Part of it was, as bad as she missed the son she lost with Sam, that was her biggest dream, waking up at night – or waking up early in the morning. And so I asked the doctor, what do you think would bring her back? She’s really very bad. And he was joking, saying, ‘If you gave her another child…’ And I said, ‘You think you can?’ And he said, ‘Well, you could cos you’re so much younger.'”