So you had a child with Sam’s widow that was stillborn? “Yeah. Then I had a child that was stillborn with my marriage with Regina.”
So, two still births? “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he raps, sadly (other reports say he and Regina’s son, named Truth, actually died in infancy). “So many things happened that I said [it was due to] leaving gospel and going to rock’n’roll. But did I deserve that punishment?
Divine retribution or not, it’s not all bad news, not least because The Bravest Man in the Universe is a triumphant comeback. And despite the life of darkness, and no matter the cloud of melancholy that can, quite understandably, hang over him, the almost 70-year-old Bobby Womack is a life-affirming character. Rascally, warm, defiant.
I ask him about the Alzheimer’s. His face creases into something like a grin. To cut a rambling story short, Womack says that he was becoming worried at occasionally forgetting lyrics. And after his coma, when he couldn’t recognise his ex-wife and had lost 40 pounds, his concern about his memory loss deepened. So he mentioned Alzheimer’s to a writer, “because I didn’t understand it”.
So, you don’t have Alzheimer’s? “No.”