Recalling a Struggler Who Soared : Memorial: Ted Hawkins, a street singer whose raw, honest voice earned him a recording contract, is remembered fondly.

For a generation, the Venice Beach Boardwalk has been a steady source of employment for an unrelenting stream of characters who walk on glass, juggle chain saws or strum guitars while roller-skating.

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Street singer/recording artist Ted Hawkins never needed such gimmicks during the many years he entertained for spare change at the surfside mecca of the zany and trendy. Roosted on a beat-up milk crate, picking at his acoustic guitar and tapping out a beat on a piece of Formica-coated particle board, Hawkins unleashed the only tool necessary to draw attention: a voice so raw, deep-bodied and honest that tin-eared joggers and big-time music company executives alike stopped dead in their tracks.

In the decades before his death at the age of 58 on New Year’s Day, Hawkins’ life swirled with more ebbs and flows than the tides of the nearby Pacific Ocean. Although he never became a household name, Hawkins, who was laid to rest Friday, rode the ultimate wave of personal success in the last year of his life: He released his first major label recording and went on to perform in concert halls in Europe and Australia and on the East Coast.

Hawkins’ burial followed a standing-room-only memorial service where a strikingly diverse group of family, friends and fans marveled at the concluding twist in his pockmarked life.

“As heartbroken as I am that Ted Hawkins is no longer with us, I couldn’t be more happy than about the final year of his life,” said music journalist David Adelson, a onetime boardwalk jewelry vendor who became close to Hawkins while he performed for more than a decade at the beach and Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade.

The most touching testimony came from a complete stranger to the Hawkins family and the music world cognoscenti who gathered Thursday night at the Harrison-Ross Mortuary in Southwest Los Angeles.

Stepping forward to an open mike, a tall and nearly toothless Vietnam War veteran told fellow mourners that Hawkins had provided lifesaving musical comfort at a time when he was strung out and suicidal.

“I met Ted Hawkins four years ago when I became homeless,” said Paul La Belle, 48. “I was trying to get clean and sober, and on the weekends when I had nowhere else to go but to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and the Promenade, I’d sit there and say, ‘Ted, I have a problem--I’m trying to kick alcohol and drug addiction.’

“He said, ‘Just sit down and I’ll make you feel better.’ ”

La Belle, who now works as a fabric salesman, said he caught up with Hawkins again last year when the musician--riding high after a string of successful gigs in Ireland, Belgium and Holland--performed at the venerated McCabe’s concert room in Santa Monica.

“Ted was on the stage and he saw me. We smiled at one another and that moment will always be embedded in my mind: I was clean and sober, and Ted Hawkins had his audience.”

The tall, muscular singer, whose tunes were a hybrid of folk, blues and country styles and whose influences included the soul and gospel legend Sam Cooke, hated to be pigeonholed into any musical category.

“You could no more categorize me with the blues than with bluegrass,” Hawkins quipped in a 1994 KCRW-FM interview and performance that was rebroadcast Thursday.

Hawkins’ personality was equally elusive. In and out of jail for much of his early life, the musician usually left people laughing, but sometimes in exasperation.

“There are many ways to describe my daddy--kind, funny, loving, mean--all of them are true,” said his daughter Carmen at the memorial service. “(His manager) called him dedicated and focused. I would have thought wacky was a better word. But you couldn’t find a sweeter person in the world.

“He’d give you the shirt off his back. Sometimes that was all he had.”

Hawkins’ life story was simpler to categorize.

Born in Lakeshore, Miss., in 1936, he was a childhood victim of utter poverty, never knowing his father and having a mother whom he once described as “mostly interested in booze and prostitution.”

By the age of 12, Hawkins was shipped to reform school, where his budding musicianship was inspired by visits from the legendary New Orleans pianist Professor Longhair. At the age of 15, Hawkins was picking cotton on a prison work gang at the Parchman Farm State Penitentiary, having been convicted of stealing merchandise from a motorcycle shop.

For years after his release, Hawkins lived a hobo-like existence, hopping trains up and down the East Coast before heading west in 1966 after his second wife died of cancer.

In some senses, he was the quintessential Southern California immigrant, having moved to Los Angeles to escape the cold and the past, itching to reinvent himself and claim his fame and fortune.

Such glory, however, was largely elusive. Hawkins, who married again (he is survived by his wife of 29 years, Elizabeth; four daughters, and a son), provided for his budding family by singing on the streets and in the cleaning houses.

He soon attracted the attention of record producers, but also that of the police.

In 1982, the minor label recording “Watch Your Step” was released to critical acclaim--it received an “Indispensable” five-star rating in the Rolling Stone Record Guide. Yet Hawkins found it impossible to publicly plug the record--much of which was recorded as early as 1971--because he was a resident at the time of the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, serving 18 months after being convicted on child molestation charges (which he steadily denied). The cover art for the Rounder Records album pictures the salt-and-pepper-bearded Hawkins, guitar in hand, crooning in the prison yard.

Hawkins’ arrest record had remained clean in recent years. During the latter part of the 1980s he spent time in England, where he became a popular performer, and back home on the boardwalk in Venice, where he said he could make as much as $300 in a weekend to support his family in Inglewood.

Eventually, he moved his milk crate to the tonier Santa Monica Promenade, where recording artist Michael Penn heard him from his apartment window and raved to producer Tony Berg about the best voice in the world performing for free on the street below. Berg later heard Hawkins at a benefit concert for the homeless that he attended with Penn.

“This guy touched a chord that other artists were not able to reach,” said Berg, who produced Hawkins’ album for DGC Records. “His voice could have the impact of a freight train--but there was also a haunting element that sounded as if it was coming from the bottom of a well.

“It overwhelmed you, yet got under your skin.”

The recording, “The Next Hundred Years,” has had only moderate commercial success, but it allowed Hawkins to put his donation bucket firmly behind him and head out on tour for much of his last year, accompanied by his guitar, tapping foot, voice and milk crate.