THE FACTS OF LIFE

I was born in a ghetto. This particular ghetto was in Cleveland, Ohio. The neighbourhood was so ghetto that we didn't bother the rats and they didn't bother us. They walked past and hollered, 'How you doin', man?'

Everybody had to survive. You could hear babies crying all the damn time and I was constantly scalping myself trying to scratch out those damn flies.

My mom and pop had come up from the south. My mother, Naomi Reed, was from Bluefield, West Virginia. My old man came from Charleston. His name was Friendly. My father had seven brothers and eight sisters. On my mother's side there were eight brothers and seven sisters. It was a big family.

My father and his brothers all sang, called themselves the Womack Brothers. It was real gospel stuff. He and his brothers would go to the little church and meet up with my mom and her sisters down there. Well, you know, someone has got to fall in love with all those pretty girls around.

Friendly quit school early, in fact all his brothers did, and around 12 or 13 they all went to work down the coalmines. But they kept up the singing and pretty soon him and Mom were courting. They got married when my mom turned 13 and he was 19.

My father predicted that he would have five sons and they were going to sing and he was going to call them the Womack Brothers, just like the group he had with his brothers. And you know? He was right. Every year my mom had a baby boy until she got to five and she used to cry, 'You can have a girl now.' But it didn't happen.

The first son they had they called Friendly Junior. We called him Jim because that was how Junior sounded when you said it fast: Junior, Jun, Jim. His other nickname was Stony Brooks. Curtis came second. His nickname was The Colonel. I was the third brother. Robert Dwayne they called me, Bobby for short. I came along on 4 March 1944. Star sign: Pisces. My folks had moved up to Cleveland by then – the house in Charleston had burned down – and my old man got himself a job in a steel mill.

I was the sickly one in the family. My mother said I was real weak and every couple of months I came close to checking out. They'd say, 'He's going out.' But I hung on. They called me Nobinee on account of the fact I had a knobbly lump on the back of my head.

After me there was Harry, who was called Goat, though to this day I don't know why. Then Cecil, or Cornflakes, as we called him because his skin peeled right off his hands and to us that looked just like cereal.

The house stood on 63rd and Central, right in the heart of the city's ghetto. It was a pokey one-bedroom shack, a small bathroom about the size of a closet and a living room a couple o