Beth McKee walked to New Orleans with the master

Beth McKee

Beth McKee

When Beth McKee began recording “I’m That Way” she didn’t realize it would lead to a bond with a reclusive Louisiana legend.

McKee says she and her husband, producer/drummer Juan Perez, were getting some material together for an album when Perez insisted McKee record “I Don’t Want to Know,” a Bobby Charles song the two had heard by way of blues artist Johnny Adams.

“We had both been fans of Bobby Charles for years,” says McKee. “It seemed like every time both of us would go bonkers over a song it would turn out to be a Bobby Charles song.”

Charles has been a songwriter since the 1950s, penning songs that were made into hits by Bill Haley (“See You Later, Alligator”), Fats Domino (“Walking to New Orleans”), Clarence “Frogman” Henry (“(I Don’t Know Why) But I Do”), along with songs covered by Muddy Waters, The Band, Jackie DeShannon and many other artists. His own albums became prized collector’s items.

McKee decided that the entire album should just be Charles songs. When the album, titled “I’m That Way,” was completed in early 2009, McKee needed to contact Charles’ publishing company for credit and payment on the songs. To her surprise, it was Charles who answered the phone. He said he was familiar with McKee’s former band Evangeline and asked her to send him a copy of the disc. A week after she sent the album McKee’s phone rang.

“He said, ‘Girl, why didn’t you give me your phone number? Do you know how many Juan Perezes there are in the phone book?’ ”

McKee laughs.

Charles loved the album and the two soon became fast friends, talking by phone often.

McKee’s career had turned and twisted up to that point. She grew up in Jackson, Miss. (a childhood friend and neighbor of Knoxville musician Tim Lee) and started playing piano in church at the age of 13. While she began performing regular gigs in clubs during college, she feared a life of waiting tables while she dreamed of making it in music and pursued a non-musical studies.

“I got a degree in accounting and then looked up one day and I was waiting tables!” says McKee.

By then she was in her late 20s. She moved to Austin, Texas, and became an apprentice to a neon artist.

“We’d go to Antone’s (the legendary music club) and watch Lou Ann Barton and Angela Strehli and finally I said, ‘Well I can do that!’”

She later moved to New Orleans and joined Evangeline, an all-woman Cajun-inspired act that signed with Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville Records. When that group amicably called it quits in the late 1990s McKee took a job playing organ at an Anglican church and then at a piano bar in Las Vegas.

After marrying Perez, the two relocated to Orlando to take care of Perez’s ailing mother, and McKee began to focus more on making her own music again. While she released one album, “Louisiana Roots,” as a sort of calling card, “I’m That Way” is McKee’s first serious solo effort.

In 2009, Charles asked McKee to perform some vocals on his Dr. John-produced disc, “Timeless.” She happily obliged. Unfortunately, Charles died on Jan. 19, 2010, a few weeks before the album was released.

Still, McKee says she’s proud to have been a part of it and to have become one of Charles’ friends.

“I still have about 20 messages from him on my answering machine that I don’t have the heart to get rid of,” she says. “I have to go through them every time I get a new message — ‘Hey Beth. Bobby.’”

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