A Life of Words

If it’s December, I’m listening to Betty. And tearing up. And marveling. Her voice could bring sweet, melodic beauty to any song.

Betty Louise Campbell Workman Cazad died 32 years ago, five days before Christmas on Dec. 20, 1992. Lung cancer. She was 71. She had quit smoking years earlier, but cancer still came and took her.

Most of you know who Betty is. She was my mother, the mother I didn’t meet in this life because I waited too long to search, and the mother of my much older two brothers and sister. I never knew about any of them, or my father – whose alcoholism finally broke up their West Virginia family before I was fatefully conceived out of wedlock – until I was 44 years old.

After initially holding deep disdain for that man, Bob Workman, I came to understand that he had an illness for which he never got help, and I have long since forgiven him. His life came to a tragic end in July 1962, a couple of months before he would’ve turned 46, when he drowned, drunken and homeless, in the Hillsborough River in Tampa after getting into a scuffle with an elderly vagrant.

If not for some very old reel-to-reel recordings Bob made, I would never have known how beautifully my mother could sing. Her voice graces those recordings for five songs, including two performed with a small dance band during a March of Dimes benefit in Logan, West Virginia – “It Had To Be You” and “I’m Confessin’ That I Love You.” Three others feature Betty “performing” with piano recordings of famed musicians Nat King Cole, Frankie Carle and Fats Waller: “The Man I Love,” “I Ain’t Got Nobody” and “Somebody Loves Me.”

What makes these tapes all the more special is that not only am I blessed to cherish and further bond with the mother I never met, I also get to hear the voice of my biological father, who narrated while re-recording the music from about 10 years earlier, when Betty was in her late 20s. The recordings even feature Bob, who played standup string bass, performing with the same band Betty sang with.

Bob may have made the recordings in the late 1950s – not long before he and Betty divorced in April 1959 – on what my oldest brother Crys tells me was a tabletop recorder our father purchased as one of his toys (he was also an amateur photographer with his own darkroom). It’s also possible Bob made the recordings during a brief time when we think B&B were making a go at reconciliation in early 1960, during the period when I was conceived that May.

The other gift of Betty’s voice that I’ve shared with you during holidays past is the one she left for her children late in her life – a cassette on which she vocally accompanied several songs on vinyl Christmas LPs she and her second alcoholic husband, Ronnie Cazad, owned. My first moments of hearing Betty’s voice came through that cassette, the first time my family and I traveled to Colorado to meet brother Crys and our sister Terry in July 2005 – almost 13 years after Betty’s passing.

I usually share some of those Christmas recordings of Betty’s this time of year. But I’ve decided to bring out a few of the old standards she sang, the treasures Bob left behind for the son he never knew about. I’m also including some photos of Betty and Bob that I’ve never shared – I’d never even seen them and dozens of others before Terry pulled out some albums during my trip last February to see her and Crys.

Betty and Bob, thank you for giving your fourth child these uniquely special gifts. Merry Christmas and love to you both in heaven.

And happy, blessed holidays to all our friends and family. We hope your holidays and 2025 are filled with love, light, lots of hugs, wonderful forever memories – and music. ❤

Here are Betty and Bob:

“The Man I Love”

“It Had To Be You”

“Somebody Loves Me”

“I’m Confessin’ That I Love You”