Darius Rucker reflected on one of his favorite childhood memories of his late mother, whom he lost in the early 90s.
Rucker said he has “a lot of great memories of her,” but quickly thought of a moment when he guessed he was 8 or 9 years old. His mother, Carolyn, “was in the kitchen cooking and listening to the gospel station and Shirley Caesar’s ‘No Charge’ came on and she was singing ‘No Charge,’” Rucker recalled, via his record label. “I just remember I ran into our living room which was adjoined to our kitchen and I just sat there and I just listened to her sing that song, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow! What an amazing voice.’ That’s just always a memory I’ve always had, and that song still to this day when I hear it just moves me because that was my mom’s song.”
When Rucker released his latest full-length album in October 2023, he explained that he opted to title it Carolyn’s Boy in his mother’s honor “because Mom never got to see any of my success. She died before any of this happened, so it’s just another homage to the greatest woman I’ve ever known.” The album’s artwork is a photo of Carolyn, who worked as a nurse at Medical University of South Carolina raising Rucker and his five siblings. He previously said that “everything good in me she instilled in me and I always believe that I hope that I became the man that she was trying to raise.”
“My mom was just always great,” Rucker, who also admitted he still has a fear of disappointing his mother, said per his label. “She worked a lot. She was a nurse and she worked a lot. She took a lot of overtime and stuff to make sure we could live basically, but she always just so supportive, ever since I was a kid. I was always a music kid. Growing up in an African-American neighborhood, I was never that guy who was gonna be pigeonholed to let people say I could only listen to this and I could only do this, because I was African-American. She always supported whatever I wanted to do, whatever I wanted to listen to, wherever I wanted to go, she always had my back. Going to college and everything, she was my biggest supporter and never let my brothers and sisters knock me down or try to tell me I can’t do this or that. All of my success comes because my mother was always in my corner.”