6 years later, how did Eddie Bo die? Sons still wonders

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - The circumstances of his father’s death don’t make sense to Edwin Bocage Jr. for many reasons - starting with the way he got the news.

It was March 19, 2009. Bocage was wondering what had happened to the handyman who was renovating the bathroom of his Gentilly home. William Hayes, who lived in a Central City house with a woman named Veronica Randolph and Bocage’s father, the musician Eddie Bo, hadn’t shown up for work the day before. So Bocage picked up his phone and called Hayes.

The phone call began with “just a general conversation,” Bocage said in an interview this month. Then Bocage inquired about his father, whom he’d seen just three days earlier.

“How’s the old man doing?” he asked Hayes.

“He’s not doing too good,” was the response, according to Bocage.

“What do you mean he’s not doing too good?” he pressed.

“Oh, he passed.”

Eddie Bo was an elder statesman of New Orleans R&B, jazz and funk, a versatile and influential bandleader with a passionate following around the world. The man known for “Hook and Sling,” ’’Check Your Bucket” and many other hit songs may have slowed down a bit, but at 79 years old he was scheduled to perform that April at his umpteenth Jazz Fest.

“That man was in good health,” said his son Owen Bocage, a percussionist. “He hated the smell of smoke, and he didn’t drink either.”

One day that March, Eddie Bo left New Orleans with Hayes and Randolph and traveled to a property he owned in rural Pearl River County, Mississippi. He didn’t tell Eddie Jr. or Owen that he was going.

He lost consciousness on the property at 685 Barth Road around noon on March 18, 2009, according to public records, and was taken to the emergency room at Highland Community Hospital in Picayune.

The man born Edwin Joseph Bocage Sr. was pronounced dead at 5 p.m. It was a “sudden cardiac death,” according to his death certificate, caused by a heart attack. There was no autopsy.

Eddie Bocage Jr. says William Hayes refused to give him any specifics about his father’s death in their phone call the next day.

“He wouldn’t tell me where or how (he died) or nothing,” Bocage said.

So Bocage started calling funeral homes in New Orleans, asking them if they had the body of the famous musician.

None of them did.

Then Bocage recalled that his father owned a home in Pearl River County, so he found a telephone book and looked up funeral homes there. The first one he called was McDonald Funeral Home in Picayune, and he found what he was looking for. Eddie Bo’s body had been taken to the funeral home. But it wasn’t there anymore.

“They told me they cremated him,” Eddie Bocage Jr. said. “I asked them who told them to cremate him, and they said it was his sister.”

A report from the Pearl River County medical examiner’s office includes a brief narrative about the death.

The sister’s name is written on the report: Veronica Randolph.

But Eddie Jr. and Owen Bocage say she is not kin to Eddie Bo at all.

Eddie Bo had a reputation for having cut more hit records than almost anyone to come out of New Orleans, and the sudden loss hit hard for many music lovers.

On the Pearl River County “report of death investigation,” though, there’s nothing to indicate that Edwin Joseph Bocage was a famous musician. The document, which was signed before Eddie Jr. and Owen even knew their father was dead, lists him as a carpenter.

The report also notes that Eddie Bo was divorced, information that was provided by Randolph, according to the narrative summary.

Eddie Jr. and Owen Bocage are hard-pressed to explain why Randolph would claim to be Eddie Bo’s next of kin, why she had him cremated, why she said he was divorced, why Hayes would be reticent about the death.

The Bocage brothers said they don’t know what became of their father’s possessions, nor any royalties for his music. A will has not been executed in Mississippi, according to Pearl River County Attorney Joe Montgomery.

In a brief telephone interview Friday (April 24), Veronica Randolph, who said she is living in Acadiana Parish, insisted she was Eddie Bo’s sister.

“I was with Eddie for 16 years daily,” she said. “I understand that there’s a lot that you wouldn’t understand.”

Contacted by telephone, William Hayes declined to comment about the death of Eddie Bo.

“I can’t give out information without talking to his sister,” he said, referring to Randolph.

Six years after Eddie Bo died, Owen Bocage said he is haunted by visions of Eddie Bo, to whom he bears a strong likeness.

“I see his face all the time,” he said. “His death, it’s just a mystery.”

___

Information from: The Times-Picayune, https://www.nola.com