Episode Transcript
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. This is E Ruth Spencer, and this is our episode one of Why We Are The Coffee Table. Why is the title of this podcast of the Coffee Table? For me, it's the place we sat each morning.
Dad would make us porridge. And if you never, if you don't know what porridge is, it's kinda I don't remember, I don't remember exactly what was in the porridge, but I remember I loved dad's porridge or some kind of a hot cereal with hot milk. And also it's where we sat for dinner. It's the place that we belonged.
It's the place that we felt at home, no matter where we were in our living room, in the dining area, in our dad's room, sitting on the bed. It was the coffee table where we. Would learn Bible stories where dad would share his ideas or his invention ideas, or teach us little known facts about other artists that he enjoyed watching on Soul Train or B E T Video Soul.
We were always at the seat of the family table. This is the place. We can honor our father, his story, our story, and invite others to learn about a legend that they knew or maybe they thought they knew, but didn't know and we think should learn about, especially all of the music he produced over his life and who he was to us up until his tragic death.
It's the table we, his brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins, longtime family, friends who knew him when he was the artist, drawing and shyly singing that they encouraged and saved his life many times to help encourage him to become who he became. A regular legend who the world will know. The whole entire world will know as Carlton Coffee, and that's just the heart of it.
But we wanted to make sure that we do more, which is to ask more of those questions that you might be asking and that we wanna get down to the bottom of, it's the question that why question of , why are we so impassionate about this effort, about this endeavor, about this quest? And really it's because we wanna talk more in depth about everything you are seeing and not seeing on our Facebook page.
Justice for Carlton to help us get to the truth. How did he end up as sick as he did? Why was he sick all these years when he was trying to get better? Why is his medical records blocked from his children who normally are allowed to request it after a parent dies, but we're not able to request it. But his stepdaughter.
Who he lived with, or another stepdaughter and his wife are on the records, which will not be allowed to be released to us and only could be released to them. Why is that happening? If what they're saying is true in their narrative, which you can definitely check out on our Facebook page, justice for Carlton.
Another question too is why didn't they tell us of his wishes so that we could also have honored them too instead of trying to intimidate us into honoring a wish we were not included in. Where is the proof of this? Why was it only his stepdaughter and widow was requested to be at his burial service?
According to what they told the police, why didn't his step other stepdaughters. And grandchildren not attend when they claim that he included those according to their narrative that he loved on the details of his sickness, his ho hospitalizations and his untimely death, at least untimely to us, because we never anticipated that this was gonna be something that happened, cuz the conversation never came up with him, nor did it come up with them?
Why didn't he tell his family that he was preparing to die? Especially his eldest sister who he has a very close relationship with. He has been known to be a goodhearted man. Why is there a contradiction with what they say was his wishes, which a goodhearted man would tell his family in order for them to have their comfort for them to trust his words and his reputation that he was sick and close to dying?
Or why not tell his older brothers at the end of the day? We want answers and we want you to help us gain these answers. We want you to be able to think about your family, how to prevent what we're going through, and also how to see yourselves in our situation so that you cannot be or make the choices that those who said that they loved my father, those who said that they loved us at some time at one way or the other from being those same kind of people.
So this tragedy does not happen again as best as we can. That's exactly why we created a GoFundMe page because we want to make sure that we're able to pursue all areas that we can pursue to get justice for him, to get those questions answered. How did he die? When did he die? There's, so much suspicion around his death, but we also wanna make sure that we can do more beyond his death to properly honor him as he deserved.
So we hope that you'll enjoy taking the moment to learn about us as human beings, learn about him as a human being. That yes, there will be ups and downs, there'll be in and outs of complex situations that I think most families can relate with. And if you can't relate with it, then hopefully you'll have some compassion for ours and help support us with making sure that we can assist other people that are in our situation.
To never, ever have to experience this. So thank you all for listening and the next episode is how we found out
