Following an unforgettable tribute to the R&B legend at the BET Awards last weekend, Charlie Wilson made a grand appearance on Saturday at the ESSENCE Music Festival.
It appeared that the massive crowd at the Mercedez-Benz Superdome fully came alive when Uncle Charlie hit that stage. In a black sequined suit he opened his 70-minute set with “Party Train,” and the crowd never stopped moving. He took concert-goers down memory lane with classics from his Gap Band days (“You Dropped A Bomb On Me,” “Yearning for Your Love”), solo hits (“There Goes My Baby”) and introduced two new songs (“Turn Off the Lights” and “Love, Charlie”).
Behind a translucent piano, which also lit up, Charlie sang “Love, Charlie” and accompanied it with a familiar speech of his past struggles as a drug addict. He closed his set with a long, fulfilling performance of Gap Band hit, “Outstanding,” which took fans out from between the rows and into the aisles to dance.
Check out our pics below:
