Bobby Back in Clink

Upon his release from a Georgia jail on Monday, Bobby Brown told reporters that it would be the last time they saw him enter or leave a prison. Just two days later a Canton, Massachusetts, judge ordered the troubled singer to spend ninety days in the Norfolk County House of Correction for failure to pay more than $60,000 in child support for two children he fathered.

Brown, 35, had previously been sentenced to sixty days in the DeKalb County Jail in Georgia for a probation violation that had its roots in a drunk driving charge from the mid-Nineties. He was released three days early for the Massachusetts hearing. Brown's current incarceration could cause problems as he's due in a Fulton County, Georgia, court on May 5th to answer to charges of misdemeanor battery after he allegedly struck his wife, Whitney Houston, during a dispute at their home near Atlanta in December 2003.

Brown can secure his release by paying the child support for two children, twelve- and fourteen-years-old, but he told Judge Paula Carey that because of a lengthy absence from the music scene, he didn't have the money to do so. Houston, 40, did not attend Brown's hearing; the R&B singer has been sorting out her own troubles, recently checking herself into a rehab center. Brown and Houston have one child.

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Song Stories

“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell | 1974

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.

More Song Stories entries »

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