Ramblin’ Chuck was born Charles Buckston Merriwether III, November 10, 1923, to a wealthy Connecticut couple. When both of his parents were killed in a freak yachting accident in 1929, young Buckston was mistakenly sent to an orphanage in New York City, only to be put aboard the last Orphan Train in 1929 and shipped off to a rural farming community in the South to start a new life with a new family.

Asleep on the train early one morning, he was startled awake by a flash of lighting and thunderclap, and in a dazed panic grabbed his small cardboard suitcase and stepped off the train (by accident) during a blinding rain storm, in White Station, Mississippi, a tiny railroad stop between Aberdeen and West Point in the Mississippi hill country, many miles away from the Delta. As the train pulled away, young Chuck ran in vain after the train, but to no avail. Forlorn, scared and exhausted, he sat down on an old wooden platform bench, and began to sing in a small, trembling voice… ”When the train left the station…there were two lights on behind….” The station’s janitor, a kindly old black man by the name of Lincoln Jefferson Lee, took pity on the child and took him home to begin his new life with the Lee family: Lincoln Jefferson, Ma, Aunt Maybelle, young twins Billie and Otis, and their evil uncle Will Lee, the “meanest man between here and hell.” Having heard the boy singing at the train station, Lincoln told his family that the child was a natural, and when Lincoln placed his battered old flat-top guitar in Chuck’s trembling hands, the boy began to pick and holler as if he’d been doing it all his life. And from that day forward, Chuck never looked back, and the legend of Ramblin’ Chuck Buxton was born.

Ramblin’ Chuck’s been rich and been poor – been white and black, up and down -- Sees the world from all sides – he feels your blues, and he’ll make you feel them too.