William Morei

"J.D. passed away yesterday in a tragic accident and is no longer with us," according to a post today on J.D. Boucharde's Facebook page. Boucharde drowned in a diving accident just off a local beach.

Singer/songwriter J. Dennis Boucharde went to college with the intention of becoming a Lutheran minister. In San Diego, he worked with summer and after-school programs at Abiding Savior, as well as teaching music through churches and privately.

Musically, he specialized in telling stories, though not all based on true life. He sometimes told audiences that he was only three days old when he gave his first piano recital in the lobby of the hospital where he was born, playing a tune he'd heard playing over the hospital PA ("Do You Know the Way to San Jose?") with "hands the size of teaspoons." His four-album project Contra Mundum (Latin for "against the world") is a biographical odyssey about his experiences with addiction, abuse, and depression.

Boucharde's one-man musical Happy Songs about the War -- a musical multimedia call for non-violence co-created with local theater maven Leigh Scarritt -- debuted in 2008 at 6th@Penn in Hillcrest. He partnered with website-designer Josh Callow for the show’s elaborate Pink Floydian visuals.

Boucharde snagged national press in 2011 when he was joined onstage at the Turf Supper Club by local-boy-gone-glam-star Adam Lambert, who had taken his father to the Golden Hill eatery for Father’s Day. “I hadn’t heard him sing, though I had heard of him,” Boucharde told the Reader at the time.

“I don’t watch television, and I sure as hell don’t watch American Idol. Don’t get me on my soapbox about America’s obsession with turning every worthy thing — and even a good many non-worthy things — into a competition. But I sat there and talked to him for a half hour or so. Cool kid. I’ve known his dad and his dad’s wife for a few years. They live in South Park: really, really good people, and I sat and talked with the three of them in the corner of the restaurant.”

As of summer 2012, Boucharde had a regular gig at the Turf Supper Club every Sunday night at 8 p.m., and he made his main living teaching piano and playing occasional sessions. He taught up to 30 students, ages four through adult.

Boucharde introduced a musical alter ego, Papa Hoodlum & The Hard Truth, with an eponymous debut in 2016. In summer 2019, Papa Hoodlum released a two song single, "Femina" (a duet with singer-songwriter Jill Nooren) b/w "All," featuring a multimedia painting created especially for the sleeve art by encaustic nature artist Chris Reilly. "Femina" was also shot as a music video created by San Diego artist/photographer Kristy Walker, and starring actor Alyssa Latson.

On the late-2020 release of his Papa Hoodlum single “Streets of Laredo (Duet With My Father),” Boucharde told the Reader “After my dad passed away this summer, I took an old recording of him into the studio and turned it into a duet. It’s the B-side of a single I just recorded called ‘Bullets,’ about guns and gun violence in America. Both will be available in wide release. The timing was interesting, I was all set to record the single, and my father died.”

“I’d always wanted to do something with that song. I’m heading into the studio to record a song about gun violence, and here’s this decades-old recording of my dad singing a century-old cowboy ballad of a man’s dying words after being gunned down in the street. It felt very fitting to release them together.”

During the Covid shutdown, Boucharde could be found staging Sunday concerts from his porch for his entire appreciative neighborhood, and donating all pandemic performance tips to struggling musicians. He is survived by a daughter named Suraya and a sister.