“I was fighting for my life” Candi Staton, 2006
What is Candi Staton doing on Valentine’s Day? With hindsight, it seems an indiscreet question to level at a single 65 year-old woman. But such is Staton’s easy nature that the thought simply doesn’t occur — either to her or to myself. Scanning her mental calendar, she realises she’ll be doing a show in Gateshead. Should you be so inclined, it’s a scenario from which you could easily wring a little pathos. On a day for lovers, there’s something poignant about the thought of Staton dusting down hits from her canon — say, 1976’s Young Hearts Run Free or her Southern soul reading of Suspicious Minds — which once served as life lessons she had yet to truly learn.
But, whatever Candi Staton has been through in the past, it’s pretty clear that the last thing she needs is pity. Not now, at any rate. As Lonely Don’t — a standout country soul gem from her new album Who’s Hurtin’ Now — puts it, “Lonely don’t get drunk and fight/Lonely don’t get drunk and fight/And lonely don’t let me down.” At a swish Marble Arch hotel, the button-like eyes that once gazed beseechingly from her first publicity shots radiate quiet indomitability. Visiting American entertainers have a habit of claiming that Britain holds a special place in their affections, but Staton has more reason to mean it than most. Since its release in 1991, more than one generation of clubbers have abandoned their inhibitions to her performance on The Source’s remixes of You Got The Love — a UK top ten hit three times in the past eighteen years.
But to many of those fans, the depth of Staton’s achievements only truly became apparent in 2004, when Honest Jons — the West London label co-owned by Damon Albarn — anthologised her early 1970s work at Alabama’s legendary Muscle Shoals studios. If those songs had her singing the blues, then by all accounts, Staton had a lot of blues to sing. “I was fighting for my life,” she says, when describing the circumstances of her first break, a decade previously. Aged 17, performing with the Jewel Gospel Singers, the young singer had already run away from Alabama to Los Angeles, where singer Lou Rawls proposed to her — only for the couple’s plans to be thwarted by Rawls’ mother, who thought Staton ought to get herself an education.
What may have been intended as sensible advice was effectively a prison sentence for Staton. By 1967, Rawls scored his first R&B number one with Love Is A Hurtin’ Thing. But back in Alabama, Staton was in no position to appreciate the irony. She was stuck in an abusive marriage with Joe Williams, the son of a Pentecostal minister and their four children. “I had gotten myself in this… situation,” she recalls, “I had surrounded myself with these strict religious people. They didn’t believe in make-up. You had to wear long sleeves. It was like what we now see in some Middle Eastern countries.”
Far from exaggerating, Staton carries a ready supply of memories to illustrate the point. She describes the irate father-in-law marching over to her house after Staton’s baby son had let slip that they had acquired a television. “My father-in-law called it the devil box,” she recalls, “He said, ‘You have to make a choice. Either you get rid of the television or I’m going to have to put you out of the church.” Staton called his bluff and, before the entire congregation, found herself ejected from the church which had served as her last remaining musical outlet.
Smarting from the humiliation, she agreed when her brother asked her to accompany her to a local club, with a view to performing a song there. Doing so merely inflamed the paranoia of an already abusive husband. Accused by Williams of having an affair with a local DJ, she fled. “If you’re being accused of going off and doing things that you haven’t done, then it’s not like you’ve got anything to lose anyway.” Her escape route came in the form of blind soul singer Clarence Carter. He procured her a contract with Rick Hall’s FAME label, whose Muscle Shoals studios had paid host to Aretha Franklin’s original recording of Do Right Woman.
By the time Staton had recorded He Called Me Baby, Evidence and the other singles that formed the bedrock of her early reputation, her gratitude to Carter had spilt over into something else altogether. Not content with having four children to care for, one wonders how Staton confronted the prospect of settling down with a blind husband. Far from being deterred, she claims “it was a blessing.” How, exactly? “Well, you’ve got to remember,” she laughs, “that I had just left this guy who kept accusing me. Clarence though — he didn’t accuse me of looking at anybody else ’cause he couldn’t see who I was looking at. Hahaha! I could stare as much as I liked!!”
Before long, however, Staton realised that her second marriage was no more sustainable than her first. When Carter’s philandering thrust her into the arms of her next husband — a promoter called Jimmy James, who she has since characterised as “a pimp and a hustler” — her life reached an all-time low. Staton has sung her British number two hit Young Hearts Run Free thousands of times, but every time she does so, the emotions are all too real. “Say I wanna leave a thousand times a day/It’s easier said than done when I just can’t break away,” went the words — written for her by producer Dave Crawford when she confessed her woes to him. She says that James routinely threatened to have her killed if she ever left him. At concerts he would stand in the crowd, gazing proprietorially at her — yet seemingly oblivious to the fact that she was singing about him.
Given the turmoil detailed in so many of her songs, it’s no surprise that Staton came to rely on alcohol as an emotional anaesthetic to get her through a show. But by the end of the 70s, her life had unraveled. James left, but once again, she repeated the patterns of her previous three marriages — a template, she says, established by childhood memories of her own alcoholic father.
In 1982, at the end of a three day session spent drinking black label Johnnie Walker and soda, Staton caught herself in the mirror and failed to recognise what she saw. Electing to turn her life around there and then, she put her faith in God to “give me a better life” and she believes He reciprocated. If Staton never sang another secular song again, it would — given what she had been through — had made a certain sort of sense. For a time, she says that she lay the blame for “every cigarette… every glass of wine and champagne, the cocaine I snorted” on the music. All of it seemed part and parcel of a life that was making her unhappy.
As is often the case with singers that swap one life for another, Staton had no idea about the cult that had built up around her early work. Having spent the last 28 years close to the Atlanta Ministry where she shored up her faith, she found it easy to dismiss the success of You Got The Love as an aberration because she was baffled by the digital cocoon in which The Source had placed Staton’s vocal (originally recorded for a US dieting supplement infomercial).
The acclaim meted out to the Honest Jons reissue of her early work, however, prompted more complicated emotions. Critical consensus may have decreed these some of her finest recordings, but these were the songs which saw producer Rick Hall getting her to sing the same vocal 50 times in order to give her voice the raw, hoarse quality listeners liked to equate with soulfulness. Even once they were recorded, Staton would then be faced with the job of hawking those same songs around the deep South’s notorious Chitlin Circuit — toilets for dressing rooms, gangster-run clubs and drunken, demanding audiences.
But in 2004, at Camden’s Jazz Café, a sober Staton played her first gig in 22 years and found, to her surprise, that her old songs sounded all the more poignant for the autobiographical weight they carried. It was with this thought in mind that she recorded the songs which, in 2005, comprised His Hands — her first non-religious album in 25 years. Just as Dave Crawford once alchemised her private travails to create Young Hearts Run Free, the stunning title track of His Hands saw Will Oldham draw on the same sadness to create something closer to her legendary FAME cuts. “When he was happy,” sang Staton, “Ooh, goodness me/And when he was scared/Oh Lord, he would scare me.” Producer Mark Nevers says that when Oldham heard what Staton had done with the song, he was reduced to tears.
On Who’s Hurtin’ Now, the passing years have conferred on her timbre the same grainy quality that she used to have to sing herself hoarse to attain 40 years previously. With improbably moving results, one song, Dust On Your Pillow, addresses the fallout that Viagra has wreaked upon married couples of a certain age. “I was in a restaurant in Atlanta one time, and I got talking to this woman. I told her I had been divorced, and she told me she was going through the same thing. Her husband had started dressin’ up and dying his hair, buying perfume, smelling good. At first she thought it was all for her, but then it turns out he had gotten Viagra and fallen for a younger woman.”
Times have changed, though Staton says she has no reason to believe that men have. Is there still the potential for being proved wrong? Say she awakes in her Gateshead hotel room to find a Valentine from an anonymous admirer? She smiles inscrutably. “Would there be a number?” There could be. “Well, I might call and say hello. Hahahah!”
This is an unabridged version of an article that appeared in The Times in 2005.