“I REFUSE TO BE ABUSED”: CANDI STATON & VETERAN AFRICAN AMERICAN VOICES IN LONDON
January finally got underway musically when several US blues and soul veterans arrived in the Smoke.
I like Candi.
This past Monday night Candi Staton was on Radio 2’s Blues show. Candi has crossed many musical genres during her more than 70 years of professional singing – she’s 85 in March and started out as a child gospel performer – but I’d never really thought of her as ‘blues’.
Then again, when I consider what she has lived through – brutal segregation in Alabama, bad marriages (she said 5 husbands on Radio 2, but I think its closer to 7), being exploited by her church leader as a child singer with the Jewel Gospel trio, then fleeced by unscrupulous individuals in the music industry – Staton has experienced the blues like few of us do. “I refuse to be abused,” she stated with force on Radio 2, which is good to hear because Candi’s suffered far too much abuse.
Indeed, when Blues show host Cerys Matthews played Candi’s huge 1976 disco hit Young Hearts Run Free, then asked Staton what memories it stirred, she replied “sad ones. Its about a bad relationship.” So it is – the song’s infectious rhythm and uplifting arrangement covering for the lyrical lament. Consider how bleak this opening verse is:
“What's the sense in sharing
This one and only life?
Endin' up just another lost and lonely wife
You'll count up the years
And they will be filled with tears
Love only breaks up to start over again
You'll get the babies, but you won't have your man
While he is busy loving every woman that he can, uh-huh”
That’s the bad marriage blues and Candi certainly know them too well – when I interviewed her in 2013 she swore she would never get married again, even noting how one of her many marriages wasn’t real “as he drugged me to make me marry him”. Well, since then she has got married again in 2017. I hope this time she’s found a good guy. Oh, Dave Crawford, who wrote and produced Young Hearts, also worked with Jackie Moore, B.B. King, Linda Lyndell (to name a few), before being murdered in mysterious circumstances in 1988 aged 45. Another reason for Candi to sing the blues.
Staton has often sung sad songs – her voice can convey an ache like few others. The title track of her 2006 album His Hands was written by Will Oldham for Candi and it concerns domestic violence (Oldham had heard her discuss suffering such on a cable TV show she hosted in Alabama for several years). Its a slow, stark song – the music doesn’t cover the lyric’s ominous narrative here – and when I saw Candi sing it on stage at the Jazz Cafe in 2006 she wept. As did her daughter, who was singing backing vocals. I refuse to be abused. Indeed.
Staton’s His Hands contains a hugely powerful performance. Its also a song she quickly stopped performing. During our interview I asked her why, considering it is a show stopper that stands far above the Elvis and BeeGee covers she often employed to fill her live set with. Candi replied that His Hands was a sad song. Adding how people don’t come to see her for sad songs. Well, some of us did.
What a hugely impressive – and moving – performance this is.
Candi retired from performing in 2023 – I saw her (apparently) final ever performance at Love Supreme Festival that summer and it was sad. Not in the sense Staton sang sad songs so making me blue. Nor sad because Candi was retiring and she is one of my favourite vocalists, no. Instead it was sad due to Staton having intensely performed across the UK in the tour building up to Love Supreme (so to fill her pension pot), and this had worn her voice out.
Candi’s main market has long been the UK – as so often happens, Americans’ have forgotten the great artists who walk amongst them - so the summer 2023 dates were a way of her saying goodbye and making a dash for cash. I’ve seen Staton sing many times, some performances having been amongst the finest I’ve ever witnessed from any artist (and the slighter ones – when she focused on bashing out the disco hits – were still fun), so to watch her wave goodbye with a croaky voice and encouraging all her band members to play solos so to cover for her inability to sing, well, it gave me the blues. But these were nothing like the blues that Candi knows.
Anyway, Staton’s Radio 2 interview is masterful, easily the best radio I have heard in many months. Why? Because the interviewer is Cerys Matthews, the finest music broadcaster working on British radio – Cerys loves the music she plays and engages with such joy (and her voice is gorgeous, a Welsh flecked caress) – and Candi and Cerys connected. This meant Candi opened up and spoke from the heart, amongst other things reflecting on learning to sing in a church where the music was so powerful “they had a gospel disco floor!” That’s the kind of religion I could get into.
Here’s Candi circa 1970, recording with Rick Hall at FAME studio in Muscle Shoals. The directness and unflinching way she sings this kiss off song… what a master soul singer.
Staton also spoke about her bad marriages and the brutal, racist society she grew up in. Hearing her detail how, as a child, the KKK would regularly terrorise her Alabama neighbourhood - “castrating Black men or beating them to death” - meant she and her sister were instructed to hide under their bed (“I grew up with fear… fear!”).
Talk about being stopped in my tracks - this was an interview like few others. “I won’t stop speaking about this,” said Staton with real force, surely furious at Monday’s inauguration in DC of a cabal of corrupt, wealthy thugs whose beliefs aren’t too dissimilar to the KKK terrorists she feared as a child.
Candi has a new album Back To My Roots (her 32nd) forthcoming in February. On Radio 2 she swore that it is her last: the first single I Missed The Target Again is available on streaming services and the kind of tough, gospel flecked soul-blues Candi sings like no one else. Go Candi!
Listen to Cerys interview Candi here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0026ws2
I suggest everyone listen to the above linked interview – then share it with others. There is wisdom and lived experience here: when the likes of Candi Staton leave the stage they won’t be replaced, the artistry and gospel/country roots which imbues their music is no longer found in younger generations. Their talents were shaped by a different America, so value the beauty and majesty they shared with us.
Sugarray Rayford: a singer in need of a soul band.
Speaking of soul-blues, I went to see Sugaray Rayford at 229 Great Portland Street on Sunday night. I’d never seen Rayford sing before and must admit to being largely ignorant of his music, he being of a generation of African American singers who learnt their craft in the 80s and 90s, a time when the interest in soul largely focused on retro white acts (Blues Brothers/Commitments) while contemporary African American music focused on rap or very smooooooth, highly produced singers like Luther Vandross and Anita Baker.
This ensured that singers like Rayford remained in the South working the chitlin’ circuit (the name given to a loosely linked collection of Black clubs that booked the traditional soul and blues artists). The music that singers like Rayford sang across the Black South got tagged “soul-blues”: even though it was far more R&B oriented than the12-bar blues where guitar is often prominent, there was a sense that the likes of Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland and Johnny Taylor were ‘blues’ singers. Thinking about it, if Candi had continued working the Black US club circuit she would have ended up back where she started - on the chitlin’ circuit singing alongside other R&B veterans and the likes of Sugaray. That she has a loyal (and lucrative) European audience meant she avoided the grind this involves.
The King of soul-blues has long been Bobby Rush, a remarkable performer and one, who in recent years, has finally broken through to a white audience (I interviewed Rush prior to his breakthrough at the Mississippi Blues Festival in 2005 – here he was playing to an almost entirely Black audience).