The Voice Behind His Hands
There are southern soul voices and there are southern soul voices. Raw and
ravaged, Candi Staton's is one of the signature sounds
of the genre. It's
a voice with a tear in it, the cry of a woman wounded by life, by men, by woes
turned inwards.
On her new album His Hands for Honest Jons/Astralwerks,
it's also the voice
of a gospel singer returning to the music that first made her name: the country
soul songs presented by the same labels on the 2004 compilation Candi
Staton,
twenty-six tracks of Muscle Shoals magic.
"I hadn't done that type of music in so long," says the woman
who over 20 years ago went back to the church in the darkest hours of alcoholism. "I
just closed my eyes and began to get off into it. I missed it, I honestly did.
I missed singing those love songs, because my life doesn't just consist
of the church."
For those who regard Candi's Muscle Shoals recordings as a high-watermark
of country soul, her return to the secular side comes as a blessed relief. Two
decades plus of spreading the Word through her Beracah ministry led many to assume
she would never again sing songs of love and pain - let alone record songs
written by Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, Charlie Rich and even Will "Bonnie
Prince Billy" Oldham.
Written by Americana maverick Oldham, the title track of "His Hands" will
go down as one of the bravest, most chilling performances of Candi's career.
Asked by producer Mark Nevers to write a song for the album, Oldham penned a
distillation of Staton's traumatic experiences as an abused and terrified
wife.
"It's kind of a gospel song and it's kind of not," says
Staton. "It ends up pointing you to the Redeemer, but it starts out telling
you about a normal, natural man and what he would do to you in an abusive situation.
I enjoyed singing that because it's so much like my life. I've lived
through every line of that song." When Nevers played the finished version
to him over the phone, Candi's performance reduced Oldham to tears.
The idea of making a new secular Staton album took shape after the release of
Candi Staton. Mark Ainley, who'd overseen the compilation, talked to Candi
about his plans after a show at London's Jazz Café. "We didn't
want to strain after the old sound, but we didn't want a contemporary R&B
record either - something more open but still authentic," he says. "I'd
worried about it for ages but that night I talked to Candi about Mark Nevers
and his home studio, the Beech House, a few hours from her place in Atlanta.
Mark's a founding member of Lambchop and Will Oldham's producer,
so it's not really Candi's world, but right away she was up for trying
something, that's her nature."
"Mark's place was very nice, very calm," says Staton. "He
has every room in his house rigged for recording, so as I'm going in I'm
thinking, ‘Where's the studio?' He's like, ‘You're
in it'. So I just made myself at home."
Work began in Nashville in June 2005, employing an intriguing crew of musicians,
including various Lambchoppers, Candi's son Marcus
Williams on drums and
daughter Cassandra Hightower on backing vocals, and Muscle Shoals legend Barry
Beckett (coming out of retirement to participate) on the trusty Hammond B3 organ.
Staton hadn't seen Beckett since those legendary sessions at the FAME studio.
Barry had been a core part of the Muscle Shoals unit assembled by producer Rick
Hall, playing on such classic Candi tracks as ‘I'd Rather Be an Old
Man's Sweetheart' and ‘I'm Just a Prisoner (Of Your Good
Lovin')'.
"I hadn't seen Barry in thirty years, not since we'd done our
last record with Rick," says Staton. "He says his fingers aren't
as fast as they used to be, but he still has his little fills. It was such a
blessing seeing him."
Aretha Franklin's abortive 1967 visit to FAME had produced both ‘Do
Right Woman' and ‘I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)',
paving the way for a succession of Chess soul sisters who came to the Shoals
to get the Rick Hall treatment: Etta James, Laura Lee, Irma Thomas and more.
But if Staton followed in their footsteps she was clear about being her own woman. "When
I was a child I was very adamant about not sounding like anyone else," she
says. "When everybody else was trying to sound like Aretha I tried not
to sound like her. I wanted to have my own style."
There was a pleading urgency, and vulnerability, in Staton's FAME sides
that not even James or Lee ever quite touched. Whether taking a bluesy leaf out
of Aretha's ‘Chain of Fools' on ‘I'm Just a Prisoner',
funking up country staples such as ‘Stand By Your Man' and ‘He
Called Me Baby', or just tearing the innards out of the harrowing ‘Heart
on a String' and ‘You Don't Love Me No More', Staton
never gave less than her all in the studio. "In my mind I've never
forgotten any of those songs," she says.
Candi's most famous recording came about several years after she left Muscle
Shoals. Following producer Dave Crawford out to California, she made her third
marriage ‑ to Tyrone Davis' former promoter, and commenced a period
of domestic misery and abuse (not her first). Crawford's song ‘Young
Hearts Run Free' was inspired by the painful stories that Candi told him
about life with James.
"We would sit down and I would tell him the horrors I was going through
in the marriage I was trying to get out of," Staton remembers. "I
would bring David incidents, and little did I know he was making mental notes
and writing all that stuff down." A masterpiece of marital grief - "You
count up the years/And they will be filled with tears" - ‘Young
Hearts' also placed Staton in the middle of the disco outbreak of 1976.
The following year she recorded the Bee Gees' ‘Nights on Broadway'.
By the early ‘80s Staton was in limbo, and drinking heavily. "I had
such low self-esteem when I started in the entertainment world," she says. "I
had no one in my family to show me any confidence. Alcohol enabled me to get
out there in front of all those people and sing. I couldn't even think
of going onstage without being at least a third drunk."
She was also coming to terms with the patterns of abuse and subjugation in her
life, tracing them back to the experience of growing up with an alcoholic father. "Your
real role model is not an artist or an entertainer, it's your parents," she
reflects. "And what you see them do, usually it comes down through the
generations. I saw how my father would drink and abuse my mother and they would
fight all the time. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew it wasn't right,
but you pick those same kind of men. I've married the same man over and
over again. He just looked different and wore different clothes."
In 1982 Staton saw the light, and knew she had to quit drinking. "I had
allowed alcohol to take my life over," she says. "I was destroying
everything in my body. One day I just went cold turkey and said, ‘I'm
not gonna do this anymore'." Instead she returned to the church of
her childhood, forsaking soul music for the gospel of her formative years. In
time she established her own ministry and television show. How, one wonders,
will the gospel faithful view her reconciliation with secular music on His Hands?
"There will be some religious folk that will come against me, and even
maybe some DJs," Staton says. "They'll be disappointed maybe
that I'm singing love songs. But I call them life songs. Just because you
go to church you're not alienated from life."
A third wind in Staton's secular career came in 1991 when club act The
Source sampled a gospel track she had recorded for comedian Dick Gregory. ‘You
Got The Love' has twice been a UK hit for Staton, giving her a whole new
profile on this side of the Atlantic. "When the song didn't happen
in America, I thought, ‘Oh well, another one bites the dust'," she
admits. "And then I got a call from London saying the song was on the charts.
The good thing was, they couldn't pay me so they gave me half the publishing!"
Staton has the publishing on four of the songs on His Hands, all of them concerned
with the sorrows of love gone wrong. "‘It's Not Easy Letting
Go' was about my son, whose wife just one day walked off and left him with
two kids," Candi says. "I realized it's not easy letting go,
even of someone who's treated you so bad. ‘I'll Sing A Love
Song To You' is about somebody who had a crush on somebody that didn't
know they had a crush on them. ‘How Do I Get Over You' came from
me watching a movie one night. ‘In Name Only' is about watching people
in church that were having difficulties with their husbands or wives, and they
were just sitting up there in the church in name only. You knew them as a couple,
but they weren't really a couple anymore."
Pooling her compositions with the other, sometimes hard-fought nominations, Staton
set to work at the Beech House. The results, arranged simply with room for her
voice to stretch out, feel like a musical rebirth.
"At first I thought, ‘What kind of record is this?', but the
more I listened to it the more I began to love it," Staton says. "Mark
is not your everyday producer, but you get the whole feeling with him. I've
always believed that less is more in the studio. Let the artist sing the song
and just give enough instrumentation to make it sound good." Only Nevers' use
of such unorthodox effects as the "underwater violin" (in her words)
was disconcerting.
"She came back after I'd done some overdubs," Nevers recalls. "I
had some of my space stuff up too loud and she said, ‘What's all
the woo-woo and the wang-wang?!' I said, ‘It's not gonna be
that loud, don't worry'. I think I kind of freaked her out a bit."
The use of pedal steel, played by Patti Loveless sideman Pete Finney, also threw
Staton. Unlike those of Bettye Swann, another Shoals country-soul queen, Staton's
FAME sides held back from employing that emblematic Nashville instrument. "I
thought she had had steel guitar on her records before," says Nevers, "but
it turned out she never had. So that kind of freaked her out too!"
The only real stipulation Staton made, though, was refusing to sing the kinds
of cheatin' song she specialized in at FAME: ‘Sure As Sin', ‘Mr
And Mrs Untrue', ‘Another Man's Woman, Another Woman's
Man'. "I couldn't do that," Candi says. "I've
been hurt too badly in that area, and I have feelings for wives, and about women
who go around singing ‘I'm gonna take your man'."
With His Hands, Candi Staton breaks your heart without resorting to songs about
adultery. Mark Nevers for one will never forget the experience. "Having
that kind of voice in this house, my God!" he exclaims. "She just
slayed us."
Candi Staton "The Sweetheart of Gospel"
Before disco caught on and Candi Staton became known for the #1 dance smash
"Young Hearts Run Free," she had begun her career in the stellar Jewel Gospel
Trio in the 1950's. After her big run as a secular star in the 1970's,
she returned to her gospel roots in 1982. Since then, she has developed a reputation
as a Charismatic praise and worship leader, a sensitive psalmist and the person
who first infused gospel with funk through her "gospco" songs such
as "Dance" and "Sing A Song" which merged disco rhythms
with gospel lyrics. However, Candi is equally known for her sweet ballads such
as "Sin Doesn't Live Here Anymore" and "Mama" as
she is for her more high-energy material. Whatever she does is sweet and that's
why she's called the Sweetheart of Soul.
Candi is currently in the studio working on her first gospel cd since 2002's "Proverbs
31 Woman" which featured the smash radio singles "Hallelujah Anyway" and
the bluesy "When There's Nothing Left but God." In the summer
of 2006, Shanachie Records will release all of Candi's best-known gospel
hits on a specially priced thirty-song 2- CD set that is tentatively entitled, "The
Best: Candi Staton's Gospel Hits." The project will feature all of
Candi's classics such as "Mama" and "The First Face I
Want to See." It will also include four brand new songs and previously
unreleased material such as her rendition of Marvin Gaye's "What's
Going On?" and a club remix of "Hallelujah Anyway."
Born Canzetta Maria Staton in Hanceville, Alabama, Candi was a farming family.
When they weren't harvesting crops or picking
cotton, they were in church. As a child, Staton sang in the choir."The crowds would get very emotional," she recalls. "At the
time I didn't really know why they were crying so much…Once I remember,
the audience got so emotional, throwing their pocket books at my feet and so
on, that I got really scared and ran off to my mother." Staton's
farther was a hard drinker and a little prodigious with his money. Mrs. Staton
took the kids and moved the Cleveland where her oldest son lived. His wife took
them to her church, which was pastured by Bishop Jewel and asked if the Staton
kids could sing a song. They sang every song they had ever heard that night and
for the first time, a band backed them. Impressed by their obvious talent, Jewel
asked Candi (then ten years old) and her older sister, Maggie, to sing with her
group. She added Naomi Harrison to the line-up and they became the "Jewel Gospel Trio".
The trio was an immediate hit with the church audiences. They recorded several
singles for Nashboro Records such as "I Looked Down the Line (And I Wondered)" and "Too
Late." The trio toured extensively, even overseas spots such as the Philippines.
They appeared on bills with the Staple Singers, the Soul Stirrers, and Aretha
Franklin among others. Mavis Staples remembers, "Canzetta was something.
I remember at one place in Shreveport the stage was real high. Back then, gospel
singers liked to go out into the aisles and work the crowd up. Well, that stage
was so high that none of the guys tried to jump down there that night; but Canzetta
sure ‘nuff jumped down there and got them worked up."
When she came of age, Candi left the group. "We were taken advantage
of and I left because of the misuse," she says. Instead of pursuing a career,
Candi pursued marriage and motherhood. However, after seven years of matrimony,
she had grown tired of her husband's jealousy and physical abuse. So when
her minister made a pass at her, she just snapped. "I said forget you,
forget church, and forget everybody. I'm through with God. Bye! And I said, ‘I'm
gonna sing the blues,' just like that." The big break soon followed.
Her brother had dared her to sing on amateur night at the 27/28 Club in Birmingham.
She went up and sang "Do Right Woman" and won a booking to open for
Clarence Carter, her future husband. He liked her and asked her to open for him
on the road.
After hooking up with Clarence, Candi enjoyed smash Top 10 R&B hits such
as "I'd Rather Be An Old Man's Sweetheart (Than To Be A Young
Man's Fool)", "Sweet Feeling," "Stand By Your Man," "He
Called Me Baby," "Mr. & Mrs. Untrue," "Too Hurt To
Cry" and "In The Ghetto"
which won a Grammy nomination and a personal letter of praise from Elvis Presley.
After 1976, Candi became a princess in the disco field with hits like "Young
Hearts Run Free," "Victim," "Nights On Broadway" and "When
You Wake Up Tomorrow."
After a series of personal traumas, Staton became a born-again Christian in
1982. Her initial gospel album "Make Me An Instrument"
peaked at #7 on the Billboard gospel charts and garnered her third Grammy Award
nomination. In the intervening years, she recorded a dozen other gospel albums
and hosted the Trinity Broadcasting Network
(TBN) weekly series "Say Yes" (originally "New Direction")
from 1986 to 2004.
In 1991 Candi became the British dance rage as a bootleg of a song she recorded
in 1986 entitled "You Got The Love" was remixed and became a Top
Ten British hit and sold two million copies. The song was reissued in both 1997
and 2006 and charted in the British Top Ten again each time. After witnessing
so many divorces in the church, Staton decided to go into the studio and record
a relationship music cd entitled "His Hands" (Astralwerks/Honest
Jons) that was released in spring 2006. "In the church we sometimes focus
so much on the spiritual things that we neglect the natural things," Staton
says."That's not balance. While we're eon earth, we have to take
care of our spouses and our kids and be there for them. We can't be in
worship all day or we won't be doing what God has called us to do, so that
project talks about issues that everyone goes through - including Christians.
The songs point to things that you should see as signs of a problem in your relationships.
I know some in the church still won't understand it, but I have Biblical
scriptures to back me up and if they want to argue with scriptures, that's
their
choice." The gospel according to Candi Staton and the Bible.
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