O soul de Candi Staton

Her voice hushed and broken with emotion, Candi Staton leans towards me in the lounge of a London hotel and croons a few lines of a break-up ballad she wrote for her new album Life Happens. “Were you kissing someone else’s lips, looking in her eyes?/ Were you making love to me the moment that made you realise?/ Where were you, when you knew?”

The original American disco diva is 74 now, with the cracks and warps of vintage vinyl in her voice. But the bittersweet core of heartbreak that cut through her 1976 smash Young Hearts Run Free is instantly recognisable. The look of fierce conviction she fixes on me during the hour we spend together wavers as she retreats from the public encounter and into the personal pain of the song.

There’s a long pause after she stops singing. Then she rallies back into interview mode: “Aretha [Franklin] emailed to tell me that’s her favourite track on the record. It’s a heavy song. I cried, oh I cried, when I recorded it. 12/12/12: that was the date of my last divorce.”

Staton says she was born with the ability “to put a sad lyric across”. But when it comes to the deep sorrow expressed on this record, she says that “I’ve lived it all from the bottom to the top”. Her most recent divorce (from former Atlanta Braves baseball star Otis Nixon) is her fifth, though she prefers to call it her fourth, because she says her 1974-77 marriage to promoter Jimmy James “was bogus. He put something in my coffee and dragged me downtown to a justice of the peace. I woke up the next day married to a psychopath.”

She was born Canzetta Maria Staton, in Hanceville, Alabama, in 1940. Her father was an alcoholic and her mother never paid her much attention. But when she was five years old a neighbour overheard her singing and encouraged her to perform at the local Baptist church. Later she joined the Jewell Gospel Trio touring the Fifties gospel circuit with Sam Cooke’s Soul Stirrers and Mahalia Jackson.

Apparently there’s “a story” behind her departure from the trio in 1968 but Staton is saving it for her autobiography. Today, she’ll only tell me about being “stuck back home with my momma in a country town with dirt roads and no wheels”. Then along came husband number one: Joe Williams. “He came rolling in with a car and hamburgers and milkshakes … all the things I craved. But of course he wanted something in return. Suddenly I was 18 and pregnant.

“My mom said, ‘I’m not gonna raise your baby.’ So there I was. Married. The abuse started almost immediately. It was physical and mental. He didn’t like other men looking at me. They did look, though, and I bore the brunt of that.”

Staton had given birth to four children (three boys and a girl) as Williams’s “baby machine” by the time she was 22. She was desperate for a way out. Her family raised money for her to study nursing – “a lifelong ambition” – but while singing in the local clubs she met husband number two: charismatic blues singer Clarence Carter.

“People asked why I married a blind man,” she says. “After Joe, I wanted a man who couldn’t see other men looking. And I gotta hand it to him, Clarence really did a great thing for my career. He was very patient and he taught me how to command the stage.

“He told me, ‘You’re not in church, so you don’t look up no more, you look AT.’ ”

^{The Jewell Gospel Trio with Staton on the left}

Carter introduced Staton to producer Rick Hall, then forging the revolutionary rock/gospel/country/blues blend of southern soul at his wooden-framed Fame studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. In 1967 Franklin had recorded I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You) there.

Staton leaned into one of his mics in 1968 and delivered her mighty solo debut: I’d Rather Be an Old Man’s Sweetheart (Than a Young Man’s Fool): all strut, funk and hands-on-hips attitude. Hall (who also produced Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Etta James and Otis Redding around this time) believed a rasp was the key to authenticity, so he would work Staton until her throat was raw. In return she turned out a heart-rending soul version of Tammy Wynette’s Stand by Your Man and a cover of In the Ghetto that moved Elvis to write to her expressing his admiration. Ray Charles said she was his female counterpart.

But back home things got rocky. “Clarence was cheating. When he came home from touring to see me in the hospital, a few days after our son was born, I saw a used airline ticket for Mr and Mrs Clarence Carter in his briefcase. Come to find out he was dating his opening act. I had given her gowns to wear on stage. I cooked dinner for her at my table. She’d even taken an overdose of sleeping pills on the road because he’d cheated on her with somebody else!”

She poured the pain into the disco hits she recorded after their split. The new, glittery grooves “were my way out of the hell of the chitlin circuit [the loop of venues across America that welcomed black artists]. Suddenly I was the hottest thing going.” And that made her prey for James. “He was charming enough at first, but after the bogus marriage he pimped my voice. He told me he would kill me, kill my kids if I left him. I was terrified.”

Producer David Crawford wrote the lyrics to Young Hearts around her experience with James (“Say I wanna leave a thousand times a day/ It’s easier said than done, when I just can’t break away”) and though he was often in the crowd, he never twigged. When she finally left him, her label hired Michael Jackson’s security guard to protect her. She was also drinking so much by this point that she fell off the stage a couple of times.

Marriage number four, to Harvard-educated drummer John Sussewell, saw her sober up and quit the world of secular music for gospel and Christian TV. Her 20 years in gospel yielded two Grammy nominations and the massive 1991 UK hit You Got the Love. “I had respect and people knew my name. I thought I would never record secular music again,” she says. But then her marriage soured (“he shut himself in his room with cocaine and pornography”) and the gospel scene “got judgmental. The white stations said my sound was too white, the black stations thought it was too white.”

Her return to secular soul has been received with open arms in the UK, but her fellow Americans have had more trouble shifting her into another pigeonhole. “I live there, I work here,” she smiles. Things were looking rosy until her fifth marriage went sour: “Two weeks after I said ‘I do’ I knew it was over.”

A few months after Staton’s marriage to Nixon collapsed, police found a crack pipe in his car and he was implicated in a particularly cruel fraud in which he allegedly scammed prisoners’ relatives out of thousands of dollars by promising he could win the prisoners early parole – for a fee. He was busted by a TV reporter wearing a wire. “He walked out that door into six cameras,” she says with satisfaction.

Meantime, Staton was back where it all began: at Hall’s Fame studio making Life Happens. “Rick’s still a perfectionist,” she says. “But I’m a mature woman now: when I knew I’d done a song as well as I could I told him to zip it.” A few weaker melodies keep the record just shy of great, but Staton’s lyric-writing and delivery are compelling. The finest ballad – about Nixon – pivots on an elegant, old-school chorus: “We were so busy saying goodbye/ I never even had the chance to cry.”

Staton says she won’t marry again: she’s pouring the love into her music from now on. “They say music won’t bring me flowers and chocolates. I say: ‘Wanna bet? It’s gonna bring me flowers and chocolates and furs and cars and houses.’ I’ve had enough of being tolerated. I’m ready to be celebrated.”

Life Happens (MRI) is out now