How Clarence Carter taught me to dig deeper

Clarence Carter, who passed away at age ninety last week, is my favorite soul singer of all time. The blind Alabama man’s deep baritone, wild tales of love and infidelity, and iconic laugh were unlike anyone else’s. I’ve always had a soft spot for soul music. My first favorite band was Earth, Wind & Fire; my mom kept one of their greatest hits CDs on constant rotation in the car when I was young, and the two of us saw them at the Concord Pavilion in the Bay Area when I was in first grade. It was my first-ever concert, and I knew every word to all their biggest songs, dancing up a storm while standing on my seat. I was a crowd favorite in our section, she said.

Still, I never looked much deeper than those songs you’d hear on the radio: the ones that felt ubiquitous, like they’d existed forever. “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding, “Respect” by Aretha Franklin, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, “Let’s Stay Together” by Al Green. The songs everyone knew, even if they didn’t seek them out on purpose. And while I spent much of high school starting to soak up as much music as possible, exploring the deepest cuts I could find, much of that was limited to rock music—specifically the sort of bands I’d find flipping through NME, from the indie bands of the day through the Britpop groups of the Nineties. 

It wasn’t until I joined my college radio station in Berkeley that I started to apply that same energy toward other genres. KALX forced every DJ to play at least three different genres during each show. They called it the “Grandma Rule,” meaning that your grandma has to be able to tell the genres apart for them to count as different. Nothing inspired me to expand my musical palette more than that. The station had about one hundred thousand physical albums in one room, including thousands of old soul vinyl records that the station had been collecting since it was founded back in 1962. Because I had at least some experience with soul music, that was where I went first.

I’m not entirely sure how I came across Clarence Carter first, but two things happened relatively simultaneously. Like most people my age, the first Clarence Carter song I probably heard was “Strokin.’” Carter, who rose to fame in the late Sixties, released the novelty single in 1986, presumably as a way to regain some sort of relevance. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably heard it; it’s laughably horny and genuinely one of the funniest songs ever written. He was fifty years old when it came out, and it became a cult classic. Each line is infinitely quotable: “Well, let me ask you this / Have you ever made love in the back seat of a car? / I remember one time I made love on the back seat of a car / And the police came and shined his light on me, and I said: / “I’m strokin’, that’s what I’m doin’, I be strokin.’”

My college friends and I became obsessed with the song from the moment we first heard it—we were college-aged guys, after all. “Strokin’” went quadruple-platinum in our house. You’d probably hear someone scream “CLARENCE CARTER, CLARENCE CARTER, CLARENCE CARTER, OOOOOOOOOOH SHIIIIIIIT CLARENCE CARTER” at least a couple times a day.

At around the same time, my roommate Mike made me a soul playlist of artists I should check out for my radio show, and Clarence Carter was all over it—specifically, tracks from his 1992 twenty-one-song compilation, Snatching It Back: The Best of Clarence Carter. “Strokin’” was nowhere to be found, but in its place were some of the best songs I’d ever heard. While there were some tracks that seemed vaguely familiar—the immortal “Slip Away” from the Almost Famous soundtrack, the raunchy “Back Door Santa” sampled on Run DMC’s “Christmas in Hollis,” the horns on “Looking for a Fox” that sounded similar to Sam & Dave’s “Hold On, I’m Comin’”—it was the deeper cuts that caught my attention. Driven by breezy guitar tones and Carter’s commanding baritone, songs like “Soul Deep,” “The Feeling Is Right,” “I Can’t Leave Your Love Alone,” “It’s All in Your Mind,” and “Too Weak to Fight” instantly blew me away, quickly becoming some of my all-time favorites. Some of those songs even made it on the cocktail hour playlist I made for my wedding last year.

That compilation completely opened my eyes to a genre I already knew but had never scratched beneath the surface of. Suddenly, I was digging far deeper into the KALX vinyl archives, going down Wikipedia rabbit holes and scrambling to find obscure compilations (there was a Hi Records boxset in particular that was huge for me at the time). Fifteen years later, I still haven’t stopped. 

While finding the rare Marvin Gaye cover or Ann Peebles deep cut is always a fun surprise, it’s the smaller acts that I’ve grown most fond of. The Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose, for instance—“It’s Too Late To Turn Back Now” is one of the best songs ever written, but “I’m Never Gonna Be Alone Anymore” is every bit as good. I throw Tyrone Davis’ “Can I Change My Mind” on whenever I’m walking around my neighborhood on perfect spring days (that album also features a great cover of Clarence Carter’s “Slip Away”). “You and Me” by Penny & the Quarters was even the penultimate song that played before I walked down the aisle last year.

This soul obsession also helped me keep in touch with my friend Harrison, who lived three thousand miles away on the other side of the country. He keeps a running playlist called “MEGA Soul” of every great soul deep cut he finds it’s—it’s now over eighteen hours long—and I’d send him submissions if I ever found anything missing. I discovered incredible tracks like “But It’s Alright” by J.J. Jackson or Prince Conley’s “All the Way” through that playlist.

I’m not much of a vinyl collector, but I do have a solid collection of old soul records. And it’s no wonder that the first record I ever bought was Sixty Minutes with Clarence Carter, an album not on Spotify. I still think track one on side two, “Next To You,” is Clarence Carter’s best song, and it’s always the first thing I play when I’m unsure what I want to listen to. My goal is still to find every Clarence Carter album on vinyl, and I picked one up just four days before he passed away.

Unsurprisingly, all of this led to Charles Bradley. Since I was born in the early Nineties and wasn’t really into soul music until the 2010s, I never got to see any of the aforementioned artists live (except, of course, for Earth, Wind & Fire as a kid). But all of a sudden, I felt like I had my chance. After moving to New York in 2014, I saw him countless times. I never got to see James Brown, but I did get to see the Screaming Eagle of Soul, my favorite live act to this day. I eventually walked down the aisle to his song “Victim of Love.”

I’m not sure I’d be writing these words right now if I hadn’t gone to his Brooklyn Bowl show put on by Paste in 2015, where I met a lot of the music team. As I grew as a music journalist, Charles Bradley—a personal hero of mine, someone who taught me to truly never give up—became my number-one interview target. I actually got the go-ahead from Paste to write a story detailing his comeback from cancer. He was never healthy enough to sit down for an interview, and he died in September 2017.

A couple years later, now on staff at Paste, I decided to try and track down Clarence Carter himself, learning my lesson from Charles Bradley’s passing that these guys wouldn’t be around forever, and that once they’re gone, their stories are, too. I wanted to hear about what it was like recording at Muscle Shoals; why he thought “Strokin’” blew up the way it did; how he chose songs like “Do What You Gotta Do,” “Harper Valley PTA” and “Let It Be” to cover; and what he thought of artists like Tyrone Davis covering his own songs.

But most of all, I wanted to somehow hear him break out that boisterous laugh; I wanted to thank him for being my gateway into this world of music that predated my own life by decades. He hadn’t done interviews in years, and it quickly became clear that tracking him down would be near-impossible. I couldn’t find any managers, publicists, or booking agents to contact, so as a last-ditch effort, I called every venue he had played over the past twenty or so years. Eventually, I was connected with his wife. I got her on the phone for maybe thirty seconds before the call was disconnected. She never picked up again.

Now he’s gone, and all those tales I was hoping he’d tell me are gone, too. But we still have his music, and maybe some twenty-year-old will stumble upon that same compilation like I did all those years ago, and maybe some of those deep cuts will have as big an impact on them as they did for me. I never got to say it to him over the phone, but I guess now is better than never: Thank you for everything, Clarence. I wouldn’t be here without you.

Steven Edelstone is the former album reviews editor at Paste, currently a senior editor at Law360, and has written for the New York Times, Billboard, Entertainment Weekly and more. He will always order lox on a bagel.

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