R.I.P. Clarence Carter: Southern soul star dead at 90

Soul legend Clarence Carter, whose songs were as poignant as they were cheeky, has died. The news was confirmed by Rodney Hall, president of FAME Studios in Alabama’s Muscle Shoals—a favorite recording studio of Carter’s—after he spoke to Carter’s ex-wife, singer Candi Staton. While battling stage 4 prostate cancer, Carter developed pneumonia and sepsis. He was 90 years old.

Carter was born blind in Montgomery, Alabama in 1936. He began his professional music career with friend and fellow soul singer Calvin Scott; in 1962, the two signed to Duke Records as the C & C Boys. Four years later, Scott was injured in a car accident, and Carter began a solo career that would prove far more lucrative after a dispute over hospital costs. In 1967, Carter penned “Tell Daddy,” an R&B chart hit that would inspire Etta James’s responsive “Tell Mama,” which reached the top 30 in the United States. Carter joined Atlantic Records and began charting regularly with records like “Too Weak to Fight” and “Slip Away,” the latter hitting #6 on the Hot 100 that year. The songs, both about love and sin, seamlessly blended the impish and the earnest into one compelling shape. 1968’s bawdy Christmas number “Back Door Santa” further raised Carter’s national profile. In 1970, he married backup singer Candi Stanton; the two had a son, Clarence Carter, Jr., before divorcing in 1973.

Carter’s records from the late 1960s and early 1970s—including 1968’s This Is Clarence Carter, 1969’s Testifyin’, and 1970’s Patches—remained his most influential. “Patches,” the titular song from that record, earned Carter a Grammy in 1971. The song, written by Chairmen of the Board’s General Johnson and Ron Dunbar, is a soulful callback to life as the son of an Alabama farmer, and the pressures the singer faced as the family’s eldest boy. “I think ‘Patches’ really etched me into the music world, where people are probably going to remember me for a long time to come,” he said in a 2010 interview. “Which I always wanted—but I never knew it would happen that way.”

With the rise of disco in the mid-1970s, Carter’s raunchy soul tunes faded into relative obscurity. His newer work, like the tongue-in-cheek “Strokin’,” was deemed too risqué for radio play at the time, though it now enjoys a cult following after appearing in Eddie Murphy’s The Nutty Professor and William Friedkin’s Killer Joe.

Carter had another son, Herbert Deon Wilkerson, in 1981, and signed to Ichiban Records in 1985. Though he never again reached the heights of fame he achieved in the early Seventies, Carter continued making music well into his eighties. Mr. Old School, his last record, was released in January 2020 on his own label, and in 2024, he released his last song, “Danger Point,” as a single.

Carter will be remembered by fans for his wit, his playfulness, and his dedication to his craft. “Music is my life and it has been good to me,” Carter said in an interview with NME in the 1970s, soon after he’d achieved success on the UK charts. “Since I lost my sight, music has not only entertained me and earned me my livelihood, but it has been a tremendous comfort to me. When I’m down and feeling low, I just get out my guitar and sing.”

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