“I was raised country,” Candi Staton laughs, her words flowing in a girlish drawl. The soul stylist and onetime disco diva was brought up in Hanceville, Ala. (current population 2,951), where, she explains, “We heard country ‘fore we heard anything else.”
It was the beginning of a long personal journey that took Staton from gospel music (singing with the Jewell Gospel Trio as a teenager) to hardcore Southern soul, and eventually to club stardom in the wake of her 1976 dance hit, “Young Hearts Run Free.” After years of struggling in the soul music world, disco felt like a payoff.
“During the time that we were doing the soul-type songs, we didn’t go into nice clubs for that. It was basically the chitlin’ circuit. No dressing rooms, compact mirrors you got to bring yourself. Your body is so tired, and then they don’t want to pay you anything. And if they do pay you, sometimes you got to chase the promoter, just to get paid. The rest of the night you’re trying to find him! I had an opportunity to feel like a real star when ‘Young Hearts Run Free’ came out. We were invited to nice clubs—Studio 54. We had our own dressing rooms with our names. I was like, ‘Wow, I don’t want this to go away. I want to keep doing this.’”
The charm wore off, though, and by the early ’80s Staton had grown sick of the alcohol and drugs, the constant partying. For the next 20 years she performed gospel music almost exclusively, until she began hearing the secular calling once again. Her new CD, His Hands, is her first non-gospel recording in years, and it’s a stunner. On songs like “It’s Not Easy Letting Go,” her soulful, honeyed voice seems to wash each line in teardrops.
“I wrote that behind my son. He was going through a divorce, and I was going through a divorce as well. I was kind of glad to get out of mine, but he was really taking it hard. His wife just up one day and walked out, and left him with two small children. It almost destroyed him. I was just sitting there one day watching him, and I just began to write that song: ‘It’s not easy letting go, when you love somebody so.’”
She speaks in a low whisper, the words packed with a lifetime of pain, of learning things the hard way. Staton’s abusive relationships have been widely chronicled, and if she sings with such conviction it’s because she’s been there.
“I call them life songs. These are songs that we’ve lived, and we’ve experienced. I was in secular music for about 20 years, and then I was in gospel for 22 years. Now I’m doing everything.”
For Staton, honesty is what counts, and categories don’t matter. “As long as I’m singing the truth.”
August 9. Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (at Bowery), 212-533-2111; 8, $25.
