PLEDGE WEEK: “Dark End of the Street” by James Carr
Andrew Hickey
This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week I’m posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey ? Transcript A quick note before I…
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A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week I’m posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey ?

Transcript

A quick note before I start, this episode deals with severe mental illness and lung cancer, so if that might be likely to upset you, you might want to check the transcript before or instead of listening.

There used to be a record shop in Manchester city centre called Beatin’ Rhythm — the shop still exists but now it’s in a suburb that’s basically impossible for me to get to. And for several years it was where I would go to find records I’d otherwise only read about — it specialised in classic soul records, but it also had good selections of sunshine pop, psychedelia, freakbeat and other such genres. It was the kind of record shop that caters to people who are serious about their music, not to the casual audience, and particularly in the years before you could find stuff easily online it was crucial in expanding my musical knowledge. It was the kind of place where I’d pick up collections by people I’ve mentioned in the podcast like Curt Boettcher, and people who have been too obscure to mention, like Keith Colley.

That kind of record shop is used to people coming in and picking up weird and obscure records, and so only once in all my many trips to that shop did a member of staff ever comment on my purchases. When I bought a James Carr collection, the clerk looked at me and said approvingly “Oh, *good* choice. You’ll like that.”

I say this to make something clear. Sometimes in these bonus episodes, I’m talking about artists that many of my listeners haven’t heard of, and they get confused why I’m talking about them at all. And in some cases, like today, I’m talking about people where there’s a very limited amount of information. The sum total of text written about James Carr probably comes to no more than twenty thousand or so words, scattered over a handful of not-very in-depth articles, and so this is going to be one of the shorter Patreon episodes, closer to the ten minutes I promise at the end of main episodes than to the fifty minutes of some recent ones. He’s not someone who comes up in discussions in the way that people like Otis Redding or Aretha Franklin do, but among people who are interested in the soul music of the sixties he is considered peerless, and gets spoken about with awe the way few others do.

Many soul singers had nicknames bestowed on them — “the Godfather of Soul”, “the Queen of Soul”, and so on. James Carr was known as “the World’s Greatest Soul singer”. He was not, by all accounts, a particularly dynamic live performer. He wasn’t someone who could do intense dance moves or would fall to his knees dripping with sweat. He was just, as far as anyone who heard him was concerned, the best soul singer in the world:

[Excerpt: James Carr, “The Dark End of the Street”]

There’s very little information about James Carr, and what little information there is seems filled with errors. He seems to have sung with various gospel groups as a young man, but nobody seems sure on which ones — his entry in the Faber Companion to 20th Century Popular Music says he was in the Soul Stirrers, but I can’t find any confirmation of that in anything about the Soul Stirrers, and other sources say that that was made up by his manager Roosevelt Jamison. There are also claims that he was in one of the several gospel groups that used the name “Harmony Echoes”, and that seems more plausible as Jamison was associated with one of those.

But we know very little of Carr’s life until he met up with Jamison and another singer, O.V. Wright. Wright was the lead singer of one of these Harmony Echoes groups, and Jamison was a medical technician at a blood bank — which sounds like it should not be a path to great success in the music industry, but the blood bank was on Beale Street, and Jamison would let bands use the space to rehearse when it wasn’t open.

Jamison became the manager of both Wright and Carr, and after speaking to Jim Stewart at Stax Records, who apparently couldn’t use then, he took them to see Quinton Claunch. Claunch was a country songwriter and producer who had been an associate of Sam Phillips — he played on a lot of Sun sessions in 1955 and 56, including with Carl Perkins, with whom he also co-wrote songs, like “Sure to Fall”, which the two co-wrote with fiddle player Bill Cantrell:

[Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Sure to Fall”]

That was later covered by the Beatles as a regular part of their live show, and was also covered by Ringo Starr on a solo album. Claunch had been inspired by Phillips to start his own label, Hi Records, and that label would go on to be an important one in the seventies, but early on Claunch had been forced out of the label by his partners, and had spent a few years running a hardware store before starting a new label, Goldwax, whicDoh was just starting up when Jamison came to him in early 1964.

Claunch immediately agreed to sign Jamison’s two acts, but Goldwax’s initial focus was on Wright. They put out a single by Wright, “That’s How Strong My Love is”, written by Jamison:

[Excerpt: O.V. Wright, “That’s How Strong My Love Is”]

That became a classic of soul music, and was covered by both Otis Redding and the Rolling Stones, but Wright soon parted from Jamison and Claunch, because he’d been signed to Peacock Records as a gospel singer, and Don Robey pointed out that his contract was still valid. So Goldwax started to concentrate on James Carr. Luckily for Goldwax, Carr was the man that many consider the greatest soul singer of all time.

Carr’s first single, “You Don’t Want Me”, is a good track, but doesn’t show off his abilities particularly well, and wasn’t successful — it’s very clearly influenced by Ray Charles and by James Brown’s early hits, but it was the kind of record that would have been a massive hit in 1958 or 1959, but sounded outdated in 1964:

[Excerpt: James Carr, “You Don’t Want Me”]

He kept releasing unsuccessful singles for another two years before finally hitting on what would become his trademark style, and that came thanks to O.B. McClinton.

McClinton was a Black man who was at the time trying to make a career as a country singer. He would later have some success — his 1972 album Obie From Senatobie, a play on “Okie From Muskogee” and the town of Senatobia, Mississippi, where he was born, had two country top forty hits on it — but at the time he was struggling in much the same way as Carr was. He had released a few singles at that point, one of which, “Tradin’ Stamps”, was a novelty song written by Claunch, released under the name “Oboe”:

[Excerpt: Oboe, “Tradin’ Stamps”]

McClinton was a superb country songwriter, and Carr started recording country songs written by McClinton. We’ve talked in the main podcast in recent episodes about Gram Parsons’ idea of “Cosmic American Music” blending soul and country, but of course a lot of soul musicians were already doing just that, and Carr’s version of McClinton’s “You’ve Got My Mind Messed Up” — a song that’s basically a rewrite of “That’s How Strong My Love Is” — became Carr’s first and biggest hit, making number seven on the R&B charts (though like all of his records it didn’t do anything on the pop charts:

[Excerpt: James Carr, “You’ve Got My Mind Messed Up”]

Over the next few years, Carr recorded a series of country-flavoured soul classics, all of them from the perspective of someone suffering terribly, and all of them minor R&B hits that made no impression on the pop charts, like “Pouring Water on a Drowning Man” later in 1966:

[Excerpt: James Carr, “Pouring Water on a Drowning Man”]

and another song by Wright, “A Man Needs a Woman”, in 1968:

[Excerpt: James Carr, “A Man Needs a Woman”]

But the track by which he became best known was written by Dan Penn and Chips Moman. The two were at a DJ convention in Nashville, and had an idea for a song. They asked Claunch if they could use his hotel room to write it in, and Claunch said yes — so long as they were writing a song for James Carr. They wrote it in half an hour, and Carr had one of the great classic records of all time, his second and final R&B top ten hit:

[Excerpt: James Carr, “The Dark End of the Street”]

Since its release in 1967 that song has been covered by hundreds, possibly thousands, of people, including hugely influential artists like Elvis Costello, Richard and Linda Thompson, Frank Black and the Eels. The Flying Burrito Brothers covered it on The Gilded Palace of Sin. Every singer’s singer has had a go at it, across all genres — Roy Hamilton, Porter Waggoner and Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Aretha Franklin, Diamanda Galas, and many more.

And yet when Dan Penn recorded a live album with Spooner Oldham in 1999 he introduced the song by saying “People ask me what my favourite version is, as if there were any version other than James Carr’s.”

[Excerpt: James Carr, “The Dark End of the Street”]

But around the time he recorded that, things started to go wrong for Carr. He was never the most mentally stable of people, and he was also someone it was easy to take advantage of — he had no formal education and was illiterate, and had to memorise his lyrics by rote.

Everyone involved in his story presents themselves as attempting to protect him — and they may well have been trying to, in their own minds — but after he was taken on by Otis Redding’s manager Phil Walden, who promised to make him bigger than Redding, his career started to flounder. According to Jamison, months after Carr signed with Walden, he turned up outside Jamison’s door standing in the snow and saying “‘Man, I kept looking for you and looking for you, where you been so long?” — he would apparently still think of Jamison as his manager and would regularly phone him when he got lost at airports or just needed someone to look after him.

And he did need someone to look after him. He had always been an introverted, quiet, person, but after he was introduced to cannabis he became severely mentally ill — he seems to have been one of that very small unlucky group of people who have a bad reaction to psychoactive drugs, and it seems to have triggered real problems for him. He’s been described as having bipolar disorder by those who knew him, but whether that was an actual diagnosis or just them latching on to a term they’d heard I don’t know.

But by 1969 and his last sessions for Goldwax, Carr was apparently nearly catatonic, and would sit in the studio just staring into space for three hours while Claunch begged him to do anything at all — before suddenly turning in a perfect vocal performance, as on his version of the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody”, recorded at Muscle Shoals with Duane Allman on guitar:

[Excerpt: James Carr, “To Love Somebody”]

Carr was the only act on Goldwax to have any success, and with his own problems getting worse the label eventually folded. He signed to Atlantic, but only released one single. He spent much of the 1970s in and out of mental hospital, and didn’t release anything between 1970 and 1977, when he put out one single on a tiny label which appears never to have released anything else at all, but which showed that he still had his voice:

[Excerpt: James Carr, “Let Me Be Right (Don’t Want to Be Wrong)”]

That tiny label was owned by Jamison, who by this point was Carr’s manager again, and Jamison arranged a tour of Japan for Carr — a tour that came to an ignominious end when on one show Carr just stood on stage and didn’t sing at all. For the next few years Carr would live with his sister — by all accounts, he was capable of functioning so long as someone else was looking after him, and his sister took charge of his life. He also got marrried at some point and had children, but by the mid-eighties that marriage was well and truly over. There’s a terribly depressing interview — I believe the only recorded audio interview with him — from the mid-eighties where he talks to the DJ Andy Kershaw about how he’s thinking of remarrying his ex-wife.

That interview was to promote a compilation of his sixties classics, and that compilation, along with the near-simultaneous publication of Peter Guralnick’s history of the genre, Sweet Soul Music, turned Carr from a marginal,forgotten figure into someone who was regarded by lovers of Southern soul as the greatest singer in the genre’s history.

Claunch relaunched Goldwax records, and Carr recorded two further albums for the new version of his old label. Those albums are not great — the backing tracks have all the worst production faults of the late eighties and early nineties — and sound cheap, but the voice is still there:

[Excerpt: James Carr, “Soul Survivor”]

The music journalist Robert Gordon was present for some of those sessions, and he talked in his articles about how Carr’s performances had to sometimes be pieced together line by line, as he often didn’t know what he was singing, and Gordon seems to have felt that there was a lot of ambiguity as to the motives of Claunch and his associates. They seem to have been telling themselves that they were helping Carr possibly finally achieve the success he deserved, but also to possibly have seen him as someone who was easily manipulable and a potential goldmine.

Carr’s mental problems continued to be as bad as ever though — he was able to function when medicated, but part of his condition involved him simply forgetting to take his medication — and Claunch soon left the company again and Carr’s brief return to having a career ended.

His reputation continued to grow — Barney Hoskyns’ book Say it One Time for the Broken-Hearted, a study of the links between country and soul music, like Guralnick’s book before it, positioned Carr as a central figure — but he largely gave up performing, especially after 1997, when he had a lung removed after a diagnosis of lung cancer. That seemed to make his mental health have a turn for the worse, and his sister had him committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he remained until being transferred to a nursing home shortly before his death from cancer in 2001.

James Carr had a heartbreakingly sad life, one that was even sadder than the protagonists of the songs he sang so well. But in the songs he recorded between 1964 and 1970, he left behind an untouchable legacy — one that’s unforgettable to those who have heard it at all.