CPI Archive 2009: Though best known for a series of disco super-hits in the ‘70s and ‘80s, deep in her soul, Candi Staton has always been a gospel singer. Andrew Hamilton finds out why.
Montgomery, Alabama, 1955 - the civil rights movement simmers slowly under the surface as racial tensions begins to erupt on all sides. Yet in this cauldron of hate and fear some of the most influential music of the last hundred years is forged. Candi Staton was just 11-years-old when the boycotts began in Alabama and North Carolina. She and her sister Maggie were plucked, quite literally, from the cotton fields and whisked off for a career in music. Once free from the confines of rural Alabama, the last thing that she wanted to do was go back. “As a child I had limited knowledge in terms of music. We didn’t have any TV, we had radio back in the day when I was growing up in Alabama and my parents let me listen to three stations - the gospel station, the rhythm and blues station and the country station,” she says. “My knowledge of music was so little that my desire to sing had to be a gift from inside of me - it’s something that God put there. So I could listen to the radio and try to sing like the people who I heard and that’s how I got started. I was singing all the time and that is how I got invited to sing in church and to become a professional singer. It was so exciting - the rural part of Alabama was so boring so when we got to move around and sing in different places it was just amazing. Singing was the most exciting thing that I could ever think to do so we just got better and better at it because we didn’t want it to stop. “We got more and more invitations to sing because we thought if we didn’t we’d have to go back into the cotton fields with my father and we did not want to do that.” Throughout her mammoth career Candi Staton has produced 19 albums covering soul, R&B and disco. But, no matter what she was singing, her heart was always with her humble roots and gospel music. “It was always the foundation. It’s what I started with, it’s what I heard around the house, it’s what my mother used to sing to me,” says Candi. “I remember Bobby Womack and I used to do shows together. He was raised pretty much the same way as me and he had a little boys gospel group and I had a little girls gospel group. We would look at each across the church in the old days, make eyes with each other and mess with each other. So years later when we would get ready for tours, Bobby and I would sing gospel before we would get on the stage to sing R&B. It was just something in us that wanted to come out.”
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