Candi Staton will always remember September 15, 1963.
The singer, then aged 23, was visiting Birmingham for Sunday mass when the horror struck. A few blocks away, a Baptist church had just been attacked by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Spectacular explosion of 19 sticks of dynamite killing four young girls and injuring dozens.
“It was our bloody Sunday,” says Mme Staton, who will be performing on September 29 at the Rialto as part of the Pop Montréal festival. “The riots started in the streets. I was with my two boys. It’s become too dangerous. We had to leave the city. »
For 60 years, the soul singer kept this significant episode in the back of her mind. But she just brought it back to life in a new song, 1963where she recounts the tragedy in detail.
I believe the Lord wanted me to tell this story at some point. It came back to me like it was yesterday. I cried the whole time while recording it.
Candi Staton, about September 15, 1963
The piece, bordering on documentary, contrasts with the apparent carelessness of the songs that made Candi Staton’s reputation. Soul singer, then disco, then pop, then gospel, the unforgettable interpreter of Young Hearts Run Free (1976) is more readily associated with dance floors than with committed singing. But this image – necessarily reductive – is only one facet of a fairly profound body of work, which includes around thirty albums over a 70-year career.
“Run, be free”
Born in Alabama in 1940, in the midst of a segregationist period, Candi Staton took off as a gospel singer in churches. In the mid-1950s, she recorded for small labels and toured the Deep South American with current stars like The Soul Stirrers and Mahalia Jackson. Her harsh voice led her instinctively towards soul music and she recorded her first solo album in 1969 before having an international soul-disco hit in 1976 with Young Hearts Run Freea song about the difficult relationship she was experiencing at the time.
“ Young Hearts was inspired by my relationship, she said. I wanted to leave him, but he threatened me. I was afraid of him all the time. It was the story of my life. This song was advice for young people. I told them: run, be free, don’t do like me! »
Young Hearts Run Free connaît par ailleurs une seconde vie en 1997, grâce à un remix house de la chanteuse Kym Mazelle. Cette version remet Candi Staton au goût du jour, tout comme les reprises successives de la chanson You Got the Love par The Source (1997) et Florence and the Machine (2009).
Ces succès, du reste, contrastent avec une vie personnelle passablement compliquée. Entre déboires conjugaux, maris abusifs, divorces à répétition (cinq !) et vie de mère seule, Mme Staton peut en effet se vanter d’en avoir bavé. Mais elle ne s’en plaint pas. Car ce sont les souffrances, dit-elle, qui font les meilleures chanteuses soul.
Pour la première fois depuis 1977
Candi Staton ne cache pas, non plus, avoir été flouée sur le plan professionnel, alors que des maisons de disques se sont enrichies sur son dos.
« Aux jeunes qui me demandent conseil, je dis toujours : lisez bien le contrat ! Les trois premières pages, ils vous donnent tout. Les trois pages suivantes, ils reprennent tout ! Personnellement, ça m’a pris des années avant de pouvoir repayer Warner [sa maison de disques entre 1974 et 1980]. »
PHOTO PROVIDED BY POP MONTRÉAL
Candi Staton, in 1976
The limousine rides, the Dom Perignon, all those parties they threw: I didn’t realize at first that I was the one paying for all that. In the end I owed them hundreds of thousands of dollars and I didn’t know it…
Candi Staton, on the Warner record company
The singer will eventually get rid of this bad contract with the valuable help of a lawyer. But she regrets having struggled so much to repay her debts and does not deny having extended her career on stage to be able to honor them.
On this subject, she is clear, it will indeed be her last tour. “I’m going to be 84 years old. It’s time, I don’t want to die on the road,” says the woman who can’t wait to spend the rest of her life with her children, her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren.
OK, but not without a final visit to Montreal where, incidentally, the singer has not been since 1977, in full disco glory. An eternity, but she remembers it like it was yesterday.
“After the concert, this young girl came to see me in my dressing room. She put her head on my lap and said thank you for Young Hearts Run Free. She told me it freed her and stopped her from getting involved with the wrong boy… I wonder what became of her. It would be nice if she came to see me again on Friday, after the concert…”
Candi Staton, Janette King and ThatHonestGuy, Friday, September 29, 8 p.m., at the Rialto Theater