Shanachie Releases Candi Staton Gospel Hits Collection

The “contemporary/praise party” disc highlights Candi’s dance-oriented gospel recordings and other contemporary styles she helped pioneer. “Dance Dance Dance,” a fan favorite and frequent concert closer from 1994, illustrates the style she dubbed “gospco”, a fusion of gospel and disco. But truth be told, Candi had been putting funk bass lines in her music since the early Eighties, much to the dismay of traditional gospel audiences. “Let’s just face it,” she says, “I was ahead of my time. They almost tried to run me out of the church with those contemporary albums back in the 1980s.

Those songs seem tame now but at the time they were scandalous just because of the instruments we used and urban styling of the songs. There was no Kirk Franklin and Be Be & CeCe Winans at that time, so I really helped blaze that trail for contemporary music in the black church.”

Another notable track on the “contemporary” CD is the original 1986 version of “You Got The Love,” a song that has been a UK chart hit no less than three times in various re-mixed versions. One version was featured in the final episode of Sex In The City. The original version is included here for the first time on CD. Other highlights include the contemporary jazz-flavored “When I See The Blood” which equates the shielding blood of Jewish Passover with the redemptive blood of the Crucifixion, as well as three brand new tracks, including a new dance-oriented mix of her 2002 gospel radio hit “Hallelujah Anyway.”

Candi Staton was born in 1940s Hanceville, Alabama and was church-bred. She was featured singing in church at age five, then sang with her sister, Maggie, in the Four Echoes, a local gospel group. At thirteen she made her recording debut with the Jewel Gospel Trio, which appeared on bills with such stars as Mahalia Jackson, The Staples Singers, Sam Cooke & The Soul Stirrers and more. She married young and spent most of the 1960s as a disgruntled housewife with four children and sometime church organist, until she left her abusive husband. Her break came when R & B hit-maker and future husband Clarence Carter took her on the road as his opening act and got her a deal with Rick Hall’s Muscle Shoals label Fame Records. Beginning in 1969 she enjoyed a string of Top Ten R & B hits including “I’d Rather Be An Old Man’s Sweetheart (Than A Young One’s Fool)”, the Grammy-nominated “Stand By Your Man” and “In The Ghetto, and “Sweet Feeling.” Joining Warner Brothers Records, she successfully made the transition into the disco era with such soulful club hits as “Young Hearts Run Free” (a #1 R & B hit and worldwide dance anthem), “Victim” and “When You Wake Up Tomorrow.”

Get this from:

Email This Article     Print This Article