They were married for 32 years before his death in 2002. “‘If she doesn’t, we’re gonna have a problem.’” What she did return home with was Curtis Amy, Charles’s musical director and Clayton’s future husband. “‘She will come back here the way she left,’” Clayton remembers her mother telling Charles. She walked out with a contract for her parents to sign. Her family friend, the keyboardist and future Beatles collaborator Billy Preston, had already landed the job playing organ in the group and hurried Clayton in for a rehearsal. While her work with Darin didn’t lead to the pop success that they had hoped, it helped usher Clayton to her next big gig: joining the touring band for the R&B superstar Ray Charles. And then you have to correct her homework.’ So here’s poor Bobby Darin correcting homework.” When you pick her up from school, she has to take a nap so that she can be refreshed. The only hurdle was getting permission from Clayton’s mother. From the first take, he was blown away by the volume and power of Clayton’s voice and immediately wanted to sign her to a contract. She fell in with a group of other vocalists and with them landed her first recording session in 1962 at the age of 14, backing the pop star Bobby Darin. Photograph: Getty ImagesĬlayton’s career got underway after her family moved to Los Angeles. Merry Clayton (rear left) in 1965 as one of the Raelettes, Ray Charles’s backing singers. “I would lean up against her and take a little nap because I would have been up since seven o’clock that morning.” “I would always find my way to nestle up right up under Mahalia wherever she was sitting,” says Clayton. Jackson, a friend of Clayton’s minister father, would frequent the parish when she visited New Orleans. From as early as the age of six, she was a star of the church choir, earning the nickname Little Haley for her mimicry of Mahalia Jackson, the pre-eminent gospel singer of the time.
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The devotional tone of Beautiful Scars brings Clayton full circle from where she started singing: at the New Zion Baptist church in New Orleans.
“It was the closest recording situation that I’ve ever been in that was totally pure love,” Clayton says. Working with her longtime friend, the famed producer Lou Adler, she slowly put together her new album, Beautiful Scars, a collection of throwback R&B and modern gospel that includes the Martin-penned Love Is a Mighty River and the defiant title track written by Diane Warren, the stellar pop songwriter known for power ballads recorded by LeAnn Rimes, Aerosmith and more.
Listen to Merry Clayton sing Touch the Hem of His Garment from her new album, Beautiful ScarsĬoldplay’s Chris Martin returned the favour when Clayton returned to the studio.
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