05/14/2026
Singer Clarence Carter brought together elements of country and the blues in his music. With humility, he once declared, “I just took a country, hillbilly type of music and crossed it with the blues—that’s where my old thing comes from.”
Carter, who died May 13 at the age of ninety, said he particularly studied blues guitarists John Lee Ho**er, Jimmy Reed, and Lightnin’ Hopkins, and singers including Washboard Sam and Johnny Ace. He built on that base over the course of a six-decade career.
Raised in a sharecropper family in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1936, Carter was blind at birth. He attended the Alabama School for the Deaf and Blind in Talladega, where he learned to play piano. At Alabama State University, he studied music and transcribed compositions in braille, while playing clubs at night. Teaming with blind singer and pianist Calvin Scott in the early 1960s to form the C&C Boys, Carter recorded a handful of singles. A session at FAME Studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, got the attention of producer Rick Hall who recorded Carter singing his song “Tell Daddy,” a solo hit in 1967 that got Carter a deal with Atlantic records.
What followed was a string of Southern soul classics. In 1968 he released his first album and earned his first gold record with a track from it, the hit “Slip Away.” A year later Carter had a hit with “Too Weak to Fight,” and then in 1970 came the song he’s probably most associated with, “Patches.” The song was found on an album from soul band Chairmen of the Board. Carter had mixed feelings about it, resisting the simplistic picture it drew of a poor southern Black man. But when he sang it he went all in, with an unforgettable vocal performance that registered as soul-baring biography. Audiences at his shows wondered how a blind man could have raised chickens and chopped wood on a farm. “It was my idea to make the song sound real natural—I guess I tried a little too hard for some people!” he explained.
He married singer Candi Staton in 1970 and brought her to FAME. They divorced in 1973. Deceptively light-hearted, Carter was deeply attentive in the studio. Duane Allman called him “the most amazingly perceptive man I ever met.” He could scream, but his throaty, chuckled “huh” carried as much force. When Southern soul faded from the charts, Carter signed with indie blues label Ichiban, where he enjoyed one last hit: the lewd “Strokin’” from 1986. A record this salacious couldn’t get played on mainstream radio, but via jukeboxes, frat parties, and college radio DJs, “Strokin'” would be a song fans demanded for the rest of Carter’s performing career. It also was featured in Eddie Murphy's 1996 film "The Nutty Professor."
Carter’s life and music inform the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s current special exhibit “Muscle Shoals: Low Rhythm Rising.”
