1971: Stand By Your Man - Candi Staton

Freedom is just beyond the door

The other week I got a couple of early morning phone calls from numbers I didn’t recognise, so, naturally, I let them ring out. On both occasions, I received a voicemail from someone from the BBC asking if I’d be interested in coming on to their radio shows that weekend to chat about A Complete Unknown, and about Bob Dylan.

Of course I did, so I phoned back straight away and a few days later ended up talking on air first with Justin Dealey and then later on with Alice Hopkins about the film, and about Dylan more generally. One of the questions was on the topic of how I got into Bob in the first place, and especially at such a young age (around 10 or 11). Anyone who has read my book on Bob Dylan will know I have my uncle to thank for this life-long obsession, but as I told Justin Dealey the other week, my uncle had been introducing me to great music long before he ever pulled Bringing It All Back Home off the shelf.

Before Bob, he’d given me the gift of Sam & Dave and Ray Charles, the gift of Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham. He’d given me the treasures of Tony Joe White and the hidden gems of Eddie Hinton. He gave me Ann Peebles and Ann Stexton and The Staple Singers and The Chairmen of the Board and Wilson Pickett and Bill Withers. He introduced me to the magic of Millie Jackson and Nina Simone and Otis Redding. Albert King and Bobby Womack and Clarence Carter and countless others, too.

Thanks to my uncle’s excellent teachings, excellent record collection and excellent recommendations, my life has been enriched by so much soulful, meaningful and magical music. Not only did he set me off on the path of discovering Dylan - and all of my adventures in New York, Rome, Memphis, Tokyo and beyond that have come with being a Bob fan - but he has given me the broader soundtrack to my whole life, as well.

One of the best albums and singers he ever turned me on to was Candi Staton and her 1971 record Stand By Your Man.

Like everything produced by Rick Hall at FAME Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals, the album sounds fantastic. There is such warmth and depth in the sound here, such fine balance between all the instruments and the portraits they are painting. There is so much going on, so much ebb and flow, but nothing ever sounds out of place or out of line. There is such an extraordinary balance between the tender, gut-wrenching ballads and the raunchier, funkier, more upbeat numbers.

Everywhere on the album, the instrumentation and playing tells the story of the songs even without the words. You don’t need to hear the lyrics to know what each song is about. You can feel every emotion that wrenches through the string sections and brass lines in Mr. and Mrs. Untrue. The piano plays its notes on your heart in every song and the drumming - especially on Too Hurt to Cry - is out of this world, almost too good to be conceivable. It's barely believable. But even though the album would still stand up as an all time great as an instrumental suite, you’d be missing out on the very best part of the record without the incredible singing here delivered by Candi Staton.

Her voice is warm and deep and rich and sonorous and sensual. She alternates between a heavenly sweetness, a cracked and weighty, earthy fragility and a strong, heavy, real and truthful power. She is soulful, she is touching and tender and exciting and dangerous and broken and brave and honest and mighty.

This is an incredibly mature record. It’s an album about desire and about being hurt but putting on a brave face and standing up to your pain, and the people who inflicted it on you. It’s an album of strength and frailty. It’s an album of conflict - inner and external. Should she stay or should she go? Even she doesn't know up until the very last moment. It’s about life and it's about death, and maybe it's about even more than that, as well. It’s an album about desire, love and lust and losing and losing and winning again right at the death. It’s an album about mending a broken heart and trying again and letting you know that you had a good thing going, but you lost it for a cheap fix and pale imitation.

Candi Staton had been introduced to Rick Hall by her soon-to-be-husband Clarence Carter some years earlier. Hall had liked her so much that he tried to sign her to a recording contract on the spot, but she already had a deal with Unity Records. Staton tried to break her contract with that label, who hadn’t really done anything to push her or advance her career, but they wouldn’t budge without compensation, even when she claimed that she was quitting the industry and retiring altogether. Eventually, Carter paid Unity the $1,500 they were demanding and so she was free to sign with Hall.

If anyone knew how to get the most out of a southern soul singer like Candi Staton, it was Rick Hall. They were a match made in heaven, which is something that probably can’t be said about Staton and Clarence Carter (although, by all accounts, he was far from her worst husband). Though he supplied guitar across the album, and helped her write the lyrics to the song Sweet Feeling, it could well be his infidelity against her that allows Staton to sing with such raw, honest heartbreak on songs like How Can I Put out the Flame (When You Keep the Fire Burning), Mr. and Mrs. Untrue, Too Hurt to Cry and which gives such emphasis to I’m Just a Prisoner (Of Your Good Lovin’).

That last song, I’m Just a Prisoner, opens with a heartbeat like drum pattern which momentarily recalls Be My Baby, The Ronnettes classic from not-quite-ten years earlier. A soul song from a more innocent time, a soul song from a girl-group singing with wild abandon about the joys of young love, and love everlasting. In contrast, I’m Just a Prisoner highlights all the youthful naivety in that earlier lyric. The love is still there, but it’s come at quite a cost.

The title track Stand By Your Man had been released as a single in 1970 and went all the way up to Number 4 in the R&B charts, so it was a natural choice to open the album. A lot can change in a year, though, just like a lot can change over the course of ten songs and over the course of thirty-one glorious minutes and twenty-one seconds.

This song is a clear signal of solidarity, a cry to Stand By Your Man. You’ll have bad times whilst he’s off out having good times, and sure, he’ll leave you lonely and hurt you. But you love him, so what can you do? Well, this album goes on from there to explore that very question. Like a great, well structured play, it doesn’t just tell you how the action unfolds over the course of the relationship and how it would make you feel, but it shows in uncomfortable detail, and makes you feel every ounce of emotion that Candi Staton is singing with. It explores all the tangled, complex and contrasting feelings of what it means to stand by your unfaithful man, what it means for you and your soul to put yourself second and ignore your own wants and needs while you wait for him to fix up and fly right. By the end of the album, and the end of the journey, you’ve lost everything. Either it’s been taken from you, or else you’ve shaken it all off but either way, the only way is up now. You’re ready to stand on your own two feet again. You’re not going to let him cheat on you any longer, and you aren’t going to cheat on yourself, either. Like Candi Staton said, Freedom is Just Beyond the Door. And, like Clarence Carter said, all you’ve got to do now is put on your shoes and walk.

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Further Reading and listening

I’ve had this album saved in my drafts to get around to writing about for a while now, but it’s far from the first thing written about Candi Staton on Substack.

Earlier this year, Garth Cartwright at Yakety Yak wrote about her here:

“I REFUSE TO BE ABUSED”: CANDI STATON & VETERAN AFRICAN AMERICAN VOICES IN LONDON

And in early May last year, Richard Elliot at the always excellent Songs and Objects was way ahead of both of us with his piece, Evidence:

Evidence

Here’s a great interview with Staton from the Guardian in 2021 where she talks about the racial discrimination which held her music back from being as rightly remembered as other works from the time, her turbulent marriages, Elvis Presley and being a “pistol packing mama”.

It’s been a bad year for soul singers. We’ve lost legends like Sam Moore, Brenton Wood and Madelyn Quebec, but, thankfully, Candi Staton is still with us and still working. In 2023 she performed at the Glastonbury festival, and next month she will release her next, and final, album, Back to My Roots.

Of course, Stand By Your Man wasn’t Candi Staton’s first really great record, and it wasn’t her last really great one either. Her I’m Just a Prisoner, Candi Staton, Young Hearts Run Free and Music Speaks Louder Than Words albums are all essential listening, too.

Thanks Candi Staton, for all the music, and thank you to my uncle, as well, for the same reason.

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