From The New York Times, March 28:

The Unstoppable Merry Clayton

One of music’s greatest backup singers is releasing “Beautiful Scars,” her first new album in over 25 years, after surviving an accident that proved that her incredible strength isn’t only in her voice.



In the hospital following her accident, Merry Clayton asked, “Did anything happen to my voice?” When she was told no, she started singing.
Credit...Joyce Kim for The New York Times

By Jim Farber
March 28, 2021

[www.nytimes.com]

Wow, great story. Did the Stones ever reach out to her after Gimme Shelter?

There was the Merry Clayton tribute at the Apollo back in 2015.

Apollo

Keith Richards, Merry Clayton–A Great Night In Harlem
Apollo Theater / New York, NY

The Jazz Foundation of America puts on a killer fundraiser every year, and we’ll go into it in greater detail later, but the Merry Clayton tribute did push a few buttons for this writer. The unforgettable voice on the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” and many other songs, and a star of the recent Oscar- and Grammy-winning documentary 20 Feet From Stardom, Clayton lost her legs below the knee in an automobile accident in 2014. When the doctor gave her the bad news about losing her legs, Clayton reportedly replied, “I still have my voice,” and began to sing.

Keith Richards and the better part of his X-Pensive Winos band showed up to close out the gala with a rendition of “Gimme Shelter” to do Clayton proud.

—Suzanne Cadgène

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Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

Love Merry. Such a great voice.

If you can't get the NY Times connection, here's the text of the article:

The Unstoppable Merry Clayton

One of music’s greatest backup singers is releasing “Beautiful Scars,” her first new album in over 25 years, after surviving an accident that proved that her incredible strength isn’t only in her voice.

By Jim Farber
March 28, 2021

In the hospital following her accident, Merry Clayton asked, “Did anything happen to my voice?” When she was told no, she started singing.
In the hospital following her accident, Merry Clayton asked, “Did anything happen to my voice?” When she was told no, she started singing.Credit...Joyce Kim for The New York Times

In 1962, an excited 14-year-old Merry Clayton turned up for her first big recording session. After entering the storied Capitol Studios in Hollywood, she took her place among the other young women who had been called to sing backup for a Bobby Darin record. Soon after they started to sing their part of the song, however, Darin stopped the session cold.

“There’s somebody really loud in there and we don’t know who is it,” Clayton recalled him saying. Because the other women knew exactly who it was, “they asked me to back up a bit from the microphone,” she said. “Then we started again and Mr. Darin stopped us and said, ‘That voice is still so loud!’ So the girls asked me to back up even more. Before I knew it, I was almost out the door. Finally, Mr. Darin recognized who it was and beckoned me to the booth to ask me my name. When I told him, he said, ‘My God, Merry, you sure can sing!’”

The strength of Clayton’s voice so impressed Darin that he moved the teenager up front where she delivered an incredibly mature vocal on a duet with him, “Who Can I Count On?”

The Rolling Stones provided Clayton with her most famous platform, a ferocious duet with Mick Jagger on “Gimme Shelter.”

Five decades later, another event in the singer’s life would make it abundantly clear that Merry Clayton’s voice is far from the only strong thing about her. After a half-century as one of music’s most in-demand backup singers — during which she had several shots at becoming a star in her own right — Clayton suffered a tragedy that has tested the limits of both her physicality and her faith.

At the time, she was enjoying one of her highest-profile moments via her central role in the Oscar-winning documentary “20 Feet From Stardom,” which threw a light on the undervalued and mainly Black backup singers who helped define popular music in the last half-century. But just four months after the film won the award, in June 2014, Clayton was in an automobile accident near her home in Los Angeles that ended so violently, she had to have both of her legs amputated below the knee. She would spend the next five months in the hospital, followed by years of rehabilitation.

The singer, 72, recalls nothing of the accident itself. But last month, she spoke with surprising humor and grace about its aftermath in a long video interview. Resplendent in a shimmering azure-blue dress, Clayton sat in her electric wheelchair in the chic Malibu office of the record producer and label owner Lou Adler. “Uncle Lou,” as Clayton calls him, has served as her advocate since 1969, when he signed her to his label, Ode, resulting in several roiling rock ’n’ roll solo albums.

Now, along with Terry Young, Adler has co-produced a new album for Clayton, “Beautiful Scars,” her first in over 25 years, arriving April 9. It stresses songs of overcoming, several of which were written by pop artists like Diane Warren and Coldplay’s Chris Martin. The others tap into the deep well of gospel music Clayton has been singing since she was a toddler in the church of her minister father.

Because he believed music would be crucial to her recovery, Adler started asking Clayton about singing in the studio again just weeks after she regained consciousness. “I said, ‘Excuse me? I’m laid up in the hospital and you’re telling me I’m supposed to be singing?’” she recalled asking him incredulously.

“If there was a space in the market that Aretha Franklin had brought about, I felt she could be in that space,” the producer Lou Adler said of Merry Clayton.

On the day she learned what had happened to her, Clayton said her family sat by her bedside crying profusely while a team of doctors came into the room. “I wondered, ‘What the heck is going on?’” she said. The doctor delivered the news about her legs. “They thought I was just going to fall out at that point. But I just asked them, ‘Did anything happen to my voice?’ When they said no, I started singing, ‘I Can Still Shine,’ a song Valerie Simpson and Nick Ashford wrote for me. Once I did that, my sister said, ‘Let’s get out of here. If she’s singing, she’s fine.’”

The response shocked a nurse who had been standing behind Clayton with a large needle at the ready, “just in case I got riled up,” the singer said with a laugh. “I told her, ‘Honey, I’m not going to get riled up. It’s in God’s hands. He hasn’t failed me yet!’”

Clayton’s unshakable belief has been the ballast of her recovery. In the interview, she mentioned God no fewer than 19 times. She first made the connection between faith and music at the age of 3 when she sang the spiritual “I’m Satisfied” in her father’s church. Located in her birth city of New Orleans, the congregation drew stars of the gospel world from Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers to Mahalia Jackson. “They called me ‘little Mahalia,’” Clayton said.

Her parents — who gave her the name Merry because she was born on Christmas Day — saw no separation between sacred and secular music. So, after the family moved to Los Angeles when Clayton was 8, they encouraged her desire to pursue a career in pop. By 15, she had the chance to cut a single under her own name — the first version of “It’s in His Kiss,” a song that later became a smash by Betty Everett. Clayton said she didn’t mind that her version didn’t click. “What mattered to me was that I sounded good,” she said.

In 1966, she realized a dream by joining Ray Charles’s backing group, the Raelettes. “I was the youngest, but I was their lead singer,” Clayton said. There she met her husband, the saxophonist Curtis Amy, who was Charles’s musical director. They remained married until his death in 2002. By the late ’60s, Clayton branched out to become one of the go-to backup singers for the superstars of rock. “We didn’t sing behind them,” she said. “We sang alongside them.”

Her collaborations included classic recordings with Joe Cocker (whom she calls “Ray Charles in another color”) and the Rolling Stones, who provided her most famous platform, a ferocious duet with Mick Jagger on the ultimate anthem of ’60s fear and loathing, “Gimme Shelter.” “At first, I told them ‘I’m not trying to do no ‘rape’ and no ‘murder,’” Clayton said, quoting from the song’s famous refrain. “Then it hit me that we’re talking about Vietnam and racism and police killing people. It’s just a shot away. I felt like I was screaming out from my ancestors to give us shelter from this world.”

The authority of the recording led Adler to sign her. “She had all the qualities you look for when you’re about to put time and money into an artist,” he said. “If there was a space in the market that Aretha Franklin had brought about, I felt she could be in that space.”

Clayton’s early solo albums featured songs written by rock and pop artists, including James Taylor’s “Country Road” and a revelatory version of Neil Young’s “Southern Man.” Her enraged and righteous reading of Young’s lyrics about “bullwhips cracking” and “crosses burning” went fathoms deeper than the original possibly could. “The lyrics are what got to me,” Clayton said. “My father said the world needs to hear you sing this song.”

Ironically, Clayton had sung backup on Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” whose lyrics clapped back at Young for “Southern Man.” By singing on the Skynyrd song, Clayton felt that she was bringing her understanding of Alabama’s racist history as a private protest. Still, she never mentioned to the band that she had also cut Young’s song. “I didn’t think it was wise,” she said.

Despite the power of her solo albums, they didn’t sell well. Adler believes that had partly to do with the resistance of radio to a Black woman singing rock. “Commercially, it probably would have been right for Merry to sing rhythm and blues,” he said, before describing the albums’ sales as “one of my great disappointments.”

Over the years, Clayton released several other solo records, most recently “Miracles” in 1994, but she never wanted for backup work. Stars hired her not only for her vocal ability but for the full history and culture her voice brings to a recording. “They don’t say ‘Merry, we want you to come sing,’” she said. “They say, ‘we want your spirit. We want you.’”

After the accident, the first person to hire her for backup work was Martin, resulting in two guest spots on Coldplay’s “A Head Full of Dreams” in 2015. Martin wasn’t aware of her accident at the time, hiring her purely for her track record and for his belief in what she could bring to the music. “It needed someone who could go free in an amazing way, which she could do,” he said. “Her voice is so full of experience and life lessons.”

Several years later, when Clayton’s team asked Martin if he had any songs for her album, he offered “Love Is a Mighty River,” inspired by his experience performing with the Soweto Gospel Choir. “When I heard her version, I thought, thank goodness she’s singing this and not me!” he said. “She did it way better.”

When Adler contacted Diane Warren to see if she might have a piece for the album, she hadn’t heard about the accident either. “But when Lou told me her incredible story, I thought of a song I had: ‘Beautiful Scars,’” Warren said. “It’s about someone who not only survives but thrives. That song was born for her to sing.”

Still, the piece that made the deepest impression on Clayton was Leon Russell’s “A Song for You,” a version of which she had cut back in 1971. For the new take, Adler elected to retain the sax solo from the original that had been performed by Clayton’s husband. Adler didn’t tell her that he added it before she listened to the playback. “When I heard it, I just lost it,” the singer said.

While recording the album, Clayton said she thought about the loss of her husband as often as she did about her accident and ongoing rehabilitation. “Of course, there were times my heart broke,” she said of the physical and psychological adjustments that she has made. “But I never said, ‘Why me?’ I never questioned God. I didn’t realize how strong I was until I went through my situation. But I had to go through all that to get to where am I now, which is living.”

“I am alive!” she declared. “Alive!”

MERRY CLAYTON
Tribute Video
.....&
KEITH RICHARDS
Gimme Shelter

Apollo Theater
October 23, 2015


[www.youtube.com]

(Pretend you don't hear KR's wildly off-key mistake near the end...)



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 2021-03-30 16:13 by schillid.

Holy crap.

Wow! The Apollo GS is one of the rockingest versions I've heard of it. They are wailing away at it. Made me think of seeing Keith and the Winos on their tours. That band really cooked. Hearing Clayton do a bit of You Are So Beautiful took me back to her comment in the article that the late Joe Cocker was Ray Charles in another form. I love the Ray Charles stylings in Cocker's voice and songs. Many of his songs/covers stand the test of time.

I always liked her own solo version of Gimme Shelter from 1970:





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Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

I think it's great that she can still sing. I have her Gimme LP, and boy she has a voice.

Merry Clayton on Her Hard-Won Comeback and How Faith Saved Her Life

“People need to hear that they can make it, no matter what they’ve been through,” the legendary backup singer says, reflecting on her first new album following a devastating 2014 accident

By Jonathan Bernstein
March 31, 2021


Mathieu Bitton

[www.rollingstone.com]

Merry Clayton, co-star of Oscar-winning ’20 Feet from Stardom,’ soars on ‘Beautiful Scars’ after grisly crash

Best known for her singing with the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Carole King and Lynyrd Skynyrd, the vocal powerhouse returns with her spirit and voice intact after a horrific 2014 car crash and double-amputation

By George Varga
April 4, 2021

[www.sandiegouniontribune.com]

What a fantastic and inspiring story.
Merry is a treasure and Lou Adler is a saint.
Thanks for posting.

Merry Clayton article from the Guardian newspaper

The singer who backed the Rolling Stones, Coldplay and more weathered a miscarriage, then the loss of her legs in a car accident – but her new album Beautiful Scars shows she refuses to give up

Thu 8 Apr 2021 12.10 BST

342
Merry Clayton has an excellent memory. The 72-year-old singer tells tales with such particular detail: the warmth of falling asleep between gospel legends Mahalia Jackson and Linda Hopkins in the pews of her father’s church in Louisiana; the recording sessions with Bobby Darin, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Rolling Stones, for whom she delivered the searing holler of Gimme Shelter.

What Clayton has no memory of is the 2014 car accident that was so severe that doctors were forced to amputate both of her legs below the knee. She remembers waking up in hospital, but the incident itself, and much of the five months she spent recovering, is lost. “It was like I was in another place,” she explains, speaking from her home in Los Angeles. “I knew I was here in the world, but it was just like I was somewhere else. I was in la-la land.”

The moment that stuck with Clayton was when she learned about the loss of her legs. Her doctors and family braced themselves for a panicked response. All Clayton wanted to know was if her voice was affected. Reassured that it was fine, she broke into song. Clayton’s sister summed it up: “If she’s singing, she’s fine.”

She has been singing a lot these days, especially in the wake of her appearance in 20 Feet From Stardom (2013), the Oscar-winning documentary that put the spotlight on the singers, many of them Black, who provided background vocals for the major pop and rock acts of the past five decades. For many viewers, the film helped put a name to the pealing, cracking voice that bursts through Gimme Shelter, briefly pushing aside Mick Jagger. It led to an invite to contribute to Coldplay’s 2015 album A Head Full of Dreams; Clayton recorded her vocals a mere week after leaving the hospital.


Listen to Merry Clayton sing Touch the Hem of His Garment from her new album, Beautiful Scars
Coldplay’s Chris Martin returned the favour when Clayton returned to the studio. 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. “It was the closest recording situation that I’ve ever been in that was totally pure love,” Clayton says. “It was very spiritual. It’s like you’re on another sphere.”

The devotional tone of Beautiful Scars brings Clayton full circle from where she started singing: at the New Zion Baptist church in 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. Jackson, a friend of Clayton’s minister father, would frequent the parish when she visited New Orleans. “I would always find my way to nestle up right up under Mahalia wherever she was sitting,” says Clayton. “I would lean up against her and take a little nap because I would have been up since seven o’clock that morning.”

Merry Clayton in 1965 as one of the Raelettes, Ray Charles’s backing singers
Merry Clayton (rear left) in 1965 as one of the Raelettes, Ray Charles’s backing singers. Clydie King is next to her on the right. Photograph: Getty Images
Clayton’s career got underway after her family moved to Los Angeles. 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. 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. The only hurdle was getting permission from Clayton’s mother. “She said: ‘OK, these are the rules. When you pick her up from school, she has to take a nap so that she can be refreshed. And then you have to correct her homework.’ So here’s poor Bobby Darin correcting homework.”

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. 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. She walked out with a contract for her parents to sign. “‘She will come back here the way she left,’” Clayton remembers her mother telling Charles. “‘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. They were married for 32 years before his death in 2002.

It was Amy who took the call from the producer Jack Nitzsche, ringing late one night in 1969 and hoping that Clayton would sing on a track being recorded by the Rolling Stones. Still in her pyjamas, hair in rollers and four months pregnant, she arrived at Sunset Sound Studios in Hollywood minutes later, cementing her place in rock history with her ferocious “it’s just a shot away” vocal line on Gimme Shelter. “I called Curtis: ‘These boys want me to sing about rape and murder.’ I wanted them to hear me, talking real loud to my husband on the phone. But we got the gist – that it was part of the song and not something just flying out of the sky. I was tired, it was cold and my voice cracked. We listened back and they said: ‘Oh that’s bloody fabulous. Can you do it again?’”


The day after the session with the Stones, Clayton suffered a miscarriage. She attributes it to the strain she put on her body pushing the heavy studio doors and reaching to hit the vocal peaks. “We lost a little girl. It took me years and years and years to get over that. You had all this success with Gimme Shelter and you had the heartbreak with this song.” Although she recorded her own version of the song for her 1970 studio album (itself entitled Gimme Shelter), it took her a long time to listen to the Stones’ song because she so closely associated it with losing her child. “It left a dark taste in my mouth. It was a rough, rough time.”

During the 1970s, Clayton continued to amass credits as a backing vocalist: Ringo Starr’s Oh My My, Carole King’s Smackwater Jack and Joe Cocker’s Feeling Alright. She also joined her friend and fellow singer Clydie King on Lynyrd Skynyrd’s controversial Southern rock anthem Sweet Home Alabama. Adding fuel to her impassioned performance was Clayton’s familiarity with the tune that song was written as a response to: Neil Young’s Southern Man. Moved by its fiery anti-racist lyrics, she had recorded a cover of Young’s song for her self-titled solo album – three years before landing in the studio with Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Merry Clayton performing in the early 1970s
Merry Clayton performing in the early 1970s. Photograph: Getty Images
It took some convincing, as when Clayton heard the title of the song, her thoughts immediately went to the racially motivated church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young girls in 1963. It was her husband who persuaded her. “He said: ‘Why don’t you protest with this music? Sing it with everything that’s in you. Sing it as if you’re saying, ‘I got your Alabama right here.’ We went, singing through our teeth, not wanting to be there. And that was our protest.”

Through it all, Adler – or as she calls him “Uncle Lou” – remained her biggest champion. He signed Clayton to his own label and produced two of her solo albums; Adler was also responsible for Clayton performing the Acid Queen as part of an all-star orchestral version of the Who’s Tommy, performed at London’s Rainbow Theatre in 1972. Sporting, as she puts it, “an afro as big as the stage”, she chided her co-stars as they took turns sliding down the decorative mushrooms on stage. “Every other song, Rod Stewart would look at me and go: ‘Why are you taking everything so bloody serious?’ I leaned over and I told him: ‘I am serious! Don’t you understand there are marks we have to hit and things we have to do? I have to concentrate on what I’m doing. Leave me alone.’”

Merry Clayton with the cast of the stage version of the Who’s Tommy, 1972
Merry Clayton (far left) with the cast of the stage version of the Who’s rock opera Tommy at the Rainbow Theatre, London, 9 December 1972. Photograph: Michael Putland/Getty Images
Clayton’s voice, as it is when she is recounting most anecdotes from her life, is filled with warmth and a hint of wonder, punctuated with a boisterous laugh. That carries through to talking about the present day. Her life in lockdown has been peaceful: she listens to Brahms or Tchaikovsky in the mornings, meditates and practises walking with her prosthetic legs. She is also coaching her granddaughter, a talented singer in her own right who makes an appearance on Beautiful Scars.

What never comes across during our conversation is any sense of despair about the accident or its aftermath. When Clayton returned home after her hospital stay, she quickly settled into a new routine of mental and physical rehabilitation with the help of her family and her doctors. “I started working really hard – but not too hard – on getting myself back to myself.”

Returning to some semblance of normality after enduring such trauma is no small accomplishment. I tell her I don’t know that I could have handled it, and I’m not alone, apparently. “I have friends who’ve told me: ‘Girl, if it were me, they would have had to put dirt on me – God knew who to put this on because I couldn’t bear it. You’re a walking, talking miracle.’ And I really, truly believe that, because I refuse to give in and I refuse to give up.”

Beautiful Scars is released 9 April on Motown Gospel.

Here is a link to a new interview with Merry from National Public Radio in the US. Both audio and written transcript: [www.nprillinois.org]

Merry Clayton talks with Lee Cowan of "CBS Sunday Morning":