AN UNSTOPPABLE SPIRIT
Merry Clayton — one of music’s greatest backup singers — survives crash and proves that her incredible strength isn’t only in her voice
In 1962, an excited 14-year-old Merry Clayton turned up for her first big recording session. After entering Capitol Studios in Hollywood, she took her place among the other women who had been called to sing backup for a Bobby Darin record. Soon after they started to sing, 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?”
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 crash 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.
“Uncle Lou,” as Clayton, 72, calls record producer Lou Adler, 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 more than 25 years, arriving in April. It stresses songs of overcoming, several of which were written by pop artists such as Diane Warren and Coldplay’s Chris Martin. The others tap into the deep well of gospel music Clayton has sang 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.
Clayton’s unshakable belief has been the ballast of her recovery. 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 in her birth city of New Orleans.
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’ backing group, the Raelettes. There she met her husband, saxophonist Curtis Amy, who was Charles’ 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 recordings with Joe Cocker and a Rolling Stones duet with Mick Jagger on the ultimate anthem of ’60s fear and loathing, “Gimme Shelter.”
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.
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 crash, 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 Adler contacted Diane Warren to see if she might have a piece for the album, she hadn’t heard about the crash 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.”