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
By Jim Farber
In 1962, an excited 14-yearold 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