ROCK’N’ROLL CONFIDENTIAL
CANDI STATON
The soul legend talks Muscle Shoals, farewell tours and battling with the bottle.
Candi Staton: the First Lady Of Southern Soul is still feeling it, experiencing it and living it.
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EMERGING FROM the same gospel circuit that gave us Mavis Staples, Sam Cooke and Lou Rawls, Candi Staton combined testifying and yearning with the Muscle Shoals studio’s greasy grooves to become the ‘First Lady Of Southern Soul’ in 1969. International fame came with 1976’s disco anthem Young Hearts Run Free, but she took a gospel sabbatical the following decade. A 1991 hit remix by The Source of You Got The Love led to a dalliance with dance pop, but after 2004’s Candi Staton retrospective, she embraced country soul once more. “Singing makes me happy,” she tells MOJO from her Atlanta home. “[Producer] Rick Hall told me to feel it, experience it, live it. That’s why my songs sound genuine, because they are.”