"Strokin'"
Clarence Carter Enters Soul Heaven
Composed by Clarence Carter
June 1, 2026:
All I have to say about Clarence Carter is already encapsulated in the Artist Guide below, although it was written in the aughts of the 21st century, with most of the hyperlinks no longer available. If you are new to Clarence Carter, I recommend immediately scrolling way down to the "About The Artist" (About Clarence Carter RIP) section of this page. "Slip Away" was my favorite Carter song, recorded in my teen years (it's hard to believe) in the era of psychedelia, in the era of the Doors' "Light My Fire," the very essence of the southern soul template, with Duane Allman on lead guitar. "Strokin'" was my Daddy B. Nice #1 Clarence Carter anthem because I came to know it in the nineties when I first encountered southern soul music and the anthems of the marginalized black "Stations of the Deep South," many of which themselves couldn't even broadcast it on the radio. Of his three great hit singles "Patches" brought up the rear in my personal estimation, although it too was a bedrock template for southern soul artistry. However, of the trio "Patches" is the tune that reminded me of an insight mentioned in the "Tidbits" (go to extreme bottom of this page) and Carter's ties to the musical culture of his era. I was a great fan of The Band (the blackest white R&B band of the rock and roll era) and their songwriter/lead guitarist Robbie Robertson's "The Weight". Clarence Carter's "Patches" lyrics--- "Patches, I'm depending on you, son, to pull the family through, my son it's all left up to you."---was indebted to "The Weight," with its lyrics "Take a load off Fannie, take a load for free, take a load off Fannie, and you put the load right on me".
May 16, 2026:The singing of Clarence Carter is so staggeringly robust it's almost impossible to hold the thought that he is one of the last, great, sightless bluesmen. Listening to "Slip Away" or "Strokin,'" the listener shakes and quakes with the sheer adrenalized, testosterone-laced power coursing through the man's vocals. The singer not only seems to have all five senses--sight, touch, smell, taste and hearing--but a few others denied ordinary mortals. When Clarence Carter sings, you imagine Jim Brown, the larger-than-life athlete and actor, in his lady-killing prime, or Marlon Brando in his tight, rolled-up t-shirt, screaming, "Stella! Stellll-aaaa!" in "A Street Car Named Desire," or the young Muhammad Ali bouncing and fronting and annointing himself the "most beautiful man on the planet" before one of his fights. The music just doesn't conjure a mere blind musician.
--Daddy B. Nice
About Clarence Carter Enters Soul Heaven
Clarence Carter was born blind in Montgomery, Alabama in 1936. He attended Alabama State College and, along with blind schoolmate Calvin Scott, started recording songs in the early sixties. A multi-instrumentalist with composing, transposing and arranging skills (all in Braille), Carter joined with Scott to form a duo called the C & C Boys.
The pair recorded songs for Fairlane and Duke before achieving some regional success at Rick Hall's Fame Studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
By this time--the mid-sixties--they were also picked up by Jerry Wexler's Atlantic label's subsidiary, Atco. They worked on various material for both entities until Carter's relationship with Scott deteriorated after an accident in which Scott was seriously injured.
Carter pressed on as a solo act, and, with the creditable "Thread The Needle," which briefly crossed over into the pop charts, and "Tell Mama" by Etta James, a "response" song to a previous song by Carter called "Tell Daddy," big-label Atlantic signed him in 1968.
Atlantic soon released "Slip Away," a perfect amalgam of Carter's wrenching vocal and guitar styles and the fluid, muscular Muscle Shoals rhythm section (Rick Hall's Fame house band). The record broke into the national Top 10 and made the "Muscle Shoals sound" famous. Its successor, "Too Weak To Fight," also became a hit.
Between 1968 to 1970, Carter was a well-known fixture on the pop charts. The albums from this, his finest period, included This Is Clarence Carter, The Dynamic Clarence Carter, Testifyin' and Patches. Carter's last and biggest single, "Patches," was an R&B re-working of the folk and country-western styles of artists like Tennessee Ernie Ford, Burl Ives and Marty Robbins, and like "Slip Away" it was equally popular with blacks and whites.
After the success of "Patches" Clarence Carter fell from his lofty position as a national chart-maker. The big contract with Atlantic ended, and although he produced an album--with a few exceptions--on an annual basis on a host of small labels through the seventies and eighties (many of them substantially smaller than the standard 10-12 songs), a national hit eluded him. While Carter dabbled in blues and some other forms during this time, he remained remarkably true to his Southern Soul style--much more so than other R&B musicians.
The precise origins of "Strokin'," the chitlin' circuit hit that jump-started Carter's career, are as obscure as the kudzu-festooned hamlets of Mississippi and Alabama that furnished its small but eager audience. The single (and its follow-up, "Still Strokin'") is reported to have been recorded soon after Carter joined Ichiban, the Atlanta-based Southern Soul label, in the mid-eighties, but it never appeared on subsequent Ichiban CD's of the period, most likely due to its prurient content.
Meanwhile, word-of-mouth on the chitlin' circuit continued to build as Carter toured Southern venues, and "Strokin'" gradually became the Carter song audiences demanded to hear more than any other. The single made one of its first appearances on a sampler entitled Nasty Blues in 1989, and finally, in 1994, Carter released the song on two albums, Dr. C.C. (Koch) and Live With The Dr. (Peachtown).
Carter has continued to record to the present day. His last album, One More Hit (2005), generated substantial air play on the Stations of the Deep South, led by the radio single "Are You Ready For The Blues?". A new, remastered and modestly-priced retrospective (minus "Strokin'")-- The Platinum Collection--appeared in 2007.
Song's Transcendent Moment
"I stroke it to the east,
And I stroke it to the west,
And I stroke it to the woman
I love the best."
Tidbits
1. With its country-western and pop elements (for example, the commercial-sounding harmonica), "Patches" has long been viewed as Carter's most borderline, crossover-conscious hit. However, with its focus on the theme of family burdens and responsibility ("It's up to you to do the rest," Carter's father tells him), few people realize that it took much of its inspiration from The Band's ground-breaking 1968 record, "The Weight," written by Robbie Robertson, from the album Music From Big Pink, in which lead vocalist Rick Danko sings: "You take the load off Annie/And put the weight right on me." Numerous other R&B acts, including the Supremes, the Temptations, Aretha Franklin and the Staple Singers, recorded direct covers of "The Weight". DBN.
If You Liked. . . You'll Love
If you liked the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," you're bound to like Clarence Carter's "Strokin'".
EDITOR'S NOTE
In the late nineties, when I first began to visualize a charting of Southern Soul music, my overriding motive was to correct what I perceived to be a grievous wrong. When I searched the Internet for information on the great artists I heard on radio stations on my trips through the South, I could find nothing about them. I was able to find information on blues and soul artists up to about the 1980's, but anything more contemporary was still a "dark continent"--unknown, unexplored and unmemorialized. Even "southern soul" was a suspect term, used mainly as an adjective to describe older artists geographically tied to the Deep South.
To help right that wrong, I went about constructing a Top 100 chart of the best Southern Soul artists from the 90's to the present, and I profiled those performers in "artist guides". But when I had finished that chart (Daddy B. Nice's Top 100), I again found myself faced with a wrong. This time the oversight was my lack of attention to the artists whose best material had been recorded prior to the 90's and 00's, artists without whom the Southern Soul phenomenon would never have occurred. Yes, one could find information on these performers on the Internet, but not up-to-date information, and not in the context of contemporary Southern Soul.
That is what brought me to formulate the chart you are reading: "Forerunners." Rhythm & Blues as it's played, appreciated and revered in the Deep South. The Golden Oldies of the Chitlin' Circuit. The artists who "count" and the songs that "matter" to the artists, producers and deejays who understand and create the Southern Soul sound. And that's different--although not altogether different--from the soul music many of us grew up listening to outside the Deep South. Although fans may be coming to this music long after it was first recorded, I believe it will only whet their appetite for Southern Soul music all the more. DBN.
Honorary "B" Side
"Slip Away"
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