Little-Known Soul Stylist Clarence Carter Gets His Due

Clarence Carter is one of the most overlooked soul stylists of the modern pop era.

Despite more than a dozen Top 40 R&B; hits in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Carter isn’t even given his own listing in either the 1,300-page “Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music” or the 600-page “Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll.”

So it’s not surprising that little of his music has been available in CD--until “Snatching It Back,” a just-released “best-of” collection.

The album--part of a new Rhino Records association with Atlantic Records that also involves the release of new best-of packages from Wilson Pickett, Solomon Burke and Percy Sledge--contains 21 of the songs that Carter recorded in Muscle Shoals, Ala., with producer Rick Hall.

The selections range from “Slip Away,” which reached No. 2 on the R&B; charts and No. 6 on the pop charts in 1968, to “Patches,” which reached Nos. 2 and 4 on those respective charts in 1970.

But two of the album’s most enticing tracks weren’t hits at all: “Back Door Santa,” a risque 1968 Christmas novelty that Carter co-wrote, and a show-stopping 1969 reworking of Chips Moman and Dan Penn’s classic tale of infidelity “The Dark End of the Street.”

Born in 1936 in Montgomery, Ala., Carter was influenced as a singer and musician by blues, gospel and country music, and he wove all three into a natural, disciplined style that was at its most powerful when addressing the desperation of relationships. It’s an attitude reflected in such song titles as “Slip Away,” “Too Weak to Fight,” “I’d Rather Go Blind” and “I Can’t Leave Your Love Alone.”

He attended Alabama State College, where he earned a degree in music. Carter, who played guitar, formed a duo in 1963 with Calvin Scott and they eventually made some singles under the name the C&C; Boys for Duke Records. Carter became a solo artist a few years later, recording briefly for Rick Hall’s Fame label and then for Atlantic.

The remarkable thing about Carter’s version of the Moman-Penn song--retitled here “Making Love (At the Dark End of the Street)”--is a long, whimsical monologue that is wrapped around the original song.

With a heavy display of pulpit fervor, Carter delivers a sermon on sex that is a barnyard variation of Cole Porter’s old “birds do it, bees do it” lyric.

Discussing the track in the album’s liner notes, rock critic Dave Marsh declares, “In its fusion of the absurd and the profound, there could be no record more redolent of rock ‘n’ roll than (the Carter track), but just the same, it remains one of the great mystery records of both rock and soul.”