***BACK IN STOCK!!! “OTIS CLAY is the kind of blesses, pulsating soul singer that Memphis is known for. An effortlessly funky performer, Clay has found a solid home with producer Willie Mitchell at Hi Records. Trying To Live My Life Without You, his first Hi album, illustrates a no-bones funkiness that immediately establishes Clay as a singer of the first rank. Otis Clay has blazed a trail in the gospel and R&B fields with a successful string of accomplishments for the past twenty-six years. In 1946, at the age of four, Otis began a singing career as part of a family gospel group that travelled through Mississippi. After ten years of touring the South, Clay moved to Chicago joining the Golden Jubilaires with whom he came under the direction of Odell Carter. A few years later he became part of a black folk singing outfit, the Blue Jays. Between 1964 and 1965 he was lead singer with the noted gospel act, the Sensational Nightingales. As a solo performer, his first straight R&B effort came in 1965. Signed to One-der-ful Records he had many hits, most notably "Satisfied Just Loving You" and "That's How It Is." His new association with Hi Records and Willie Mitchell is a genuinely exciting merger of two distinctively forceful artists operating for many years in the same territory. Willie Mitchell is the Memphis soul stirrer who has concocted so many fine things recently with Al Green, Denise LaSalle, and Ann Peebles. Over the years, he has...
LP $25.45
12/04/2020
***OTIS CLAY made most of his best-known records in Memphis during the early ‘70s, but he’s still universally hailed as Chicago’s deep soul king. In a city filled to overflowing with legendary blues artists, Clay has become the proud standard-bearer for Chicago’s enduring soul tradition. Like so many of his contemporaries, Clay’s intense vocal style reflects a gospel background. He made the secular jump in 1965, signing with Chicago’s One-derful Records and issuing a series of gospel-tinged soul records that were a lot grittier than the customary Windy City soul sound. Clay inaugurated Atlantic’s Cotillion subsidiary in 1968 with a supercharged cover of the Sir Douglas Quintet’s “She’s About a Mover,” produced by Rick Hall in Muscle Shoals shortly before the singer joined forces with Hi Records boss Willie Mitchell. With the relentlessly driving Hi Rhythm Section in tow, Clay waxed his biggest seller in 1972, “Trying to Live My Life Without You,” later covered very successfully by Bob Seger.
LP $25.45
09/11/2012