Candi Staton: ‘I told him, If you kill me, you’ll die too’

The 84-year-old soul stalwart has survived alcoholism, segregation, a dramatic mid-career trough, and a relationship in which she accuses a man of once holding a gun to her head. Ahead of a new documentary paying tribute to her career, she talks to Craig McLean about going on the road aged 11, the Ku Klux Klan and how she turned her many traumatic experiences into the ultimate survivor’s anthem ‘Young Hearts Run Free’.

In an upstairs lounge at Hackney Picturehouse, Candi Staton is reflecting on the documentary that has just premiered on screen one. The American singer, a vivacious and very much active octogenarian, is one of the stars of the British-made I’ll Take You There: Discovering the Sound of Alabama, and the evening’s guest of honour. “It is amazing,” she says, beaming, of this late-in-life recognition that’s brought her to London. “Years ago, when I was in my thirties, my forties, my fifties, people said: ‘God is saving the best for the last. Your last days will be your better days. Just be patient…’ So I always kept a mental positive attitude, and I kept those things in mind.”.

Staton’s career may have got off to a glittering start, but this battle-hardened soul survivor spent much of her middle years languishing in the doldrums. From the late 1960s to mid-1970s, she had been a towering figure in Black American music, dubbed the First Lady of Southern Soul and acclaimed for her R&B covers of “Stand by Your Man” (a huge American hit in 1971) and “In the Ghetto” (a hit in 1972). Her 1976 single “Young Hearts Run Free” was a disco-era smash. But in 1982, at the age of 42, Staton – who’d been a functioning alcoholic – went sober and became a born-again Christian. Her conversion prompted a long run of gospel-only albums, none of which her fans wanted to hear. As she pithily puts it of her live shows during that period, “People are not saying: ‘Oh, I love you!’ They’re saying: ‘Get off the stage! We came to hear ‘Stand by Your Man’! We don’t want to hear the rest of that mess!’”.

In the 1990s, however, the wheel turned once more when one of her mid-Eighties tracks, “You Got the Love”, became a dance-floor favourite. More recently, she’s made a series of Americana-flavoured albums that fuse her love of soul, country, gospel and R&B and which have brought a newfound lease of creative life – and adoration – well past retirement age. This most recent musical pivot is another reason for her trip from her home in Georgia: the International Lifetime Achievement gong that, when we meet at the start of this year, she is set to receive at the UK Americana Music Awards, which took place in late January.

In short, Staton – 85 years young next month and radiant in great-grandma bling (designer leather, Gucci loafers, bejewelled jeans, diamond-ringed fingers) – is now a bone fide musical icon. Nowhere is that more apparent in I'll Take You There. It’s a sprawling film that takes in Alabama’s status as a cradle of southern soul; the development of the legendary Fame recording studios in Muscle Shoals; this corner of the South’s importance to the civil rights movement; and the resonance of all these historical currents to an awestruck bunch of visiting UK Americana artists, who include Michele Stodart of The Magic Numbers and Bristolian singer-songwriter Lady Nade.

The connective tissue? Staton – a defiantly positive woman who thinks “everybody goes through the same things [in life]”. So, from the personal to the political, she still heeds the creed contained in the lyrics of her biggest song. “America’s messed up right now. And I do feel like throwing my hands up in the air, saying, Lord, I don’t care. But you got the love I need to see me through.”.

The woman born Canzetta Staton has lived an extraordinary life, featuring five ex-husbands, several career stops and starts, plus that alcoholism-to-born-again-Christianity through line. Hers is a story of both personal trauma and 20th-century racial injustice, and it only makes her richly soulful music all the more emotionally impactful. Nowhere is this more the case than on her new album, Back to My Roots, a collection of covers and originals billed as the sound of the singer “return[ing] to her southern ways” and which features the spoken word track “1963”. That title refers to the events of 15 September 1963 – the day the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls. By chance, Staton, a young mother married to the son of a preacher man, was also in Birmingham that day at another church service run by her father-in-law.

“We had just finished praise and worship and prayer, and the deacon came through the door and said: ‘Get out of here everybody! They’re rioting! They just bombed 16th Street Baptist Church. Four little girls got killed!’” she recalls. “They had targeted that church rather than ours because that one sometimes held civil rights [meetings] and Martin Luther King would often preach there [although not on that occasion].”.