‘My ex put a gun to my head and threatened to shoot me’

As a new film pays tribute to the career of singer-songwriter Candi Staton, 84, she talks to Craig McLean about going on the road at 11, the Ku Klux Klan and turning trauma into hits

- Craig McLean

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!’”