...Not having too much success on the charts (except for "The Ball Game" (1952), which became one of Specialty's best selling gospel records and most recently featured in the movie 42), Carr grew increasingly unhappy with the straight gospel direction of her career and pleaded with Rupe to let her record "pops, jumps, ballads, and semi-blues". 
Rupe relented and from 1955 to 1959 Carr recorded two dozen rock & roll and R&B sides for Specialty, which, like her gospel songs, she mostly wrote herself. Despite scoring an R&B hit with "Should I Ever Love Again?" in 1957, overall the change from spiritual to secular music didn't help Carr much in terms of sales or recognition. Unfortunately she also contracted tuberculosis around this time, which kept her from doing the necessary promotional work and touring for two years, effectively ending her tenure with Specialty in the summer of 1959.In 1961 Carr signed with Frank Sinatra's Reprise Records and released an unsuccessful pop album. She moved back to Cleveland, sinking into obscurity and suffering from declining health and depression; she died there in 1976.
6 comments:
https://mega.co.nz/#!rARjnBYD!NNypyEHOrDGFqEXI1wiJUG2Vm0swQL3jla7vIevmenU
Man, so many of these artists have unhappy endings. It seems if they're lucky, they might achieve a happy personal life in spite of a failed career but it seems quite often they are doomed to a bleak personal life as well. Seems so unfair when weighed against the gifts they gave us.
Thanks KC
I love this stuff - Classic R&B and rockin' too !
Cheers
Not familiar with her before now, but damn fine stuff.
First, I want to reiterate my great thanks for your and the other contributors exposing me to gospel, a genre that I had prematurely written off as didactic propaganda because I am not religious. To me, the genre had been defined by my friend's mother and friends at work in Texas blaring their religious beliefs through the music at full volume without consideration for those of us who would not consider subjecting them to our music preferences in the same way. Through this blog, I have learned to re-listen and enjoy the emotion and joy of the music and overcome my prejudices. Second, I know for many there is a great division between secular black music and gospel but, for me, both make the same body parts move and elicit the same emotional reactions. Carr's ability to be great in both genres and the uplifting emotional spirituality of both genres leave me unable to discern the distinction, aside from the didactic religious lyrics, between the secular and the profane. Perhaps were I religious, the lyrics would make a significant distinction but both genres leave me feeling similarly revived and passionate about what I have just heard. I feel the same way about Rastafarian reggae and pocomania music even though they too are overtly religious. There is a mystical quality to all great music and the denunciation of any form as devil's music because it articulates the primal joy of being human equates in my opinion to a denunciation of human creativity and secular appreciation of simply living one's life here on earth and enduring. Just my simple opinion so I hope no one is offended but each Sunday I ponder the alleged difference and admit that I still don't understand fully the apparent conflict that so acutely troubled Marvin Gaye and many other artists and, perhaps erroneously, regard it as the intolerance of many who appreciated gospel for all other music that expressed a different form of celebration of our humanity.
Feilimid, I think the sacred-secular conflict becomes exacerbated and deeply troubling for participants when played out within family networks.
Similarly to you, I guess, I have thoroughly enjoyed these last couple of years discovering gospel here at the King's joint. A welcome education. Not that it should be such a surprise, though - as I have been exploring music from other cultures (as well as diasporic) it seems it is all connected to ritual, and to dance. Pretty much all of it (well maybe apart from the stuff involved with marching and war) seems to me to be what we could call 'devotional'. I think it may be that quality of commitment to which we respond so strongly.
But thanks a million for the introduction to this Wynona woman, KC. She is fabulously lovely.
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