James Carr

Genres:	R&B / Soul
Descriptive "tags":	soul • southern soul • deep soul • rhythm and blues
Decades Active:	1960s • 1980s • 1990s • 2000s
Links online:	BBC Music • Wikipedia

Biography

13 June 1942, Coahoma, Mississippi, USA, d. 7 January 2001, Memphis, Tennessee, USA. Carr grew up in Memphis where he sang gospel in the Sunset Travellers and the Harmony Echoes and was discovered by Memphis gospel-group mentor Roosevelt Jamison. This budding manager and songwriter brought Carr to the Goldwax Records label, run by Quinton Claunch. It took four singles to define the singer’s style, but the deep, magnificent ‘You’ve Got My Mind Messed Up’ burned with an intensity few contemporaries could match. A US Top 10 R&B hit in 1966, ‘Love Attack’ and ‘Pouring Water On A Drowning Man’ also followed that year. In 1967 Carr released ‘The Dark End Of The Street’, southern soul’s definitive guilt-laced ‘cheating’ song, which inspired several cover versions. His later work included ‘Let It Happen’ and ‘A Man Needs A Woman’, but his fragile personality was increasingly disturbed...

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