Chris Clark - Chris Clark - Selected Best Tracks (1968-1969)

I recently posted two albums of material from Chris Clark. This is the third and last, because she only had a relatively brief recording career, from 1965 to 1969. If you don't know who she is, she was a soul singer for the Motown label. But she didn't have much commercial success despite being very talented. The fact that she was a tall, platinum-haired white woman singing a type of music beloved mainly by black audiences at the time didn't help.

She put out an album in 1967 called "Soul Sounds," and my last post on her was my drastically changed version of that. She put out her second and last album in 1969, called "CC Rides Again." Unfortunately, it was a mess. Most of the songs were predictable covers of the biggest hit songs of the year. She gave good performances as usual, but clearly Motown wasn't giving her good material.

On top of that, many of the songs began with long instrumental passages from famous classical pieces that had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the song. Apparently, it was some kind of failed effort by the producers to appear hip or experimental. For the songs I've chosen from the album, I've lopped all those sections off.

But I didn't do that very much, because it turns out that only four of the 14 songs here come from "CC Rides Again." As I said, that just wasn't a very good album. She was recording much better material but it stayed in the vaults until decades later. Another eight songs are from 1968 or 1969, but not officially released at the time.

The last two songs are strange, because they come from much, much later. After 1969, she basically gave up on her music career, but stayed with Motown Records and moved her way up in the company until she was the head creative director. (She did record a few songs in the later 1970s, but they're disco tracks and not worthy of inclusion here.)

However, her reputation as a soul singer has grown over time, and in the 2000s she began performing some concerts, especially in Britain, where the classic Motown sound is more appreciated by the "Northern Soul" crowd. That led to her recording two new songs in 2011. I've added them at the end. If you didn't read this, you probably wouldn't notice the massive time gap, because they're good songs and they sound exactly as if they were recorded in the late 1960s instead. It's too bad she hasn't recorded more in recent years, because her voice hasn't lost any of its power.

By the way, I couldn't come up with a good name for this album, so I decided to simply call it "Chris Clark."  I was influenced by the cover art I chose, which has her name is massive letters, without really having room for more text.

01 Feelin' Good (Chris Clark)
02 I'm Gonna Be True (Chris Clark)
03 He's Good for Me (Chris Clark)
04 Bad Seed (Chris Clark)
05 Can I See You in the Morning (Chris Clark)
06 If You Let Me Baby (Chris Clark)
07 C. C. Rider (Chris Clark)
08 One (Chris Clark)
09 In the Ghetto (Chris Clark)
10 You've Made Me So Very Happy (Chris Clark)
11 My World Is Empty without You (Chris Clark)
12 The Last Thing on My Mind (Chris Clark)
13 Dream or Cry (Chris Clark)
14 Hang It Up (Chris Clark)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15100216/ChrisCrk_1968-1969_ChrisClrk_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I used the cover of an EP as the framework. But the lower half contained the names of four songs with a very tiny photo of Clark. I erased all that and replaced it with a much larger photo of her.  Good color photos of her in her late 1960s heyday are very few and far between. I actually found two different versions of the same photo that had been cropped to show only parts of her head. I stitched them together to show her full head. I'm happy at how that turned out.