Merry Clayton

Based on Wikipedia: Merry Clayton

The Voice That Cracked Open Rock and Roll

In the summer of 1969, sometime around two or three in the morning, Merry Clayton's phone rang. She was pregnant, already in bed with curlers in her hair, and the voice on the other end was asking if she could come to a recording studio right now to sing on a track for some British rock band.

Her husband, the jazz musician Curtis Amy, wasn't thrilled. But Clayton got dressed and drove to the studio anyway.

What happened next became one of the most electrifying moments in rock history. Clayton stepped up to the microphone and began trading verses with Mick Jagger on a song called "Gimme Shelter." The track is apocalyptic—about war, violence, the feeling that the world might be ending. And when Clayton hits her part, wailing "Rape, murder! It's just a shot away!" her voice climbs so high and pushes so hard that it actually cracks.

If you listen carefully, you can hear Jagger in the background going "Woo!" He couldn't believe what he was hearing either.

That crack in her voice wasn't a mistake. It was everything. It was the sound of someone pouring so much soul into a performance that the human voice itself couldn't quite contain it. Critics and musicians have written about that moment for decades. Some have called it the greatest backing vocal in rock and roll.

When Clayton got home from the session, she suffered a miscarriage.

A Christmas Gift to New Orleans

Merry Clayton was born on Christmas Day, 1948, in Gert Town, a neighborhood in New Orleans. Her parents named her "Merry" because of the date—a small, sweet detail that would define her before she ever sang a note. Her father was the Reverend A.G. Williams, Sr., and her mother was Eva B. Clayton. The family's life revolved around New Zion Baptist Church, where Merry spent her childhood surrounded by the soaring harmonies and raw emotional power of gospel music.

Gospel isn't just a genre. It's a tradition where singing is an act of spiritual testimony, where the voice becomes a vessel for something larger than the individual. The techniques Clayton absorbed in that church—the way gospel singers bend notes, the call-and-response dynamics, the willingness to let emotion override technical precision—would later make her invaluable to rock, soul, and pop musicians who wanted their records to feel alive.

When her family moved to Los Angeles, Clayton encountered the Blossoms, a vocal group who worked as some of the most in-demand session singers in the music industry. They saw something in her and encouraged her to pursue singing professionally.

She was fourteen years old when she made her first recording.

The Invisible Army Behind the Hits

There's a whole world of music that most listeners never see. When you hear a classic song on the radio—the backing harmonies, the soaring chorus, the voices that make a track feel full and powerful—you're often hearing session singers. These are professionals who can walk into a studio, learn a song in minutes, and deliver a flawless performance. They don't get their names on the album cover. They don't do interviews. They just make other people's records sound incredible.

Clayton became one of the best.

Her voice appears on records by Pearl Bailey, Phil Ochs, Burt Bacharach, Tom Jones, Joe Cocker, Linda Ronstadt, Carole King, and Tori Amos. She sang on Neil Young's debut album. She's sometimes credited with recording with Elvis Presley, though music historians haven't been able to confirm this—her name doesn't appear in the meticulous session logs that document every musician who ever played on an Elvis record.

Early in her career, she performed as one of the Raelettes, Ray Charles's legendary backing group. Her father, despite being a minister, had a soft spot for Ray Charles—he was the only secular artist the Reverend Williams would allow his daughter to see perform live. Perhaps he recognized that Charles, who had grown up singing in church himself, brought something sacred to even his most worldly songs.

Almost Getting "The Shoop Shoop Song"

In 1963, Clayton recorded a version of "The Shoop Shoop Song (It's in His Kiss)"—yes, that song, the one that asks how to tell if a man really loves you and answers that it's in his kiss, not in his face or his embrace. Clayton's version was actually the first to be released.

But Betty Everett's version, recorded the same year, was the one that became a hit, climbing into the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. This would become a pattern in Clayton's career: being there at the creation of something significant, contributing something essential, but not quite getting the spotlight.

It's worth pausing on how much of music history works this way. The difference between a hit and an obscurity often has nothing to do with the quality of the performance. It might come down to which record a particular radio DJ happened to play, which label had better relationships with distributors, which version got released in the right market at the right moment. Clayton's Shoop Shoop wasn't worse than Everett's. It was just less lucky.

The Second Choice Who Became Immortal

Here's another twist in the "Gimme Shelter" story: Clayton wasn't even the Rolling Stones' first choice.

The band had originally asked Bonnie Bramlett, half of the husband-wife duo Delaney & Bonnie, to sing on the track. But Delaney Bramlett refused to let his wife perform with the Stones. The reasons aren't entirely clear—perhaps jealousy, perhaps concern about her associating with the notoriously wild British rockers, perhaps something else entirely.

So the Stones went looking for someone else. They made what Jagger has described as a "random" call to Clayton. She showed up in curlers, pregnant, in the middle of the night. She nailed it in just a few takes.

Jagger has called her performance "pretty amazing." Coming from a man not known for generous praise of his collaborators, that's significant.

But the Stones' recording habits being what they were, her name was misspelled as "Mary" on some releases of the album. For years, listeners didn't even know exactly who they were hearing.

Her Own Version

The year after she recorded "Gimme Shelter" with the Stones, Clayton released her debut solo album. She titled it Gimme Shelter and included her own version of the song as the lead track.

It's a fascinating recording. Where the Stones' version is all menace and apocalyptic dread, Clayton's solo version transforms the song into something else—a plea, a prayer, maybe even a statement of resilience. The same words take on different meaning when sung by a Black woman in 1970 America versus a group of white British rock stars.

Her version peaked at number 73 on the pop charts. It was the first of five singles under her own name to crack the Billboard Hot 100. A respectable showing, but not the breakthrough that might have made her a household name.

The same year, she sang "Lift Every Voice and Sing"—often called the Black National Anthem—for the soundtrack of Robert Altman's film Brewster McCloud, a strange, satirical movie about a young man who lives in the Houston Astrodome and builds wings to fly. She also contributed vocals to Performance, a fever dream of a film starring Mick Jagger as a reclusive rock star.

From Tommy to Tori

In 1972, Clayton originated the role of the Acid Queen in the first London production of Tommy, the Who's rock opera about a deaf, dumb, and blind boy who becomes a pinball messiah. The Acid Queen is one of the show's most memorable characters—a woman who promises to cure Tommy through psychedelic drugs and sexual initiation. The role later made famous by Tina Turner in the film version was first brought to life by Clayton on stage.

The following year, she sang prominently on Ringo Starr's "Oh My My," which would become one of the former Beatle's bigger solo hits, reaching the Top 10 in 1974. She and fellow session singer Clydie King also provided backing vocals on Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama"—meaning that two Black women from the world of soul and gospel helped create what became an anthem of Southern rock, a genre not always associated with racial harmony.

The layers of irony there are worth contemplating.

Clayton kept working through the decades. She sang on hits by the Blackbyrds, an R&B group formed by students at Howard University. She recorded the title track for The Nude Bomb, a 1980 film revival of the spy comedy Get Smart. In 1987, she sang "Yes" for the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, which hit number 45 on the Hot 100—not her biggest placement, but part of one of the best-selling movie soundtracks ever made.

In 1994, she reunited with a newer generation of artists, singing backing vocals on Tori Amos's hit "Cornflake Girl" and delivering the "Man with the Golden Gun" bridge in the middle of the song—a reference to the James Bond film, dropped into a song about female friendship and betrayal.

Twenty Feet from Stardom

For most of her career, Clayton remained what she had always been: a voice people knew without knowing whose voice it was. She was the texture in their favorite songs, the power they felt without being able to name.

That changed in 2013.

The documentary 20 Feet from Stardom premiered at the Sundance Film Festival that year. Directed by Morgan Neville, the film explores the lives of backup singers—the musicians who stand just behind the spotlight, whose contributions are essential but whose names rarely appear above the title. Clayton is one of the central figures.

The film is often devastating. It grapples with questions of race, gender, luck, and talent in the music industry. It shows singers of extraordinary ability who never achieved the solo fame that seemed within their grasp, and asks why. The answers are complicated, involving the music industry's biases, the specific demands of being a star versus being a singer, and the randomness of which records become hits.

20 Feet from Stardom won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 86th Academy Awards. It also won the Grammy Award for Best Music Film in 2015. Clayton, who had spent decades being the voice behind other people's success, finally received recognition in front of a global audience.

Tragedy and Resilience

Clayton's husband, Curtis Amy, died in 2002. They had been married for over thirty years. Their son, Kevin Amy, followed his parents into music. Her brother, Sam Clayton, became the percussionist for Little Feat, the eclectic rock band known for blending rock, blues, R&B, and New Orleans funk.

Music runs through this family like a river.

On June 16, 2014—just a year after her moment of recognition at the Oscars—Clayton was critically injured in a car crash in Los Angeles. The accident was severe enough that both of her legs had to be amputated at the knees due to what medical reports described as "profound trauma to her lower extremities."

She nearly died.

But Clayton survived. And in 2021, at the age of 72, she released a new solo album called Beautiful Scars. The title speaks for itself. Here was a woman who had lost her husband, lost her legs, spent decades in the shadows of other artists' fame, and still had something to say. Still had a voice that demanded to be heard.

The Voice That Couldn't Be Contained

There's a moment in "Gimme Shelter" that music fans have analyzed endlessly. It comes when Clayton's voice breaks—not breaks down, but breaks open. She's pushing so hard, giving so much, that the physical apparatus of her vocal cords can't quite keep up with the emotional demand she's placing on them.

In a studio culture obsessed with perfection, that crack might have been edited out. But producer Jimmy Miller and the Stones knew better. That imperfection was the whole point. That was the sound of someone risking everything on a take.

Clayton went home that night and lost her baby. She has spoken about this tragedy in interviews, and you can hear people try to make meaning of it—to connect the intensity of the performance with what happened after, as if one caused the other, as if the song took something from her.

Maybe it did. Maybe that's what art sometimes costs.

Or maybe the two events were unrelated, and we just can't help looking for patterns, for stories that make sense of senseless loss.

What's certain is that Merry Clayton gave something to that recording that no one else could have given. She was a young Black woman singing about violence and destruction with a group of white British men, bringing the authority of gospel and the power of soul to their rock and roll apocalypse. She was pregnant, exhausted, and underprepared. And she delivered one of the most iconic vocal performances in the history of popular music.

She was always more than twenty feet from stardom. She was right there in the center of it. We just didn't always know her name.