Chris Clark: Motown’s failed answer to Dusty Springfield
Delivering Detroit soul to the masses, Motown Records is among the most important and successful labels ever to grace the airwaves, thanks in no small part to the efforts of founder and label boss Berry Gordy Jr. After all, Gordy was always a businessman at heart, keen to capitalise on musical trends and maximise the hit potential of Motown. So, while the label produced a wealth of now-iconic stars, it also witnessed its fair share of underappreciated obscurities.
Within a few short years of its foundation, Motown Records was a commercial force to be reckoned with. The US pop charts were chock-full of the sweet soul sounds emanating from Hitsville USA, and figures like Marvin Gaye, The Supremes, and ‘Little’ Stevie Wonder were rapidly becoming household names. Still, Gordy kept his ear to the ground with regard to emerging musical trends, which eventually led him to hear the unmistakable tones of Dusty Springfield.
A white British soul singer who took colossal inspiration from Motown itself, Springfield quickly became one of the defining voices of the swinging sixties, earning hits in the US and helping to bring soul music to UK audiences for the first time. Almost immediately, Gordy set about recruiting his own Springfield-esque vocalist to the Motown roster, and found that the answer had been under his nose for a number of years.
Back in 1963, a young vocalist from California named Chris Clark auditioned to join the ranks of Motown. Having experimented with everything from folk to hippie psychedelia, Clark’s voice had a power and adaptability that would have made her one of the label’s most recognisable stars. However, her audition for the label did not land her a recording deal; instead, she was resigned to do office and secretarial work at the Motown offices.
After the rise of Dusty Springfield, however, Gordy reassessed Clark’s potential, taking a personal interest in her career development. Then, in 1965, Clark unleashed her first single for Motown, ‘Do Right Baby Do Right’, released on the subsidiary label VIP. Despite it having the songwriting talents of Gordy himself behind it, along with Clark’s powerful vocals, the single flopped commercially.
Clark’s difficulty in finding success with Motown is less surprising when taking into account just how much of an outlier she was in comparison to the rest of the label’s roster. Not only was Clark white, making her one of the very few white artists to record for Motown during the golden age of the 1960s, but she also hailed from the West Coast, rather than the industrialism of Detroit. This, coupled with the fact that she was assigned to Motown’s lesser-known subsidiary VIP, meant that she garnered very little mainstream attention.
Other releases followed, including the woefully underrated ‘Love’s Gone Bad’, and even a version of Frank Wilson’s ‘Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)’, but mainstream success seemed to evade Chris Clark. Eventually, Gordy lost interest in her career, and she became overshadowed by a new generation of soul stars towards the end of the 1960s. Her final release on Motown was 1968’s ‘Whisper You Love Me Boy’, after which she left the label.
Despite Motown’s answer to Dusty Springfield failing to garner the same attention as the peroxide blonde star, Clark’s career was far from being a failure. In the years after her stint with Motown, the musician earned an Academy Award nomination for co-writing the screenplay for the Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings The Blues.
What’s more, tracks like ‘Do Right Baby Do Right’ became major tracks within the northern soul scene, which blossomed in England during the early 1970s, providing some sense of vindication for the lack of commercial success gained during her Motown years.
