Clarence Carter, US soul star who had hits with Patches and more, dies aged 90

Clarence Carter, the US soul singer who had numerous hits including the transatlantic 1970 smash Patches, has died aged 90.

His management company confirmed his death to the Guardian, saying he died on Wednesday following complications with pneumonia.

Carter was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1936, and was blind from birth. His music career began with the duo Clarence & Calvin, later the C & C Boys, who recorded a number of singles during the early 1960s. When his partner Calvin Scott, who was also blind, was injured in a car accident, Carter went solo and had his first R&B chart hit in 1967 with the self-penned Tell Daddy. It inspired Etta James to write a cover version and riposte, Tell Mama, which reached the US Top 30.

In 1968, he released arguably his most enduring track, Slip Away – now with more than 45m plays on Spotify. The mournful yet steadily strutting ballad, with Carter pleading with a woman to cheat on her partner with him, reached No 2 on the R&B chart and he crossed over in the US pop chart for the first time, reaching No 6. The song has since been used in numerous film soundtracks, including The Commitments, Almost Famous and Licorice Pizza.

That year also brought another hit song, Too Weak to Fight, and the ribald Back Door Santa – “I ain’t like old Saint Nick / He don’t come but once a year” – which has endured as an offbeat Christmas classic, and was sampled in another: Run DMC’s Christmas in Hollis.

1968 was also the year he met future soul music legend Candi Staton, who became one of his backing singers before they married in 1970. Staton later said she married him “because he was blind … I’d gotten so tired of my ex-husband accusing me, every man I looked at. I was in prison. So I got somebody who couldn’t see. And I had a wonderful time with him.”

Carter introduced her to producer Rick Hall of the Muscle Shoals studio, which helped to kickstart her solo career. Carter co-wrote songs for Staton – including the witty, Grammy-nominated I’d Rather Be an Old Man’s Sweetheart (Than a Young Man’s Fool) – which are regarded as classics from that era of soul music, and they had a son, Clarence Carter Jr.

But he was unfaithful, and Staton wrote bitter songs about his infidelity. “I was angry Clarence had done me so wrong chasing women,” she later said. “We could be walking down the street and they’d come and hug him. I sang them to get back at him.” Staton also told the Guardian that Carter “went to the IRS and told them I hadn’t paid taxes. I took an overdose, but I had a vision of my children’s faces. I threw it all back up and never tried that again.” They divorced in 1973.

In the interim, Carter’s R&B hits continued to stack up, culminating in Patches, his cover of the track by soul group the Chairman of the Board. Carter brilliantly told its social-realist story of a father who pleas to his son to press on through hardship, and his impassioned performance took the song to No 4 in the US and No 2 in the UK, his only UK Top 40 hit. His rendition won its songwriters, Ronald Dunbar and General Johnson, the 1971 Grammy award for best R&B song, while Carter himself was nominated for best R&B vocal performance (male).

“Music is my life and it has been good to me,” he told the NME amid his UK chart success. “Since I lost my sight, music has not only entertained me and earned me my livelihood, but it has been a tremendous comfort to me. When I’m down and feeling low, I just get out my guitar and sing.”

Carter remained a fixture in the US soul scene until the mid-1970s, when the genre was eclipsed by the rise of disco, and his success waned. He had a brief return to success – including the lower reaches of the UK charts – with his sexually explicit 1988 single Strokin’, and continued to release a steady stream of albums during the 1990s.

Film director William Friedkin was a fan of Strokin’, using it in his film Killer Joe. He described Carter as “the Mozart of Southern music”.