Every music genre has its own anthems and disco is one of the most popular. Every DJ has their own go-to song when you’re struggling to get a dance floor moving. I have about four songs, my number one is Billy Ocean’s Love Really Hurts Without You – it never fails and another is Young Hearts Run Free, coincidentally, both from 1976. What a year that was. This requested came in from Millie Jackson (not the soul singer) who said, “Me and mum absolutely LOVE the song Young Hearts Run Free by Candi Staton, we always get up and dance to it! We were listening to it the other day and after reading the lyrics was wondering what it was actually about!?” Well, now you’ve read the lyrics, you will realise that this uplifting, vibrant floor-filler is in actual fact a tragic tale. It’s autobiographical, but it confused people who look at the writing credit and see the name Dave Crawford. Read on and I’ll explain.
First things first, let’s get her name right first; she was born Canzetta Maria Staton and her surname is pronounced Stay-Ton, I know this because I heard an interview on BBC London where she corrected the interviewer who called her Stat-on. She was born in Alabama where she lived for 11 years and then she and her sister were sent to Nashville, Tennessee and whilst at school there, the school pastor was impressed with Candi’s voice and teamed the two sisters with another student, Naomi Harrison, and formed the Jewell Gospel Trio.
After leaving school in 1968, she launched a solo singing career and it was the soul singer Clarence Carter who recommended her to the American record producer Rick Hall. Rick owned his own FAME recording studio and after she had notched up 16 songs on the Billboard R&B chart, he nicknamed her the ‘First Lady of Southern Soul’.
Candi has been married six times, first to Joe Williams (1960-1968) then Clarence Carter (1970-1973) with whom they had a child, but it was her third husband, the record promoter, Jimmy James is where the problems really started. Candi said, “He was a gangster and a pimp and very abusive.” He apparently once held her ‘hostage’ on a Las Vegas hotel balcony and then at gunpoint on a bed, “This guy was telling me that if I ever left him, he’d kill me,” Candi added. She was naturally frightened and didn’t know how to get out of it and confided in her close friend Dave Crawford, who was a songwriter and producer. She said, “I would sit down and tell David all these horror stories about my marriage and little did I know he was writing all this down.”
In an interview with The Guardian, Candi explained how she first met David, “I’d just signed to Warner Brothers and they were opening this new disco department. A producer called David Crawford was always in their office hustling and he’d wanted to work with me for years, so we finally got the chance. He fasted for 40 days before we went in the studio, because he wanted to get into a more spiritual realm and asked me where I was in my life. I told him I was trying to get out of a really bad relationship, I was so fearful and every female artist will get one of these guys, once. He drugged me and I don’t even remember the day I was supposed to have married him. I think it was all a setup and I don’t think it was ever registered.
David poured all this into writing Young Hearts Run Free. He had a lot of great songs, but said they were album cuts, not hits. But when he came up with Young Hearts Run Free, I instantly loved it. I heard the music first, then he sang it to me once and gave me the lyric sheet. Then I sang it in one take. I pleaded with him to let me do it again and he said, ‘You can, but I’ve got it.’ As an artist, the first take contains the raw emotion. The hurt in my voice is real. I was singing my life.” Even the title of her first solo album in 1970 reflected the situation, it was called I’m Just a Prisoner.
Not only is the song the real story of Candi’s life and her unfortunate relationships, but she was also now going to give this story to millions of people, mainly ladies, in the form of advice. She recalled, “In my life, I had fallen into a well and the song is me trying to give advice to younger women: don’t have babies with him, because he’ll be busy loving every other woman he can, but you’ll be stuck. Know that there’s a future behind every choice, and you’re not always going to like it. The song is telling them to run free. So many women know exactly what I’m talking about.”
Halfway through the song, came the next bit of advice as realisation dawns that you only get once chance and sings, ‘It’s high time now just one crack at life, who wants to live in, in trouble and strife? My mind must be free to learn all I can about me. Women, the world over, have been in identical relationship and millions have taken the advice and got out, but, sadly, there will be a large element who haven’t or couldn’t for obvious reasons. Maybe one day for them.
In 1978, Candi recorded the album, House of Love, which contains the track Victim which was also written and produced by Crawford and further tells her story with a chorus that states, ‘I’m a victim of the very songs I sing’ and she even reference her million-selling smash in the third verse, ‘I told you young hearts run free when I didn’t listen to myself, engulfed by the power of love, I just fell right in, ooh yes I did.’
In 1982, she returned to her gospel roots releasing the album Nightlites and Make Me an Instrument the following year. In 2010, came another marriage to former baseball player Otis Nixon for a couple of years and five years later, she wed Henry Hooper to whom she is still married. Her most recent album was 2018s Unstoppable and let’s hope that’s the case as it was the same year she revealed that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Staton is 84 and is still young at heart.
Crawford’s first notable song was 1968’s What A Man as recorded by Linda Lyndell which when covered by Salt ‘N’ Pepa with En Vogue in 1994 made the top 10 as Whatta Man. He also wrote two other hits for Candi Staton, Destiny and Honest I Do Love You, which both just missed the UK top 40. Young Hearts Run Free just keeps coming back, charting again on re-issue in 1986, in a top 20 cover version by Kym Mazelle in 1997 and in a re-recorded version by Candi in 1999 which again got into the top 30.
Sadly, Crawford’s life was cut short when he was murdered in 1988 in Brooklyn, New York, he was buried nearby in an unidentified, pauper’s grave. His body was later exhumed and buried in Jacksonville with assistance from his cousin Moore.