Barbara Carr | |
---|---|
Birth name | Barbara Jean Crosby |
Born |
St. Louis, Missouri, United States |
January 9, 1941
Genres | Blues, soul-blues |
Occupation(s) | Singer |
Barbara Carr (born Barbara Jean Crosby, January 9, 1941) is an American blues singer.
She was born in St Louis, Missouri, and started singing in the First Baptist Church in Elmwood Park. She sang with her sisters as The Crosby Singers, and they performed in various locations throughout Missouri. In 1963, she joined a local vocal group, the Petites, before successfully auditioning to join Oliver Sain's band.
In the mid 1960s, Carr's first recording contract was with Chess Records, where she recorded "I Can't Stop Now" and "Think About It Baby", and these two recordings launched her solo career. Carr and husband, Charles Carr, soon started their own record label, Bar-Car. Their first recordings included Good Woman Go Bad and Street Woman. She continued to record intermittently and performed with Sain until 1972, when she temporarily retired to raise a family.
After returning to perform with local bands around St Louis, she again began recording but with little success. With her husband, she set up her own record label, Bar-Car, in 1982, and recorded a number of singles at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, which provided the basis for her first album, Good Woman Go Bad, in 1989. A second album, Street Woman, followed in 1994. In 1996, Carr signed with Ecko Records, which produced such songs as "Footprints on the Ceiling", "The Bo Hawg Grind", "If You Can't Cut The Mustard", "The Right Kind Of Love", and "Bone Me Like You Own Me". While still with Ecko Records, Carr recorded "What A Woman Wants", "Let A Real Woman Try", "Rainbow", "The Best Woman", and "Stroke It". Carr recorded eight albums with Ecko, including a best of compilation album, Best of Barbara Carr.
Carr has been honored twice with the Living Blues Readers Award as 'Female Blues Artist of the Year'. Her 2012 release, Keep The Fire Burning, on Catfood Records, reached top ten on both the Living Blues Report and the Roots Music Report. It was selected one of Down Beat magazine's Best Albums of the Year. Carr was on the cover of the November–December 2012 issue of Living Blues and was featured in that issue.