O.B. McClinton

b. Obie Burnett McClinton, 25 Apr 1940, Senatobia, Mississippi, USA, d. 23 Sept 1987. The child of the Baptist preacher, McClinton was dissuaded from hearing R&B, but required solace in nation music. Having worked well for a while as a disk jockey at radio train station WDIA in Memphis, he forged a profession like a songwriter, penning country-soul ballads for Otis Redding (‘Maintain Your Hands Around Me’), before locating the ideal foil in Wayne Carr. Two of McClinton’s compositions, ‘You’ve Got My Brain Messed Up’ (1966) and ‘A Guy Needs A Female’ (1968), stand among this vocalist’s finest function. McClinton after that became an employee writer in the Stax Information label and, in January 1971, started recording like a C&W designer around the organization’s Business subsidiary. His albums there provided varied materials, including variations of Wilson Pickett’s ‘Don’t ALLOW Green Lawn Fool You’ (1972) – his most effective country chart solitary – and Merle Haggard’s ‘Okie From Muskogee’. McClinton briefly relocated to Mercury Information in 1976, where he previously popular with ‘Dark Speck’, before shifting to Epic, where he obtained six minor C&W strikes. Mostly of the successful black nation singers, McClinton passed away of abdominal malignancy in Sept 1987.