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Artist
Clarence Spady
12+ albums
bluesTerra BluesBlues artist
about
Growing up, the sound of Scranton, PA. was overwhelmingly pop and top 40. But young Spady, who first picked up the guitar at the age of 4, got a healthy diet of the blues at home. Mom listened to gospel and often took her son to visit her native New Jersey, where he was exposed to the area’s rich radio diversity. But it was dad – who taught Spady how to play guitar and who, until a spate of recent health problems, attended all his son’s shows – who was Spady’s greatest influence. “He used to listen to Bobby Bland and B.B. King at home. And at night he’d sit on the porch playing guitar. I’d climb in his lap, and start fingering the notes while he did the picking,” Spady remembers. “And we used to have blues jams every weekend. [Dad] would get off work on Friday at 5 p.m., 5:30 p.m., and we’d head out Highway 80 east toward Patterson to my uncle’s place. The jam would start Friday night and end Sunday morning. Sometimes we’d be on our way home and just make it back in time for church. And we did that for 14 years, every weekend. That was the biggest exposure to the blues that I had when was young.” On his own, Spady developed a taste for soul and funk, influences readily apparent in his music, which marries traditional blues sound with a funkier, modern sensibility. He says his next album, due out next year, will lean more in the R&B direction, with plenty of horns and vocal harmonies. “I guess that comes from listening to James Brown and growing up in the era of Motown,
