Otis Clay (February 11, 1942 – January 8, 2016) – The Only Way Is Up (1980)
The phenomenally uplifting original version of the song Yazz took to #1 in the UK during the summer of '88 was self-released on Clay's own Echo Records label.
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Otis Clay got his start singing in gospel vocal groups, and his gospel-trained voice helped make his later R&B records so soul-stirring.
Born in Mississippi, Clay grew up listening to a gumbo of music on radio stations out of Memphis, Nashville and Arkansas. “Every Saturday night I listened to the Grand Ole Opry,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 2013. “I guess I was about 6 or 7 years old when I saw my first live show. I was living in Clarksdale, Miss., at that time, and that was Muddy Waters.”
He moved to Chicago as a teenager in the mid-1950s to live with his aunt and uncle. “Chicago is only a suburb of Mississippi,” said Clay.
“And now I’m in the same city that Muddy Waters is living in and playing local clubs and what have you, though I wasn’t going to ‘em yet. Sam Cooke was here, the Soul Stirrers, the Caravans and all these (other gospel) people. It was a lot of excitement.”
Otis Clay on the South Side of Chicago, 2000
Clay sang with numerous gospel groups before signing with Chicago-based label One-derful! Records in 1965. The superb “That's How It Is (When You're In Love)” (1967) was his first hit, going to #34 R&B.
One-derful! went under in 1968 and Atlantic Records bought Clay’s contract. They launched their Cotillion subsidiary designed to focus on the R&B market with Clay’s single “She’s About a Mover,” produced by Rick Hall and recorded at FAME Studios. It was a #47 R&B hit and also cracked the Billboard Hot 100 at #97, his highest-charting crossover record ever on the pop charts.
He switched labels and moved to Hi Records in 1971, where Willie Mitchell produced “Trying To Live My Life Without You,” Clay’s biggest-ever R&B record that went to #24. Later that decade, Clay left Hi Records and released an album on Kayvette Records, one of Henry Stone’s labels that was distributed by T.K. Productions.
In 1980, Clay released his phenomenally uplifting, original version of “The Only Way Is Up” on his own Chicago-based Echo Records label. It was co-written by FAME Studios’ prolific songwriter and producer George Jackson and Johnny Henderson, and produced by Troy Thompson. The single was pressed in small quantities and did not chart. Original copies today sell for hundreds of dollars.
It became the title track to his next album, which was first released in 1982 by the Japanese label Victor Records (which split off from RCA-Victor during World War II). Three years later it came out in North America, re-issued by a new Chicago-based blues label, Blues R&B Recording.
“The Only Way Is Up” was covered by Yazz and the Plastic Population in 1988, who turned it into a house/techno-pop anthem that spent five weeks at #1 in the UK that summer, becoming the second best selling single of the year, and hit #2 on U.S. dance charts. But Clay’s original was a gospel-flavored soul masterpiece, deserved to have been a far bigger hit, and might have been if it had come out on a major label.
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