The Goddess of Groove
By Mad Royal

Born in the middle of the last century, Nathan Clay grew up in a small shack in a pecan grove near Cullman, Alabama, which is about forty miles from both Mussel Shoals, Alabama, and Tupelo, Mississippi. He grew up with his parents and his sister, singing in church.
“I started singing when I was two. I thought everybody sang,” he says now. He picked cotton, corn, and potatoes to earn money for school clothes, and hunted deer and rabbit from the age of nine, to help feed his family on the farm his great-grandfather homesteaded after the Civil War. When Nathan was 11, in the early fifties, the family started moving back and forth between Alabama and Detroit, a move that was not finalized until Nathan was in his early teens.
When Nathan turned 13, he took guitar lessons, a series of ten lessons that didn’t move fast enough for the young boy, so he started teaching himself. He started playing in clubs in Detroit when he was just 15. He joined his first band, called Continue reading Nathan Clay: Breaking the Mold →