Chris Clark

Christine Elizabeth Clark (born February 1, 1946), better known as Chris Clark, is an American soul, jazz, and blues singer, who recorded for Motown Records. Clark became known to Northern Soul fans for hit songs such as 1965's "Do Right Baby Do Right" (by Berry Gordy) and 1966's "Love's Gone Bad" (Holland-Dozier-Holland). She later co-wrote the screenplay for the 1972 motion picture Lady Sings the Blues starring Diana Ross, which earned Clark an Academy Award nomination. Clark was born in Santa Cruz, California. Clark produced a prominent chart hit on Motown's subsidiary label "V.I.P." with "Love's Gone Bad", which reached #105 pop, and #41 R&B in the U.S. in 1966. In Canada, the song made it to #95 on the RPM 100. In 1967, Clark released her first album entitled Soul Sounds on the Motown label. The album featured twelve songs including a rare Motown ballad called "If You Should Walk Away" (Berry Gordy, Jr.) which was slated for release as a single, but never was. Another notable recording was the 1967 U.K. single "I Want To Go Back There Again" (Berry Gordy, Jr). She recorded one more album for Motown on its newly-created rock label Weed entitled CC Rides Again (1969). The Belgian label Marginal released a CD of "Soul Sounds" made from the original master tapes (with unaltered mixes) and it contains the songs from Soul Sounds, 5 songs from CC Rides Again and 3 unreleased singles. A 50-track double-CD from Universal Music was released in 2005 entitled Chris Clark: The Motown Collection includes Soul Sounds, C.C. Rides Again, and many unreleased Motown recordings. A reissue and remastered version of the Soul Sounds album was released by the Reel Music label in April 2009, the first time the album was issued on CD in the U.S. Clark became famous in England as the "white negress" (a nickname meant as a compliment), because the six-foot platinum blonde, blue-eyed soul singer toured with fellow Motown artists, who were predominantly black.

Clark co-wrote the screenplay for the 1972 motion picture Lady Sings the Blues starring Diana Ross, which earned her an Academy Award nomination. During the early 1970s, she was an executive with Motown's Film and Television Production Division in Los Angeles. In 1975 Clark was the Creative Assistant on the motion picture Mahogany. Ultimately Clark served as Head of Creative Affairs for Motown from 1981 to 1989.Clark performed the song "The Ghosts of San Francisco", written by R. Christian Anderson and John Thomas Bullock, for the feature film When the World Came to San Francisco in 2015. The music video for the song was winner of the "Mixed Genre Jazz Film Award" at the New York Jazz Film Festival in November 2016. Clark currently lives in Santa Rosa, California and continues to work as a screenwriter, fine art photographer and singer.