Barbara Carr spent years working without widespread notice, among them an understated stretch under contract to Chess, before gaining attention in the closing years of the 1990s as a forthright, frequently explicit powerhouse vocalist in the Southern soul-blues style. Born Barbara Crosby on January 9, 1941, in St. Louis, she first performed as a choir member in church and later helped establish the family gospel ensemble the Crosby Sisters. While still in elementary school she entered a singing and dancing ensemble, then continued singing in the high-school choir; during that period she also co-founded the Comets Combo, a group that performed current hits at neighborhood venues. In 1963 she became a member of the locally favored Petites, a unit that served as an opening act for Smokey Robinson & the Miracles. Through her brother-in-law she was introduced to the St. Louis saxophonist and bandleader Oliver Sain; after adopting her husband’s surname, Carr auditioned successfully and joined Sain’s ensemble.
Her association with Sain led to a solo agreement with Chess in 1966, and over the ensuing years she cut soul-oriented singles such as “Don’t Knock Love,” “I Can’t Stop Now,” and “Think About It Baby.” Although initially thrilled simply to hold a recording contract, Carr grew dissatisfied with Chess’s apparent reluctance to promote her; she paused her recording activity in the late 1960s to care for her children, then resumed work with the label around 1970, still without significant notice. She departed Sain’s band in 1972 and performed with several other, mostly short-lived ensembles in the St. Louis region. In the late 1970s she issued another single, “Physical Love Affair,” on Gateway, yet again received scant promotional backing. Together with her husband she launched their own imprint, Bar-Car, in 1982 and released several singles over the following years, many of them tracked at the historic Muscle Shoals studios in Alabama. Those recordings supplied the core material for her debut long-player, the 1989 album Good Woman Go Bad, which Paula later reissued from Shreveport in 1994. A second set, Street Woman, appeared on Bar-Car as a cassette in 1992 and was upgraded to compact disc in 1994.
Awareness of Carr’s work gradually expanded, resulting in a 1996 signing with Ecko; her first release for the label, Footprints on the Ceiling, arrived the following year. The next project solidified her emerging image as a tough, risqué blues figure: the 1998 album Bone Me Like You Own Me announced its forthright stance in both title and lyrics. By then Carr was receiving airplay on blues and retro-soul outlets throughout the South, establishing herself as a female counterpart to Marvin Sease; the resulting success finally allowed her to leave the electronics-company position she had held for more than two decades. She continued along the same successful path with subsequent releases that included What a Woman Wants in 1999, Stroke It in 2000, The Best Woman in 2001, On My Own in 2002, Talk to Me in 2003, and Down Low Brother in 2006.
