Carl Sims

Later in life Carl Sims attained prominence in Southern soul through a series of recordings that surfaced in the final years of the 1990s, fully thirty years after he began performing as a teenager around Memphis, Tennessee. At sixteen he impressed Otis Redding, who engaged him after listening to Sims perform with the Stax house band the Bar-Kays at neighborhood venues. He narrowly avoided the December 1967 plane crash that claimed Redding’s life—an event that might have placed him in the historical record—yet instead spent the next three decades working the Southern soul circuit before issuing his first album, House of Love, in 1995. Thereafter he maintained a steady schedule of headline appearances and studio work, issuing projects on Paula, Waldoxy, Ecko, and CDS.

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, on October 18, 1949, Carl Sims developed his initial passion for music while attending junior high. He began by singing with a vocal group called the Mustangs, later striking out alone and drawing the notice of the Bar-Kays. Throughout the mid-1960s the ensemble regularly invited him onstage at local clubs; when the Bar-Kays accompanied Otis Redding on his 1967 tour they brought Sims along both as a roadie and as an additional vocalist. On the night Redding and most of the Bar-Kays boarded a small plane in Cleveland, Ohio, bound for Madison, Wisconsin, Sims and bassist James Alexander traveled separately. The two survivors were later required to identify the bodies of their colleagues.

Sims returned to Memphis and resumed regular club work, cutting the Dan Greer–produced single “I Know How to Love a Woman” for Beale Street Records in the late 1960s. Additional sides appeared on labels tied to Greer, including the early-1970s coupling “Pity a Fool”/“The Word Is Out,” while he continued performing solo at local nightspots. He joined the band Steel, which released the 1971 Epic single “Never on a Monday” and recorded an unsuccessful album. In 1977 he toured U.S. Army bases with Element of the Universe; the following year he contributed background vocals to the soul ensemble Fiesta. His profile rose further in 1981 when he served as opening act for Denise LaSalle, an exposure that yielded the 1988 Edge Records single “Seventeen Days of Loving.” LIFE Records issued “Smooth Ride” in 1990, and in 1993 Paula Records released the Southern soul hit “Trapped,” followed two years later by the full-length debut House of Love.

House of Love revived Carl Sims’ recording career. From that point he delivered a new album every three or four years, moving to Waldoxy for the 1998 release Let Me Be the One and remaining there through 2001’s M&M Man before switching to Entune for 2003’s Brick House. A three-album sequence on Ecko followed in the mid-2000s—It’s Just a Party in 2004, I’m Ready in 2006, and Can’t Stop Me in 2007—with a compilation of those sessions appearing in 2014. He next issued Hell on My Hands on CDS, then joined Soul Singer for Are You Serious? in 2014. Sims reemerged in March 2017 with the single “Living in a Rooming House.”