Clarence Reid(1939-2016)

Singer, songwriter, and music producer Clarence Henry Reid began his career in the music industry doing acceptable and respectable mainstream commercial R&B fare in the 1960's and 1970's, but it was his outrageously raunchy and profane alter ego of no-holds-barred parodist Blowfly whereby Reid made his greatest and most lasting impact as one of the more colorful and idiosyncratic practitioners of American outsider music.

Reid was born on February 14, 1939 in rural Cochran, Georgia. Clarence grew up in a poor family and received little in the way of a formal education. Reid first started coming up with filthy parody versions of popular hit songs when he was seven years old and working as a sharecropper in the fields of Georgia after dropping out of grade school. Clarence eventually moved to Florida in the mid-1960's and continued to work doing menial jobs while establishing an initial foothold in the music industry. Reid eventually secured a steady gig as a staff songwriter for Deep City Records in Miami, Florida. Moreover, Clarence also pursued a solo singing career on the side with strictly modest results, although his self-pressed release of his song "Blowfly's Rapp" in 1964 has been widely cited as one of the first ever known instances of a rap song in existence. (Reid eventually did a much more explicit version of this song called "Rapp Dirty" in 1980.) Among the notable songs that Reid had a hand in writing and/or producing are "Clean Up Woman" by Betty Wright and 'Rockin' Chair" by Gwen McCrae. In addition, Clarence played a key role in shaping the sound of KC & The Sunshine Band as well as wrote songs for such major soul artists as Wilson Pickett and Sam & Dave.

However, in 1971 Reid launched a whole new career for himself after recording and releasing an entire album of dirty songs called "The Weird World of Blowfly" under the alternate name of Blowfly. In an attempt to avoid jeopardizing his mainstream musical career, Clarence appeared on the album cover as a kind of wacky superhero wearing a mask and bodysuit in order to hide his actual identity. Said mask and bodysuit would go on to become key trademarks of Reid's Blowfly persona. Although his lewd and lascivious song parodies not surprisingly failed to receive much in the way of play on commercial radio stations, Clarence/Blowfly nonetheless became a significant cult figure in the world of outsider music with over twenty party albums released altogether over the course of several decades (his 1980 album "Blowfly's Party" even went all the way to #26 on Billboard magazine's Black Albums chart).

Alas, not everyone appreciated Reid's cheerfully bawdy brand of musical parody. For example, songwriter Stanley Adams sued Clarence over his send-up of his song "What a Difference a Day Makes" called "What a Difference a Lay Makes." Moreover, Reid earned no money in royalties from various musical artists who sampled his songs throughout the years due to the fact that he had to sign away the rights to his publishing catalog in 2003 in order to pay off debts. Moreover, in 2014 Clarence had to raise money through an online crowfunding campaign in order to save his home from foreclosure. Reid died from liver cancer at age 76 at a hospice facility in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida on January 17, 2016. Although he's sadly no longer with us, Clarence and his infamous alter ego of Blowfly will continue to forever tickle our funny bones in the best and most dirty way possible.