Caroline Peyton is an American singer and songwriter. Peyton was born in Brookhaven, Mississippi on October 8, 1951 and grew up in Charleston, West Virginia. Her father, Thomas Peyton, is from Virginia and her mother, the former Joan (pronounced Jo Ann) Johnson, is a native of Mississippi. Peyton grew up with three sisters and began performing with them at an early age. She attended Charleston's George Washington High School, where she participated in theatrical productions. Peyton was accepted to the Boston Conservatory of Music but enrolled at Chicago's Northwestern University in 1969. Already proficient as a guitarist and vocalist, she began performing in Chicago with fellow guitarist and singer John Guth. Peyton had previously met another singer interested in folk music, Mary Johnson, who later adopted the stage name Mary Flower. Johnson took Peyton to visit the town of Bloomington, Indiana, which had a lively music scene that utilized both local musicians and students studying music at Indiana University. Impressed by what was happening in Bloomington, Peyton moved there in 1970 and began performing with a group of musicians that included singer Bob Lucas and songwriter and producer Mark Bingham.Bingham had put together a large band with shifting membership, the Screaming Gypsy Bandits, who were influenced by jazz, rhythm-and-blues and Frank Zappa. Born in Bloomington on January 30, 1949, Bingham had spent his early years in New York state and had gone to Los Angeles, hired as an in-house songwriter and producer by California record label Elektra Records. Cut loose by Elektra, Bingham returned to Bloomington in fall 1969 and began collaborating with Peyton.Working at a local studio owned by drummer and teacher Jack Gilfoy, Peyton and Bingham recorded what would be Peyton's first record album on a label they had begun along with a local woman named Kathy Canada, who had family connections to, and thus family money from, pharmaceutical manufacturer Eli Lily. The label, Bar-B-Q Records, released Peyton's 1972 album Mock Up, which featured her guitar playing and vocals along with Bingham's guitar (and songwriting) and the piano of Mark Gray, who was studying jazz at Indiana University's music school. With spare performances, Mock Up featured Bingham compositions such as "Between-Two" and "Engram." The record came to the attention of Columbia Records A&R man Mark Spector, who arranged an audition with label head Clive Davis in New York City in October 1972, but they failed the audition, although Peyton says that Spector called her upon her return to Bloomington to encourage her.As Peyton said in a 2006 Nashville Scene article, “I didn’t know what I wanted, and I needed to find my own voice. Mock Up was my first recording. My father paid for it, even though I had dropped out of Northwestern. My frustration with Mark Bingham was that he was so anti-establishment. I don’t think he ever re-wrote anything—it was all stream-of-consciousness.
$1.5 Million
