Clark was born and raised in Austin, Texas where he sang gospel music in the choir as a young boy. In the early 1950s at age 14 he first learned the guitar, and then later experimented with blues and jazz on the bass guitar. By the early 1960s, he began attracting the attention of such Texas blues performers as Big Joe Turner, Albert Collins and Little Johnny Taylor. In the late 1960s, he joined the R&B Joe Tex Band, and left Austin, where he thought the R&B scene had died.

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