Clarke was born in 1940 and raised in
Kenosha, Wisconsin. From 1959 through 1969, he worked at a car factory in Kenosha,
American Motors Corporation. In 1973, he graduated from the
University of Wisconsin–Madison with a Bachelor of Science in education with honors. He lived in England from 1973 to 1998, during which time, from 1974 to 1979, he worked for
Marshall Cavendish Publications. From 1998, Clarke lived in
Austin, Texas, moving in 2003 to
West Des Moines, Iowa, where he worked for a time on the music e-zines
BluesWax and
FolkWax. He then moved to
Allentown, Pennsylvania in 2009 and to
Colorado Springs in 2014. Clarke was the author/editor of the
Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music (1989, 1998), which is now available free on his website. His other books include
Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday (1994),
The Rise and Fall of Popular Music (1995), and
All or Nothing at All: A Life of Frank Sinatra (1997). The
Billie Holiday biography was reprinted by
Da Capo Press in 2000 under the title
Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon. == Selected work ==