I learned today actually that she had a miscarriage the following day after recording this. She also recorded with Coldplay (decades later) a week after being released from the hospital where she lost her legs in an accident. Wow… (Guardian article excerpt below:

“It was (husband Curtis) Amy who took the call from the (Gimme Shelter) producer Jack Nitzsche, ringing late one night in 1969 and hoping that Clayton would sing on a track being recorded by the Rolling Stones. Still in her pyjamas, hair in rollers and four months pregnant, she arrived at Sunset Sound Studios in Hollywood minutes later, cementing her place in rock history with her ferocious “it’s just a shot away” vocal line on Gimme Shelter. “I called Curtis: ‘These boys want me to sing about rape and murder.’ I wanted them to hear me, talking real loud to my husband on the phone. But we got the gist – that it was part of the song and not something just flying out of the sky. I was tired, it was cold and my voice cracked. We listened back and they said: ‘Oh that’s bloody fabulous. Can you do it again?’”

“The day after the session with the Stones, Clayton suffered a miscarriage. She attributes it to the strain she put on her body pushing the heavy studio doors and reaching to hit the vocal peaks. “We lost a little girl. It took me years and years and years to get over that. You had all this success with Gimme Shelter and you had the heartbreak with this song.” Although she recorded her own version of the song for her 1970 studio album (itself entitled Gimme Shelter), it took her a long time to listen to the Stones’ song because she so closely associated it with losing her child. “It left a dark taste in my mouth. It was a rough, rough time.”