It says something about our priorities that, when it comes to singers, few books add anything to the experience of listening to the music. Annie J. Randall is a university musicologist who has written about Puccini’s operas, and particularly The Girl Of The Golden West. That said, Dusty: Queen of the Postmods is mercifully free of ugly jargon, for the most part.
Dusty Springfield (1939-1999) was the greatest British pop vocalist of the 20th century, her stature more difficult to apprehend because she was a woman in a profession notoriously inhospitable to women. Randall doesn’t so much deconstruct the standard mythography of Dusty Springfield as she dismantles it and makes its irrelevance visible. The story goes like this: Springfield began life as a homely middle-class Irish Catholic girl named Mary O’Brien who, through an act of will, became the larger than life star known as Dusty Springfield. Her fears that revelations about her personal (sexual) life would destroy her career led to drink, drugs, and suicide attempts, nearly destroying her career.
Dusty Springfield has not been lucky in her biographers. Vicky Wickham, a contemporary and also her last manager, has an unaknowledged but obvious grievance and a lamentable way of introducing swathes of dialogue that she could not possibly remember or have had access to. The young Lucy O’Brien does a diligent job but commits anachronisms of attitude that a diligent editor would have corrected.
Dusty came from a musical family, but it was her older brother Dion (Tom) who was supposed to be the success; as soon as she joined his folk trio, The Springfields, she overshadowed him. When she left the group at the height of its popularity in 1963, one British newspaper simply headlined the inevitable move as “Dusty Does It!”
The music of black America was an important part of the Mod subculture in 1960s Britain. In the recent movie Cadillac Records, story of the fabled Chess label in Chicago, it is 1963 when a group of young Mods arrive at the door to pay their respects to Muddy Waters: they are the Rolling Stones.
That many of the men Springfield worked with found her “difficult” should not be accepted at face value. A pretty, intelligent, woman who knows what she wants and is determined to get it from herself, and also from those around her, is difficult by definition. So much the worse for her if she appears less than charmed by their attentions.
Her motto in the recording studio was “Anything won’t do!” Later in life, Dusty herself spoke guardedly about the condescension she experienced when she took an active role in shaping her accompaniment. In today’s terms, Springfield was the co-producer of her recordings but she acknowledged poignantly that, not only was she unable to receive credit from her male coworkers, but it would also have been unacceptable to the public – and she wanted to be liked. Though her biographers describe the emotional toll that concealing her sexuality took, they underrate the psychic pain involved in concealing the extent of her talents. We all crave recognition but it was Dusty’s burden to be talented at a time when recognition could .be dangerous.
Derek Wadsworth, trombonist with Dusty’s 1960a backing group, the Echoes, and one of her producers, describes how Springfield recreated the standard vocalist’s instrumental accompaniment of the post-war era, bringing the rhythm section forward to define the arrangement and reframing the brass section to comment on the action, admitting that he had never encountered such working knowledge in a vocalist before.
Yes, she was a spotty, glass-wearing, awkward adolescent and her emotional pain was intense, but her determined self-transformation into a young woman of remarkable presence is often noted as there if there were some unspecified neurosis involved in making the best of yourself
This is a singer who at age twenty-four rose like a meteor to the pinnacle of the pop music world, so protean that listeners had trouble deciding if she was male or female, black or white. Brian Epstein, famous as the manager of the Beatles once said (1967) that his unfulfilled ambition was to manage Dusty Springfield.
Randall compares Dusty’s 1965 Sounds Of Motown Special on British television’s Ready Steady Go to the Beatles’ first appearance on America’s Ed Sullivan Show. Dusty had appeared at the Brooklyn Fox Theater in September 1964 on the bill with Martha & the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations and the Ronettes, bringing the idea for the progra
m home with her.
Randall’s chapter Soul+ Melodrama+ The 1960s Pop Aria is a brilliant work of detection and synthesis, and reason enough by itself for the book. Springfield attended Catholic schools where she was exposed to the style of presentation handed down through opera and silent films from the great melodramatic stage actors of the 19th century, such as Sarah Bernhardt. In a series of pairings of photographs of Springfield singing the Italian pop aria You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me with images from stage performances by Bernhardt, et al, we see how the singer achieved a synthesis of European and black American ways of gesture as well as vocalizing that should cause a major shift in the criticism of popular music.
Popular music owes much of its vitality to people who are not privileged white males. But criticism of America’s most vital musical genres has been almost completely in the hands of the group least responsible for creating them. To offer just one notorious example, the respected Robert Christgau referred in a 1969 Esquire Magazine column to James Brown, without irony, as being “uppity.”
Randall reappraises the 1968 album, Dusty In Memphis, considered one of the best pop soul releases ever, illuminating Springfield’s dissatisfaction with the finished product. The male critical establishment claims that Springfield failed to understand the perfection of the album. Randall sees a musically intelligent artist, experiencing a loss of control in the recording process. While the record is a gorgeous thing in itself, it constricts the singer to a single note: vulnerability. Springfield’s driving chest tones and infectious sense of rhythm are absent, shoehorned into a conventionally feminine persona. Some of the sidemen – the reknowned ‘Memphis cats’ – that producers Jerry Wexler paired Springfield with, felt free to express their queasiness about working with a rumored lesbian. . After following Randall’s detective work through the chapter Dusty’s Soul Dream, you can almost hear the album Springfield hoped to make The irony here, as later when Springfield moved to the States for several years, is that the place where she thought she would find greater freedom, failed to deliver.
Dusty Springfield (1939-1999) was the greatest British pop vocalist of the 20th century, her stature more difficult to apprehend because she was a woman in a profession notoriously inhospitable to women. Randall doesn’t so much deconstruct the standard mythography of Dusty Springfield as she dismantles it and makes its irrelevance visible. The story goes like this: Springfield began life as a homely middle-class Irish Catholic girl named Mary O’Brien who, through an act of will, became the larger than life star known as Dusty Springfield. Her fears that revelations about her personal (sexual) life would destroy her career led to drink, drugs, and suicide attempts, nearly destroying her career.
Dusty Springfield has not been lucky in her biographers. Vicky Wickham, a contemporary and also her last manager, has an unaknowledged but obvious grievance and a lamentable way of introducing swathes of dialogue that she could not possibly remember or have had access to. The young Lucy O’Brien does a diligent job but commits anachronisms of attitude that a diligent editor would have corrected.
Dusty came from a musical family, but it was her older brother Dion (Tom) who was supposed to be the success; as soon as she joined his folk trio, The Springfields, she overshadowed him. When she left the group at the height of its popularity in 1963, one British newspaper simply headlined the inevitable move as “Dusty Does It!”
The music of black America was an important part of the Mod subculture in 1960s Britain. In the recent movie Cadillac Records, story of the fabled Chess label in Chicago, it is 1963 when a group of young Mods arrive at the door to pay their respects to Muddy Waters: they are the Rolling Stones.
That many of the men Springfield worked with found her “difficult” should not be accepted at face value. A pretty, intelligent, woman who knows what she wants and is determined to get it from herself, and also from those around her, is difficult by definition. So much the worse for her if she appears less than charmed by their attentions.
Her motto in the recording studio was “Anything won’t do!” Later in life, Dusty herself spoke guardedly about the condescension she experienced when she took an active role in shaping her accompaniment. In today’s terms, Springfield was the co-producer of her recordings but she acknowledged poignantly that, not only was she unable to receive credit from her male coworkers, but it would also have been unacceptable to the public – and she wanted to be liked. Though her biographers describe the emotional toll that concealing her sexuality took, they underrate the psychic pain involved in concealing the extent of her talents. We all crave recognition but it was Dusty’s burden to be talented at a time when recognition could .be dangerous.
Derek Wadsworth, trombonist with Dusty’s 1960a backing group, the Echoes, and one of her producers, describes how Springfield recreated the standard vocalist’s instrumental accompaniment of the post-war era, bringing the rhythm section forward to define the arrangement and reframing the brass section to comment on the action, admitting that he had never encountered such working knowledge in a vocalist before.
Yes, she was a spotty, glass-wearing, awkward adolescent and her emotional pain was intense, but her determined self-transformation into a young woman of remarkable presence is often noted as there if there were some unspecified neurosis involved in making the best of yourself
This is a singer who at age twenty-four rose like a meteor to the pinnacle of the pop music world, so protean that listeners had trouble deciding if she was male or female, black or white. Brian Epstein, famous as the manager of the Beatles once said (1967) that his unfulfilled ambition was to manage Dusty Springfield.
Randall compares Dusty’s 1965 Sounds Of Motown Special on British television’s Ready Steady Go to the Beatles’ first appearance on America’s Ed Sullivan Show. Dusty had appeared at the Brooklyn Fox Theater in September 1964 on the bill with Martha & the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations and the Ronettes, bringing the idea for the progra
m home with her.Randall’s chapter Soul+ Melodrama+ The 1960s Pop Aria is a brilliant work of detection and synthesis, and reason enough by itself for the book. Springfield attended Catholic schools where she was exposed to the style of presentation handed down through opera and silent films from the great melodramatic stage actors of the 19th century, such as Sarah Bernhardt. In a series of pairings of photographs of Springfield singing the Italian pop aria You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me with images from stage performances by Bernhardt, et al, we see how the singer achieved a synthesis of European and black American ways of gesture as well as vocalizing that should cause a major shift in the criticism of popular music.
Popular music owes much of its vitality to people who are not privileged white males. But criticism of America’s most vital musical genres has been almost completely in the hands of the group least responsible for creating them. To offer just one notorious example, the respected Robert Christgau referred in a 1969 Esquire Magazine column to James Brown, without irony, as being “uppity.”
Randall reappraises the 1968 album, Dusty In Memphis, considered one of the best pop soul releases ever, illuminating Springfield’s dissatisfaction with the finished product. The male critical establishment claims that Springfield failed to understand the perfection of the album. Randall sees a musically intelligent artist, experiencing a loss of control in the recording process. While the record is a gorgeous thing in itself, it constricts the singer to a single note: vulnerability. Springfield’s driving chest tones and infectious sense of rhythm are absent, shoehorned into a conventionally feminine persona. Some of the sidemen – the reknowned ‘Memphis cats’ – that producers Jerry Wexler paired Springfield with, felt free to express their queasiness about working with a rumored lesbian. . After following Randall’s detective work through the chapter Dusty’s Soul Dream, you can almost hear the album Springfield hoped to make The irony here, as later when Springfield moved to the States for several years, is that the place where she thought she would find greater freedom, failed to deliver.
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