Dusty Springfield

Dusty Springfield

Dusty Springfield OBE (16 April, 1939 - 2 March, 1999) was a popular English singer whose career spanned four decades. She achieved her most notable success during the 1960s, with a successful comeback in the late 1980s.

Biography

Early life and group career

Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien, (born April 16, 1939 in West Hampstead, London, England), was brought up in the west London borough of Ealing. She was of Irish heritage. The name "Dusty" was given to her when she was a child, probably as she had been a tomboy in her early years. As a child, she was a fan of American jazz and also pop singer Peggy Lee's music. At age 11, she went into a local record shop in Ealing and made her first record, an amateur imitation of Peggy Lee singing the Irving Berlin song "When The Midnight Choo Choo Leaves For Alabam'".

Springfield's first professional musical experience was with the British vocal group the Lana Sisters, which she joined in 1958 and recorded several singles with over the next two years. In 1960, she joined her brother Dion O'Brien and Tim Feild (who had been performing as a double act called the Kensington Squares) to form the Springfields, a pop-folk trio. According to Tim Feild, they picked the name when practising in a field in Somerset in the spring that year. Mary took the name Dusty Springfield after forming the group, and her brother Dion took the name Tom Springfield. The Springfields signed their first contract with Johnny Franz at Philips Records and, with singles such as "Breakaway" and "Bambino", soon became a very popular act in the UK. After Tim Feild left the group, he was replaced by Mike Hurst and the trio became even more successful. Their biggest hit, "Island of Dreams", was released towards the end of 1962, rose to the Top 5 and stayed in the charts for six months. A little earlier, the Springfields had scored a Top 20 hit in the United States with their recording of "Silver Threads and Golden Needles". Pre-Beatles, this was a very unusual achievement for a British act.

Intent on producing an authentic American recording, the band travelled to Nashville, Tennessee, to begin work on an album. It was during a stopover in New York City that Springfield first heard "Tell Him" by the Exciters and immediately became smitten and inspired by its sound. She also loved the Shirelles and similar girl groups and later became obsessed with the Motown sound, being particularly fond of the voice of Martha Reeves (of Martha & the Vandellas). Springfield was keen to gain full command over her music, so in late 1963, she left the Springfields to establish herself as a solo singer. Her brother and Mike Hurst both gave up performing and moved into production. As producer (and primary songwriter) for the UK-based Australian folk-pop band the Seekers, Tom Springfield scored major hits in the UK, the USA and Australia. Hurst, meanwhile, achieved success as producer for Cat Stevens, Manfred Mann, the Move, the Spencer Davis Group, Showaddywaddy, the Four Tops and others.

Solo success

Springfield's first single came just three weeks after her departure from the Springfields. The song, "I Only Want To Be With You", became a success in both Britain and the United States. This song was a "sure shot" on WMCA in New York, even before the station started playing the Beatles, they thought so highly of its release. "I Only Want To Be With You" was ultimately a Top 10 hit in New York, and reached #12 on the national U.S. charts. It was followed by a series of successful singles, including "Stay Awhile", "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself", "All Cried Out" and "Losing You". Springfield maintained that she became a Burt Bacharach fan upon hearing "Don't Make Me Over" in 1962, and with that, she recorded a number of Bacharach-David compositions, including "Wishin' and Hopin'", which was a Top 10 hit for her in 1964. Another Bacharach-David song, which was noteworthy, "The Look of Love" (from the 1967 spoof Bond movie Casino Royale, nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song in 1967.) While Springfield's original hit the Top 10 on radio stations like KGB in San Diego and KHJ in Los Angeles in 1967, the version of the song by Sergio Mendes and Brazil 66, from 1968, became a bigger hit, reaching the national Top 10.

By 1964, Springfield was one of the biggest solo artists of her day. Other popular Springfield singles included "Your Hurtin' Kinda Love" and "In the Middle of Nowhere", culminating in her biggest hit, and her first (and only) UK #1 single, "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me". Springfield had heard the song at the San Remo Music Festival and obtained an acetate of the song, but didn't move to record it until almost a year later. Her future manager, Vicki Wickham, and collaborator Simon Napier-Bell reportedly wrote English lyrics for the song in the back of a cab the night before the recording was due to take place. The song also reached #4 in the American charts.

Early in her career, Springfield created a controversy when she refused to play in front of a segregated crowd in South Africa. She had a clause written into her contract that specifically stated she would perform only before mixed audiences. She performed two concerts thus, and was promptly asked by the South African government to leave the country. She stated that she didn't intend her insistence on the clause to be any sort of social statement, but rather that she felt anyone should be able to listen to her music.

Springfield was often a featured artist, and also, the first guest on the British television music show Ready Steady Go!, produced by Vicki Wickham, who would later become her manager. Because of her interest in Motown music, Springfield was selected in 1965 to host The Sound of Motown, a Ready Steady Go! special that introduced Motown and American soul music to British audiences. In the 1994 video biography, Dusty - Full Circle, several of the musicians who participated, most notably Martha Reeves, credited the media exposure, and Springfield's advocacy of the music, with helping them to break into the British pop charts.

Springfield's UK success led to her being given four television series of her own: Dusty (BBC, 1966 and 1967), It Must Be Dusty (ITV, 1968) and Decidedly Dusty (BBC, 1969). Her shows featured many leading stars of the day as guests. One of the most memorable was Jimi Hendrix, who appeared in a duet with Springfield on the song "Mockingbird". The master videotape of this appearance was later erased, although a brief fragment of Hendrix's performance on the show, filmed directly off the TV screen by a fan, has survived.

Like many other solo singers who did not write their own material, Springfield's recording career was dependent on the quality of the material she could obtain, and by the end of the decade, top-notch material was becoming harder to find: Carole King, who had written two of her biggest British hits, "Some of Your Lovin'" and "Goin' Back", was embarking on a singing career, and the chart-busting Bacharach-David partnership was foundering. Her status in the music industry was further complicated by the gradual fracturing of the formerly homogeneous "pop" market into many distinct musical genres in the late 1960s. Springfield's music was coming to be seen as "unhip" at a time when hipness was necessary for musical success, and in addition, her performing career was becoming bogged down on the UK touring circuit, which at that time largely consisted of Working Men's clubs and the hotel and cabaret circuit.

Hoping to reinvigorate her career and boost her credibility, she signed with Atlantic Records, home label of one of her idols, Aretha Franklin, and began recording an album in Memphis, Tennessee with producers Jerry Wexler, Arif Mardin and Tom Dowd. The Memphis sessions were a challenge for Wexler, who was not used to working with an artist with Springfield's reported penchant for perfectionism, which she later attributed to her deep insecurity and her very real anxiety about being compared with the soul greats who had recorded there. In the end, the Memphis tracking sessions were completed without any major work being done on the vocals; almost all her vocals were cut some weeks later in at a studio in New York.

File:DustyInMemphis.jpg

Cover of Springfield's 1969 album Dusty in Memphis.

Despite the problems with its production, the album, Dusty in Memphis is considered Springfield's definitive work; it has appeared in several "best of all time" lists, including those compiled by Rolling Stone magazine in the United States, and Q music magazine in Britain. The album is best known for "Son of a Preacher Man", which was a hit in both the United Kingdom and the United States, though the album itself was a commercial disappointment. The song enjoyed a significant revival in the 1990s thanks to its inclusion on the best-selling soundtrack for the Quentin Tarantino film Pulp Fiction (1994).

"Son of a Preacher Man" also encapsulates some of the ironies of Springfield's career, and how she perceived herself in comparison with other artists. It had initially been offered to, and turned down by, Aretha Franklin. Franklin later recorded the song, and Springfield felt Franklin's version was superior, especially Franklin's phrasing in the chorus. She thereafter always performed the song with the phrasing Franklin had used.

The Seventies and Eighties

Springfield's second album for Atlantic Records, A Brand New Me, was released in 1970 (and appeared in the UK on the Philips Records label with the title From Dusty With Love). Although it yielded the Top 25 single "A Brand New Me", the album itself was as commercially unsuccessful as Dusty in Memphis. It was one of the first works produced by Gamble and Huff productions, who would go on to great success in the R&B genre with their "Philadelphia sound". Gamble and Huff themselves wrote all the songs, however, production is anonymously credited to "Staff". A third album for the Atlantic label, produced by Jeff Barry was abandoned because of unsuccessful single releases (including the intended title track "(I'll Be) Faithful". The masters were later destroyed in a fire, but Barry reportedly kept copies of the intended final mixes, and most of the material was released on the 1999 American deluxe reissue of Dusty in Memphis on Rhino Records. Her next album, See All Her Faces (1972) was released only in Britain, a mix of tracks recorded between 1969 and 1971, which resulted in a lack of the cohesive feeling that her previous two albums possessed. In 1972 Springfield signed to the ABC Dunhill Records label, and the resulting album Cameo was released early in 1973 with a minimum of publicity. It remains the hardest to find of Springfield's official discography. The album's producers (Lambert & Potter) went on to a string of hits with the Four Tops and Glen Campbell, amongst others.

The following year she began to record another album, with the working title of Elements. It was later re-titled Longing, and was to have been produced by Brooks Arthur, who had produced several hit records by singer-songwriters such as Janis Ian. During these sessions, Springfield cut a rendition of Ian's "In the Winter" that is among her most critically acclaimed recordings. (Ian is on record as saying that, in comparison to Springfield's version, she "could no longer do the piece justice".) Longing was eventually abandoned due to Springfield's problematic personal life at the time, but much of the material from it was later released on the 2001 compilation Beautiful Soul.

Springfield put her career on hold during the mid-1970s, though she did sporadic work with fellow artists like Anne Murray and she also performed backing vocals on the Elton John hit "The Bitch is Back". She continued to work on material for new albums throughout the late 1970s for the United Artists Records label, resulting in the albums It Begins Again (1978) and Living Without Your Love (1979). Both were critically lauded, but commercially unsuccessful; only It Begins Again charted on either side of the Atlantic, and only briefly made the British charts. During this time Springfield had very few charting singles and soon drifted from popular view.

She then endured a string of bad luck with record companies. She released two final singles for her British label Mercury Records. The first was "Baby Blue", a disco-influenced single which reached #61 in Britain. The other was "Your Love Still Brings Me to My Knees", which was the singer's final single for Phonogram: a company she had been with in various forms for 20 years. She signed a deal with Twentieth Century Fox Records, which resulted in an unsuccessful single, a cover of "It Goes Like It Goes" (from the film Norma Rae). She then began to record an album entitled White Heat (1982). The label was then bought by a group which owned Casablanca, and Springfield was switched to that label. The album was a departure from Springfield's sound, and featured music and lyrics similar in style and substance to the New Wave genre. The album was critically acclaimed. Its release, however, was limited to the USA and Canada. This was due to the shuffling of artists between the record company's various labels, as well as Casablanca having no distribution in the UK. Not long after the album's release, Casablanca Records also folded and "White Heat" was eventually absorbed into the Universal Music Group, along with Springfield's Phonogram recordings, keeping a good number of her important works together.

Springfield tried to revive her career again in 1985 by returning to the UK and signing to Peter Stringfellow's Hippodrome Records label, which resulted in a single called "Sometimes Like Butterflies" and a disastrous appearance on Stringfellow's live TV show. The song was released against Springfield's wishes with a practice vocal recorded while she had laryngitis. The singer left the label in response.

A return to popularity

Springfield's fortunes finally changed in 1987, when she was approached by the British pop duo Pet Shop Boys to collaborate with them on a song called "What Have I Done to Deserve This?", which was a huge chart success in Britain (#2), the USA (also #2), and around the world, helping to bring Springfield back into public view. The song subsequently appeared on the Pet Shop Boys' album Actually, as well as on both of their greatest hits compilations. It was also included on The Dusty Springfield Anthology(1997), which was the singer's first-ever anthology in the States. Springfield and the band performed the song at the BRIT Awards in 1988. Much later, shortly after Springfield had died, the Pet Shop Boys performed a special version of "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" as part of their Nightlife tour in 1999. This time, the band's singer and lyricist, Neil Tennant, duetted with Springfield by means of a visual backdrop that featured Dusty's performance from their original promotional video, along with clips of her TV appearances from the 1960s. Footage of this event was later released on the Pet Shop Boys DVD Montage.

Also in 1987, Springfield provided the lead vocals on Richard Carpenter's single "Something In Your Eyes", which was a #12 Adult Contemporary hit in the U.S. and came from Carpenter's album Time. In 1988 a new compilation of Springfield's greatest hits, The Silver Collection, was released and charted on the strength of the renewed interest in her music. The following year she was approached once again by the Pet Shop Boys to sing the theme song from the film Scandal, which was based the 1960s British political scandal dubbed the Profumo Affair. That track, "Nothing Has Been Proved", provided Springfield with another Top 20 hit in the UK, as did its follow-up, the up-beat "In Private", which, again, was written and produced by the Pet Shop Boys. Springfield capitalised on this success by recording the album Reputation, which was released in 1990 and was another Top 20 success, with the single of the same name reaching number 38. Half of the album (which included "In Private" and "Nothing Has Been Proved") was written and produced by the Pet Shop Boys, while its other contributors included Dan Hartman.

These successes persuaded Springfield that the time was right to leave California and return to Europe, initially to Amsterdam (where animal quarantine restrictions were less stringent), and finally back to Buckinghamshire, England. In 1993, she was invited to record a duet with her former '60s professional rival and friend Cilla Black. This was "Heart And Soul", which comes from Black's Through the Years album on Sony Records' Columbia label and was released as a single. This led to the offer of a recording contract with Sony Records and the making of what was to be her final album, A Very Fine Love, and this, too, was released on Columbia. Though Springfield was emphatic that A Very Fine Love was not a country album, it did include several songs by well-known Nashville songwriters, and arrangements typical of the genre.

Dusty Springfield's last-ever recording, which she made in 1995 for an insurance company's TV advertisement, was a rendition of the George and Ira Gershwin song "Someone To Watch Over Me". It was eventually released commercially on Simply Dusty (2000), the extensive anthology the singer had helped to plan but would not live to see released.

Death

Before releasing what was to be her final album, A Very Fine Love, recorded in Nashville in 1994 for Sony Records, Springfield was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had felt unwell during recording and it was only when she returned home to England that she discovered she had the cancer. She received treatment and, for a time, the cancer was in remission. She was able to promote her new album and gave a particularly memorable live performance of one of its tracks, "Where is a Woman To Go?" on the BBC music show Later With Jools Holland, backed by Alison Moyet and Sinéad O'Connor.

However, the cancer recurred in 1997 and Springfield lost her battle with the disease and she died on 2 March 1999 at the age of 59. It was the day she had been due to receive her OBE at Buckingham Palace, and just ten days before she was to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Shortly before her death, her manager Vicki Wickham had gone to St James's Palace to collect the award in order to present it to Dusty in hospital with a small gathering of family and friends present. Attended by hundreds of fans as well as by celebrities such as Elvis Costello, Lulu, and The Pet Shop Boys, her funeral took place at St. Mary the Virgin Church in Henley-on-Thames, where she had lived for the last few years of her life. A marker dedicated to her memory can be found outside the church. Springfield was cremated, and some of her ashes were buried at Henley, and the rest were scattered by her brother, Tom Springfield at the Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Ireland.

Career challenges and personal struggles

Springfield had been raised as a strict Catholic and, despite her reported reluctance to participate in confession and Mass, she kept her faith in a Higher Being to the end of her life. The conflict between her conservative religious faith and her life was one that affected her deeply. Springfield's biographers and several journalists have suggested she had two personas: shy, quiet Mary O'Brien, and the persona she created in Dusty Springfield.

In all aspects of her career, but especially in the studio, Springfield was a notorious perfectionist. Some labeled her as "difficult". Much of this can now be seen as a reaction from male colleagues who, in a very male-dominated industry, were wholly unused to women taking control in the studio. She often produced her songs, but could not take credit for doing so, as it was seen as bad form. Springfield's musical ear was very finely tuned and she was totally intolerant of anything less than perfection, which some session musicians did not appreciate. To add to the challenges, she did not read and write music as the session musicians did, making it even harder for her to communicate what she wanted. She was notorious for her agonisingly painstaking vocal sessions, during which she would often record short phrases or even single words or syllables, over and over again, to get the precise feeling and musical quality that she wanted. She was not alone in this practice: many of the Motown artists in the 1960s had wrecked the nerves of recording engineers by insistently punching in vocal phrases (a practice which overwrites the recorded vocal but in the 1960s could have ruined an entire recording if anything went wrong). Springfield's version of this technique was decidedly extreme by all accounts.

Springfield's biographers attribute much of her "difficult" behaviour to her dysfunctional family background and her deep insecurity, which began in childhood. Her mother was prone to explosive rages and would often throw things to express anger -- a trait which Springfield herself soon adopted. Her accountant father, conversely, was quiet and withdrawn, and it is evident that, at least in part, her mother's violent "acting out" was an attempt to gain her husband's attention. Mary/Dusty's growing insecurity was heightened by her parents' blatant favouring of her older brother Dion (Tom).

In her early career much of her odd behaviour was carried out more or less in fun -- like her famous food fights -- and it was at the time dismissed as merely "eccentric". One story related in her biography tells how, when Springfield first performed in America, she was too nervous to meet the other performers on the bill, so she found a box full of crockery and hurled it down a flight of stairs in order to bring the other performers out of their dressing rooms.

But as the Springfield persona became more and more famous, she was indulged, pampered and spoiled, and plummeted into chronic drug and alcohol abuse. For much of the Seventies, living in Hollywood, Springfield alternately battled mental health and substance abuse issues. When her career imploded, she began to internalise her violent behaviour. The seriousness of her increasingly frequent acts of self-harm resulted in her being hospitalised on numerous occasions. Though she reportedly attempted suicide several times, it was later realized that she was battling with the mental health problem of cutting.

Sexuality

Throughout much of Springfield's career, her sexuality was a matter of speculation. In 1970, she disclosed that she was bisexual when she told Ray Connolly of the London Evening Standard during an interview that "A lot of people say I'm bent, and I've heard it so many times that I've almost learned to accept it....I know I'm perfectly as capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy." By 1970 standards, Springfield had made a very bold statement. The fact that she never married meant that the issue continued to be raised throughout her life from this point onwards, although she stated that she had enjoyed relationships with both men and women "and liked it".

There is some debate among friends and fans regarding this issue; Springfield was intensely private about her personal life, and after the 1970 interview, she seldom directly addressed the issue or made a definitive statement regarding her sexuality in the press and questions of a certain nature were prohibited in press interviews. However, Springfield occasionally made subtle references and openly appreciated her gay audience. For example, during a 1979 concert at Royal Albert Hall in London, her last large scale concert in the UK, Springfield noted the number of obviously gay men in the front rows and made a comment that she was "glad to see that the royalty isn't confined to the box", making a play on the term "queens" as it can be used to refer to gay men. Princess Margaret was the member of the Royal Family who was in the box and she was apparently unintentionally offended by the remark and Dusty was sent a letter to be signed, apologising for insulting the monarchy - although she still eventually received her OBE.

Several biographies about Springfield have touched on the issue of Springfield's sexual orientation. Lucy O'Brien's biography, Dusty (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1989) mentions the rumours in passing. Penny Valentine's 2000 book Dancing with Demons, which included significant contributions by Springfield's friend and manager Vicki Wickham, identifies Springfield as a lesbian, indicating Springfield never had a relationship with a man, except when she had wanted to make a lover jealous. Singer-songwriter Carole Pope of the Canadian band Rough Trade disclosed in her 2001 book Anti-Diva that she and Springfield had a relationship and lived together in Toronto when Springfield worked with her (Pope wrote the song "Soft Core", which appeared on Springfield's White Heat album).

Legacy

Springfield is widely regarded by many as one of the finest soul singers of all time, an accomplishment made even more notable by the fact that she was a "blue-eyed soul" singer - a Caucasian singer who sang material in a way normally associated with African-American singers. It is also notable that she was held in high esteem by many black singers (such as Aretha Franklin and Martha Reeves) whom she, in turn, also emulated and idolised. Aside from her contemporaries, many other artists have cited her as an influence or have cited their love of her music, including Neil Tennant, Elvis Costello, Beth Orton, Annie Lennox and Elton John. The diversity of music - jazz, R&B, pop, rock, show tunes, country, electronica, and even rap (in her song "Daydreaming") - and the authority with which she sang in those genres is often mentioned. Springfield was among few singers in the Rock Music genre known for their interpretive prowess. In her 2005 list for iTunes, Carole King accompanied her inclusion of "Son Of a Preacher Man" with the comment "there is a hole in music where Dusty Springfield used to be", and elaborated that Springfield was indeed a unique and respected talent (and premised the statement authoritatively by citing Springfield's many recordings of Carole King songs).

Posthumous

Springfield's work has continued to draw attention after her death, and the critical acclaim for Dusty in Memphis has kept her in the spotlight.

• In what was considered a very rare departure from royal protocol, Queen Elizabeth said she was 'saddened' to learn of Springfield's death.
• In November 2006 Springfield was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame; "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me" was performed by singer Patti LaBelle and "Son Of A Preacher Man" was performed by Joss Stone.
• In Australia, a hit musical based on Springfield's life - Dusty The Original Pop Diva premiered in January 2006 to wide acclaim and sold-out performances. The musical starring Tamsin Carroll as Springfield, won a 2006 Helpmann Award for Carroll as Best Female Actor in a Musical. Deni Hines plays Reno, an imaginary character who represents Springfield's bisexual relationships and the prejudice of the time.
• Currently, there are several movie projects in the works based on Springfield's biographies. One project is slated to have Broadway actress Kristin Chenoweth portraying Springfield.

Trivia

• Springfield had a great love for animals, particularly cats, and was an advocate for several humane groups.
• She recorded a version of the theme song for Growing Pains, "As Long as We've Got Each Other," with BJ Thomas. This version of the theme song was used from the fourth season of the show on until it went off the air.
• Parts of her song "Bits and Pieces" are used twice in Richard Rush's Oscar nominated film The Stunt Man. Its tune bears a resemblance to one of the film's musical themes composed by Dominic Frontiere.
• UK jazz-pop duo Swing Out Sister covered two of the same songs as Dusty Springfield: "The Windmills of Your Mind" (1989) and "Am I The Same Girl?" (1992). They have also performed the track "Where Am I Going?" live.
• Springfield was mentioned as being a favorite singer of the fictional Dempsey sisters in romantic comedy writer Jennifer Crusie's 2000 novel "Welcome to Temptation".
• Springfield recorded an alternate opening theme song for "The Six-Million Dollar Man" series in 1974 but it was replaced with the opening credits that became the staple for the series..."Steve Austin....astronaut..".http://youtube.com/watch?v=FLSdwg35RnU
• A sample from "Son of a Preacher Man" was used on Cypress Hill's cult classic stoner culture song, "Hits From The Bong" on their "Black Sunday" Album
• Two of Springfield's songs appeared on an episode of Ally McBeal. The character Gorgia Thomas also references two of her songs.

Discography

Further information: Dusty Springfield discography

External links

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