<DUSTY SPRINGFIELD - AN INTRODUCTION>

DUSTY SPRINGFIELD
WOMAN of REPUTE

AN INTRODUCTION

NOTE: This page gives a brief overview of the life and career of British vocalist Dusty Springfield (1939-1999). For a more detailed account of Dusty's life and musical legacy, see the Biography pages of this site. These biography pages also contain numerous images, along with quotes by Dusty collected from a wide range of sources.

Mention her name and the image that is conjured up in most people's minds is the notorious beehive hairdo that Dusty Springfield wore in her sixties heyday. Next perhaps, the image of her heavily mascared eyes - the "panda look," or maybe the elaborate hand and arm gestures she made while singing one of her signature dramatic ballads.

All of these images, though memorable, tend to overshadow the real gift that Dusty Springfield contributed to contemporary music. Any doubt of the impact of this gift is quelled when one acknowledges the loyalty of her diverse range of admirers, and the range of musicians and performers who have considered her influencial in their lives and musical careers - among such people: Annie Lennox, Elton John, Linda Ronstadt, Jools Holland, Marc Almond, Sting, Bette Midler, Allison Moyet, Elvis Constello, Neil Tennent, Joan Osbourne and Sinead O'Connor.

This gift of course, is her voice. As author David Evans has noted, "Dusty's voice has never been equalled or bettered in British pop music for individuality, expression, timbre, pitch or colour." He goes on to state that her voice "is indefinable except in terms of what it does. It puts whoever listens to it in touch with their feelings. It is an instant conduit to joy, to pain, to laughter or to tears . . . Dusty's vocal performances sear; they soar, sometimes triumphant, sometimes infinitely reflective. She sings and the sound becomes a mirror in which we see all the times we've felt just like her."

In his commentary on 1997's The Dusty Springfield Anthology, Charles Taylor goes further, noting that Dusty in the 1960s forged "a brand of pop that was as steeped in the grown-up sophistication of singers like Sinatra and Peggy Lee (her idol) as it was in love with the energy and vitality of rock 'n' roll and soul." The result of this fusion was something quite unique: "A purveyor of young music who doesn't sound young; a devastating chronicler of heartache who, in some essential way, knows how to protect herself."

"The way she looked was easy to impersonate -
the panda eyes and the bouffant hair.
But the voice was impossible to imitate . . .
Dusty was the perfect pop singer."

Petula Clark
- British vocalist

Dusty Springfield was born Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien in London on April 16, 1939. As a young girl her first introduction to music was through her father's love of Beethovan and other classical composers. Jazz was also a genre of music popular in the O'Brien household, with Jelly Roll Morton, Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee being major influences on the young Dusty.

Encouraged by her older brother Dion, the teenage Dusty performed folk and Latin-American songs at a small London club. Answering a press advertisement, Dusty joined a trio called the Lana Sisters in 1958. Moderate success followed with novelty-type records such as "Seven Little Girls Sitting On A Back Seat". Yet she never really felt comfortable - with either the trio's music or stage persona.

In 1960, Dusty accepted the invitation of her brother, now going by the name of Tom, to join him and friend Tim Field in what was soon to become the internationally successful folk-pop band, The Springfields. Together they sang of escaping the mad rushing crowd to the "Island of Dreams" and of the broken heart that not even "Silver Threads and Golden Needles" could mend when money is substituted for love. Musically, it was light, pseudo-folk (with elements of Latin thrown in for good measure). Yet Tom's lyrics and Dusty's soaring vocals imbued the songs with a depth of sincerity and yearning that transcended the folk-pop musical framework.

"Perhaps the greatest legacy of '60s Britain is the
drive in our artists to create new identities, to combat the
destructive, demoralising resonance of the net-curtain twitch with
even more outrageous transformations. In the face of surburban bigotry,
you have to change and shock and scare and scandalise. Lennon and Bowie
realised this, so did Marc Bolan and Bryan Ferry and Malcolm McLaren
and Boy George and, of course, so did Dusty Springfield."

Christian Ward
- British music critic/writer

Dusty, however, found such a framework increasingly restrictive, especially after hearing the rhythmically vibrant sounds emanating from black urban America during a Springfields trip to the States. She was soon going solo, complete with a chart-topping debut single, "I Only Want To Be With You," a mod new look, and a best-selling album dominated by credible covers of American soul and R&B classics such as "Mockingbird," "Mama Said," and "Twenty-four Hours From Tulsa". It was 1963 and Dusty had arrived! Yet her ascent to the top of both the British and American charts was not without its obstacles - or detractors.

For a start she was a woman - a "girl singer" - one who was determined to extract from the British musicians she worked with, the new sounds she had heard and loved in the States. She soon gained a reputation for being "difficult."

"I was asking musicians to play sounds they'd never heard before," she would later remark. "For instance, Motown hadn't released any records in Britain but I'd heard them on tour in the States. I wanted to use those influences in a country where they were still playing stand-up bass and the only black music they knew about was jazz. So, I would scowl a lot. They knew what I wanted but the last person they were going to take it from was a bee-hived bird."

"With bold, brassy horns announcing its arrival,
1963's 'I Only Want To Be With You,' her first
single, is where the Dusty Springfield story really starts.
By combining lavish Spectorlike ballads with gritty American
R&B, she created her own Anglicised Wall of Sound."

Steve Pafford
- British music critic

Dusty's love and respect for black soul music and the musicians who produced it ensured that she played a pivotal role in getting Motown artists recognized in Britain. Her efforts culminated in her invitation of a selection of artists from the Detroit-based label to London for a special appearance on the Friday night, cult music TV show, Ready, Steady, Go! It also ensured that when Dusty toured South Africa in 1964 she stipulated in her contract that she would only perform before non-segregated audiences.

Upon her arrival, the South African government demanded that she alter the contract. Dusty refused, and after playing a series of concerts in Cape Town to mixed audiences, she and her entourage where placed under house-arrest. Strictly speaking, Dusty wasn't deported, as her return airfare wasn't paid for. Nevertheless she was, in her own words, "drummed out of the country." "I wasn't making any major statement," she would later remark in her typically deprecating manner, "I just thought it was morally the right thing to do."

Musically too, Dusty wasn't afraid to cross lines or make waves. She could duet with Jimi Hendrix or Liberace - and carry off each with equal aplomb. Her eclectic taste in music was matched only by her interpretative skills, to the extent that one critic would later be left to wonder: "What can you say about a vocalist who could master the rawness of rhythm and blues, the smooth, tricky sophistication of Bacharach and David, the false bravado of the Broadway standards, and the cunning simplicity of classic pop?" Indeed, from florid Italian ballads like "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me" to the simmering soul of "Son Of A Preacher Man", Dusty traversed all over the musical landscape.

"She didn't write the songs, and if you had never
heard her sing, you could argue Dusty was a '60s version of
the non-writing, so-called divas of today, the Celine Dions,
Mariah Careys, et al. But the difference is that she was an
interpreter, not just someone who hit the right notes.
Like Sinatra, she didn't write the songs but she
sounded as if she had lived them."

Bernard Zuel
- Australian music critic

By 1968 Dusty was Britain's Number 1 female singer with her own TV series and guaranteed top billing at cabaret venues and nightclubs around the world. Yet Dusty found the "supper club" scene artistically deadening and so orchestrated an escape by accepting the invitation to sign with Atlantic Records in the US and work with Aretha Franklin's producers Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd and Arif Mardin.

The resulting album, Dusty in Memphis, is considered her masterpiece and spurred the soulful "Son Of A Preacher Man" up the international charts. Yet surprisingly at the time of its release, the album itself charted poorly on both sides of the Atlantic.

"I can't think of anybody who carried Dusty Springfield's
imprint, as opposed to Aretha Franklin, where there are many
acolytes. But Dusty was sui generis - the "Queen of White Soul,"
I called her. Her particular hallmark was a haunting sexual
vulnerability in her voice, and she may have had the most
impeccable intonation of any singer I ever heard."

Jerry Wexler
- U.S. music producer

Dusty's follow-up, 1970's A Brand New Me, saw her experimenting with the emerging Philly Soul-sound with producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff in Philadelphia. Yet at best, Dusty's second (and last) album with Atlantic Records was a moderate commercial success. "It could have been that the public and radio-programmers had trouble accepting a brand new Dusty," noted one critic. "Then again, Dusty may simply have been at the right place at the wrong time. She brought the raw goods to Philadelphia, but Gamble and Huff hadn't yet fined tuned their hit-making machine." Recalling that period of her career, Dusty would later sigh: "As usual, I was saying things about five years ahead of everyone else."

Yet Dusty's comment to London's Evening Standard in 1970 was considerably more than five years ahead of its time, at least for an established pop singer: "I know that I'm perfectly capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy," she remarked, ensuring that she was the first artist in pop music to openly identify herself as bisexual.

Dusty never recanted her remark, yet also never used it, or her relationships, to further her career. "My relationships have been pretty mixed, and I'm fine with that," she would state in 1995. "Who's to say what you are? Right now I'm not in any relationship by choice . . . Yet I don't feel celibate, either. So what am I? It's other people who want you to be something or other - this or that. I'm none of the above."

"The songs [on Dusty in Memphis] came from a dream team of pop
auteurs like Carole King and Randy Newman. But it took Springfield's voice
to turn them into a moment of pop transfiguration. She rippled over and
curled around the songs of carnality, of love's psychosis and, mostly,
of love's memory, love in exile, love as asymptote. It was some of
the most emotionally literate music ever put to vinyl; while other
pop singers were still wondering who wrote the book of love,
Springfield was teaching a course in comparative literature."

Rob Hoerburger
- American writer

With the advent of the rock-dominated '70s, Dusty's profile in music dropped. She recorded sporadically as pickings were slim for interpreters, even of Dusty's caliber, in a decade that deified the singer/songwriter. To her credit Dusty never opted to live in the past, thus sparing herself the twilight existence of the nostalgia circuit.

Instead, 1982 found her in Toronto recording and co-producing her intense and edgy album, White Heat, whereon in an often snarling vocal, she explored the darker side of sexual relationships. Later in the decade, the Pet Shop Boys invited her to sing with them on "What Have I Done To Deserve This?" The song was a worldwide hit. Her acclaimed Reputation album followed in 1990 and Dusty found herself firmly back in the public eye and once again high in the charts - at least in Europe.

Long-term international stardom remained elusive after the '60s, however, in part because of Dusty's inability to settle for the predictable, preferring instead to be always attempting to break new ground in the pop realm. This diversity worked against her in commercial terms, making it impossible for record company executives, intent on backing a sure and safe bet, to pigeon-hole and market her within the limiting framework of any one genre of music. As early as the 1960s, Dusty shrewdly assessed that those in the record industry "get nervous if you throw too many different things at them."

Throughout her career Dusty maintained a cynical view of the industry's corporate dimension, remarking in 1995 that "I dislike the music business because it's about manipulation of peoples' needs and hopes. Luckily I see past all that. They just don't know that about me." (It's accordingly appropriate that in the wake of Dusty's death, the only tribute album to appear is one produced and recorded by indie-music women - including the Indigo Girls with their cover of Dusty's 1967 anti-war folk song, "Broken Blossoms").

Dusty's eclecticism could also piss off her fans, with her music capable of attracting a different audience with each new album. Not all fans of the techno-blast of Reputation, for instance, where quite as enthralled by its follow-up, 1995 country-nuanced A Very Fine Love. Yet therein lies Dusty's special appeal. She really didn't give a rip, but instead followed her heart and her own innate musical sensibilities ensuring an artistic credibility unparalleled in the sphere of contemporary music.

Most of the queer boy bands of contemporary rock music,
as well as such androgynous or sexually ambiguous women performers as
Annie Lennox, Allison Moyet, Chrissie Hynde, and even Madonna, demonstrate
the musical, visual or aesthetic influence of Dusty Springfield,
one of the first women in rock who dared to 'strike a pose.'"

Patricia Juliana Smith
- Author and editor of The Queer Sixties

In 1994, as Dusty completed the recording of A Very Fine Love in Nashville, Tennessee, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. A successful round of radiation therapy resulted in the remission of the disease. As her strength returned, Dusty set about promoting her new album in Britain. Looking and sounding relaxed and at peace with herself and her music, she appeared on various television talk shows and performed a memorable live rendition of the album's closing track "Where Is A Woman To Go?" on the popular late-night music show Later With Jools Holland.

In the summer of 1995 Dusty traveled to the windswept Atlantic coastline of Ireland to make the video for her single "Roll Away." An ode to the inherent mystery of life and to the soul's meandering journey to a state of wholeness, "Roll Away" resonates with a spirit of trusting openness to all that may come. It became, appropriately enough, Dusty's swan song, as within two years of its release she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Dusty Springfield died on March 2, 1999 - the day she had originally been scheduled to receive the Order of the British Empire (OBE) from the Queen of England. Arrangements however, had been made for her manager and long-time friend Vicki Wickham to collect the award a month earlier. It was presented to Dusty at the Royal Marsden Hospital in the presence of close friends and hospital staff. Dusty's passing at her home in Henley-on-Thames came within two weeks of her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and less than seven weeks before her 60th birthday on April 16.

There is one photograph from the sixties that perhaps best sums up Dusty Springfield. This particular image depicts her in all her mod glory seated at a drum set where, oblivious to the photographer, she displays a look of intense concentration as she attempts to wrestle from the drums just the right sound she's after.

Looking at this image one can begin to understand why in an industry dominated by men, Dusty gained a reputation for being "difficult." And why in her determination to get a wilder, more ambient sound she would record in the ladies' bathroom at London's Marble Arch recording studios.

This dedication and commitment, along with her willingness to experiment, contributes greatly to Dusty Springfield's enduring popularity. Yet in the end, what ensures her music its timeless and universal quality is Dusty's ability to vocally convey depths of emotion that transcend categories of age, gender, race and sexual orientation. Hers is truly soul music.

Such transcendence, Charles Taylor observes, creates "great pop songs" - songs that "offer up scenarios of happiness or heartbreak so lush and accessible that they can make us want more from life than we have, and then question why we don't have it." Indeed, Iain Burnside's words about opera legend Maria Callas are equally applicable to pop/soul legend Dusty Springfield: "Grabbing us by our innards she leads us to a place beyond notes and beyond words, to a deeper understanding of the human condition."

With this in mind one can only concur with Taylor's belief that it is because of singers like Dusty Springfield, that "the notion of the 'simple pop song' becomes an oxymoron," and concede accordingly that within the sphere of contemporary music, Dusty Springfield will always remain a woman of great and genuine repute.

Michael J. Bayly

"She's unique, alien,
an enigmatic amalgamation of black soul and Brit melodrama,
private passions and popular myth, fantasy and reality. Who was Dusty?
Did she ever really exist? What did it all mean?
Now all we have is the music.
Just listen to the music."

Christian Ward
- British music critic/writer

It's my favourite shot of you
You look so pretty, your eyes were true
I'm still on your side
Don't you know you know what's right?

"Wish Fulfillment"
Sonic Youth