Dusty Springfield died?

Of all the many distinctive voices to emerge from the British pop scene in the fertile 1960s, none was more naturally soulful than that of Dusty Springfield, who has died from the effects of cancer, aged 59. Despite a somewhat erratic career, she was respected by successive generations of singers and musicians and by anyone capable of responding to the carefully shaded emotions she brought to the music of her prime, in hits such as I Don't Know What To Do With Myself Son Of A Preacher Man, I Only Want To Be With You, The Look Of Love, Some Of Your Lovin' and You Don't Have To Say You Love Me.

With her lavishly back-combed blonde hair and generous applications of mascara, she became an instantly recognisable figure. More important, she was the only white woman singer worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as the great divas of 1960s soul music: Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, Dionne Warwick and Mary Wells.


Unlike the vast majority of her would-be rivals, who merely reproduced the much-caricatured rawness of the archetypal soul singer and ended up producing nothing more than a modern version of black-face minstrelsy, she understood that the artistry of a Franklin or a Knight had its essence in grace and nuance, the products of genuine musicality. Like them, she had the gift of adding, new layers of meaning to a lyric which, in other hands, might have expressed something quite straightforward.

Originality was important, too. These women were not the products of an industrial process such as the music business later became. Each one put her distinctive signature on a song, and a special smoky intimacy made Dusty's voice stand out among them.

For women singers of that era, such a talent usually carried the penalty of an automatic dependency on the contributions of male record producers, arrangers and songwriters. Women were not expected to know what was best for them. Springfield certainly did, and her opinion played a powerful role in her recordings, which were distinguished by a thoughtful choice of material and by impeccably soulful arrangements .

Born Mary O'Brien in Hampstead , she had already been a member of an all-female trio called the Lana Sisters when, aged 21, she joined her brother Dion and a friend, Tim Field (later replaced by Mike Hurst), in a folk and country-based group called the Springfields. She and Dion renamed themselves Dusty and Tom Springfield, and in 1961 the trio signed a contract with Philips Records. Their first single, Dear John, made little impact, but Break-away and Bambino were small hits, earning them enough votes to be named Best UK Vocal Group in the New Musical Express readers' poll at the end of the year.

Solo artists ruled the charts in the immediate pre-Beatles era, and competition among groups was hardly intense. Nevertheless, the Springfields created a niche for themselves with their pop-oriented versions of folk and country songs. In 1962 they enjoyed a surprise US Top 20 hit with a rousing version of Silver Threads and Golden Needles, Dusty's voice emerging from the exuberant three-part harmony to deliver a poignant middle-eight which emerged as the record's commercial hook -- the bit of the song you wanted to hear over and over again. Repeating the same device on Tom Springfield's Island of Dreams the following year, they enjoyed their biggest British hit, reaching the top five.

It was already obvious that the haunting quality of Dusty's voice exposed in those brief solo passages, was the group's main attraction. Her gingham-and-mascara image, too, virtually obliterated the bland presence of the group's two male members, and it was no surprise when, at the end of 1963, she embarked on a solo career.


The song chosen for her debut, I Only Want To Be With You, reflected a move away from the group's successful hybrid and towards the music that she loved the contemporary girl-group sounds of the Ronettes, the Crystals and the Chiffons, blending simple teenage sentiments with powerful orchestrations. Supervised, as were many of her best records, by Johnny Franz, a Philips staff producer, I Only Want To Be With You became the first record to be featured on the inaugural edition of Top Of The Pops on New Year's Day, 1964, and made its way into the top five.

That summer, another dramatic arrangement contributed to the success of I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Simultaneously her more delicate version of another Bacharach-David song, Wishin' And Hopin' was giving her a top 10 hit in the United States. Both songs were taken from her first solo LP, A Girl Called Dusty,

The hectic mid-60s represented her prime. In 1965 alone she had hits with In The Middle Of Nowhere and Some Of Your Lovin', appeared in the Royal Variety Performance and the NME Poll Winners' Concert at Wembley (sharing the bill with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones), and hosted an ITV special devoted to performers from Berry Gordy's Tamla and Motown labels: Martha and the Vandellas, the Miracles, the Temptations, the Supremes and Stevie Wonder. These were artists whose work she loved best, and whom she had enthusiastically brought to the attention of the British audience. She was also perhaps the only non-American singer who could perform alongside them without fear of humiliation.

Little By Little, You Don't Have To Say You Love Me, Goin' Bac, I Close My Eyes And Count To Ten and The Look Of Love (a ballad written by Bacharach and David as the theme to the James Bond spoof Casino Royale) were the hits that carried her from 1966 to 1968, the year in which she signed a contract with Atlantic Records in the US.

As a result of that new relationship she travelled to Tennessee, where producer Jerry Wexler, arranger Arif Mardin and engineer Tom Dowd (Atlantic's key music men) supervised the sessions for Dusty in Memphis. Generally viewed as the best of her career, the album was a carefully chosen and beautifully performed collection. Its big hit, The Son Of A Preacher Man, had originally been written for Aretha Franklin, whose father was a famous minister, but it became the defining performance of Springfield's career, the ultimate proof that she could take the material of black music and refashion it into something true both to its own essence and to hers. It was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic.

Sessions in Philadelphia with the producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, then on the brink of success with the O'Jays, Billy Paul and others, resulted in another fine album, including a memorable version of A Brand New Me. These were the days when one of her aides de camp would hire an extra seat on a transatlantic flight to transport the rhinestone gowns for an American tour.

In 1972 she went to live in Los Angeles, a move which coincided with a swift and steep decline in her popularity. When the US-recorded albums See All Her Faces and Cameo made little impact, she began to settle into semi-obscurity which lasted until the late 1980s, despite several half-hearted comeback attempts (including one sponsored by the Hippodrome label, run by Peter Stringfellow, the nightclub impresario).

An approach in 1987 from Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe of the Pet Shop Boys restored her fortunes. Tennant and Lowe understood the mysterious glamour of her voice well enough to incorporate it into one of their own hit singles with great success, and Springfield even re-emerged to perform the song, What Have I Done To Deserve This, at the Albert Hall during the British music industry's annual awards ceremony. The partnership continued in 1988 when she sang Nothing Has Been Proved, the theme from Scandal, the feature film dealing with the affair between Christine Keeler and John Profumo. Another Tennant/Lowe song, In Private, reached the top 20 the following year, although an album, called Reputation, only crept into the Top 40.

Thanks to Tennant and Lowe, the public had been reminded of her existence as something more than a ghost from the 1960s. Not long after this satisfying renaissance, however, she began to suffer from the effects of what was to become a fatal condition, and one of the most consistently affecting voices in pop music was finally silenced.



Dusty Springfield (Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien),
singer, born April 16, 1939; died March 2, 1999.