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DUSTY SPRINGFIELD

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dusty springfield

 - Biography - Wikipedia - 
June 30, 2020: BBC: ​How Dusty Springfield made a remarkable comeback
As her 1990 album Reputation turns thirty, Nick Levine looks back at how the troubled pop icon enjoyed a glorious and unexpected late-career high after years out of the limelight.
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April 16, 1939: Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien was born in 
West Hampstead, London.
March 2, 1999: Springifield died  from cancer.
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All I See Is You I'm Gonna Leave You Dusty Springfield Philips 40396
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DUSTY SPRINGFIELD-DUSTY IN MEMPHIS-JAPAN CD
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Dusty In Memphis (2002, Vinyl New) Label: 4 MEN WITH BEARDS Format: LP Release Date: 05 Jul 2002

2002 "Dusty In Memphis" reissue liner notes by Elvis Costello:

What words best describe the quality of voice and singing on `Dusty In Memphis`?

I’m damned if I know. You could start by saying the singing is `cool`, in that it is elegant and restrained but it also has great warmth and power. Doesn’t the tone sound like some kind of vapour at times? No, that just doesn’t do it justice. It is true to say that the voice is recorded in the audio equivalent of `extreme close-up`? Every breath and sigh is caught and yet it can soar. Knowing that these things are beyond words, I offer these few lines of adoration and praise.

Dusty Springfield’s singing on this album is among the very best ever put on record by anyone. It is overwhelmingly sensual and self- possessed but it is never self-regarding. The delivery might be confidential, intimate or vulnerable in the opening lines of a song only to explode in the chorus with unknowable emotion. Every crescendo is well judged; the performances are never showy or bombastic. The most striking impression throughout is one of honesty.

The most famous songs in this collection are probably `Son of a Preacher Man` and `Breakfast in Bed` - simply one of the most knowingly adult records ever made. This track may have the greatest vocal entrance of Dusty’s career. Her vocal tone on the line, `She’s hurt you again, I can tell`, tells an entire story in itself.

On `Son of a Preacher Man`, Dusty recalls the life of a young girl. She teases through the taboo tale, lending her brand new style to the Memphis funk. She had clearly left behind the world of her English vocal contemporaries. Don’t get me wrong; Dusty’s London recordings are wonderful. However, at times the accompaniments sound as if the players are struggling to receive messages from overseas about the music that the singer is interpreting with ease. Then again, many of the best cuts have a glorious European drama that would have been totally alien to the Memphis players.

Now Dusty had a rhythm section that dove deep into the groove but could also play with extreme delicacy. She also had Arif Mardin’s arrangements to sparkle and illustrate her voice with Spanish guitars, shimmering strings and snaking lines of oboe. All this was immaculately ordered by the production team of Mardin, Tom Dowd, and Jerry Wexler. The only comparison that comes to mind is the musical journey of that other great Irish soul singer, Van Morrison, in the records such `Moondance` and `Tupelo Honey` (a song that Dusty would later cover). Even when the accompaniments have touches of period charm such as the electric sitar introduction to `in the Land of Make Believe` or the Tennessee version of a Byrds guitar figure in the opening of `Don’t Forget About Me`, it is Dusty’s performance that is timeless.

Most extraordinary is her poise and confident progress through a frankly berserk, psychedelic Brazilian- influenced arrangement of Michael Legrand’s utterly French melody for `Windmills of Your Mind` . The occasionally comic surrealism of the lyric never sounded better.

Dusty’s ethereal and seamless tone is perfectly matched to Burt Bacharach's exquisite and otherworldly, `In the Land of Make Believe` while Carole King’s song of the earth, ` No Easy Way Down` is as well suited to Dusty as the same composer’s `Natural Woman` was to Aretha Franklin, Gerry Goffin’s lyric speaks of romantic disappointment and the embrace of melancholy.

It could have no finer advocate. However, there are two other songs in particular which serve to best illustrate the musical ambition and achievement of `Dusty in Memphis`. They are both by Randy Newman and are almost unique in their tenderness and straight-faced passion, among his catalogue of dark humoured portraits.

The first, `Just One Smile` opens with a series of rising, questioning phrases and unravels into an gracious but constantly surprising melody that might have come from the Catania of Bellini’s time. This is soulful music of the first order even though it arrives from place beyond our expectations. The second of these unusual songs is `I Don’t Want To Hear It Anymore`. It written from the point of view of a betrayed woman living in a poor apartment block. She can hear the gossip and innuendo coming through the walls, hence the title. However, the song never descends into soap opera melodrama thanks to the remarkably ambitious melody, a line that Dusty negotiates with conversational ease, so that you hardly realise how far your ear has travelled when you are hurled into the longing of the chorus.

The arrangement contains the sort of sublime touch that, for me, places `Dusty in Memphis` right up there with Aretha’s `I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You` album. In the final verse she sings: `Ain’t it sad` said a woman down the hall, `That when a nice girl falls in love, ain’t it too just bad she had to fall for a boy that doesn’t care for her at all`. At this moment a cool vocal group enters and utter their judgement with such pity and cruelty: `It’s so sad` and the song crashes into the final devastating chorus: `I don’t want to hear it anymore!`

Hearing this record again in all its stereo and mono glory, I realise that this is just one moment among so many others on `Dusty in Memphis`, that will chill and thrill, always and forever.

Elvis Costello, May 2002.
  • Rolling Stone (1969): "Most white female singers in today's music are still searching for music they can call their own. Dusty is not searching—she just shows up, and she, and we, are better for it."
  • Rolling Stone (12/11/03, p. 146): Ranked No. 89 in Rolling Stone's "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" "...the result was blazing soul and sexual honesty...that transcended both race and geography."
  • Rolling Stone (4/11/02, p. 106): Ranked No. 9 in Rolling Stone's "50 Coolest Records". "...London's fabbest pop starlet takes her big voice and fire-hazard bouffant to Memphis and becomes a born-again soul diva..."
  • Rolling Stone (10/31/02, p. 135): Ranked No. 3 in Rolling Stone's "Women in Rock: The 50 Essential Albums" "...[A] British soul masterpiece..."
  • VH1: Ranked No. 58 in VH1's "100 Greatest Albums of Rock & Roll": "...Not only is this Dusty's finest work, it is unanimously acknowledged as one of the great soul albums...a faultless record on which we have, thankfully, now recognised she was far too ahead of her time for her own good..."
  • Entertainment Weekly (3/12/99, p. 71): "...It's her shining moment and just might be one of the all-time great pop albums." – Rating: A
  • New Musical Express (10/2/93, p. 29): Ranked No. 54 in its list of the "Greatest Albums of All Time."
  • Dusty in Memphis was ranked 87th in a 2005 survey held by British television's Channel 4 to determine the 100 greatest albums of all time.
  • Mojo (1995): Ranked No. 92 in Mojo's 100 Greatest Albums of All Time.
  • The album appears in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
  • Music critic Robert Christgau listed Dusty in Memphis as one of his 75 fundamental records of the 1960s
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BBC: Dusty Springfield Dusty In Memphis Review (2002)

The Rumpus: Sept 2, 2011: Albums of Our Lives: Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis

Record for the Day: April 18, 2013: Day 43: Dusty Springfield- Dusty in Memphis

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