Dusty Springfield: An Appreciation

Dusty Springfield, picture courtesy of the BBC


















I made a new discovery this year; the music of Dusty Springfield. I don't remember just how I came across her, much less how I missed her music all of these years, but there it is. I had heard "Son of a Preacher Man" all of my life, on and off, and of course, The Pet Shop Boys "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" since I was a teenager, and I'd heard her name, but she and her music never really came across my radar as anything significant. I really didn't have any idea who she was, or what her legacy had been. Then again, like my reading of Margaret Atwood, I was too young and callow to appreciate a talent like Springfield's.

Listening to her now at age forty, I realise that her's is not an easy voice. It isn't emotionally soothing and warm. It can be a very joyous sound, like her first hit, "I Only Wanna Be With You," but a lot of the time, the voice is veiled in by a sort of agonized longing. It's ethereal, and almost maddening in a way, as if, for all of it's power as an instrument, it permanently threatens to vanish, or worse yet, wait forever immobilized, never being sure of gaining what it yearns for. The most difficult Springfield song for me to listen to is "The Look of Love", with it's inchoate longing that never seems fulfilled throughout the entire song.

With Springfield's voice, there is a haunting quality to it, as though one is never sure she's quite there. Like lightning, it flashes and in a blink it can be gone. But it's unforgettable once you've heard it. Camille Paglia said it was an androgynous voice, almost masculine, and that it had an almost castrati like quality to it. I think that's true. There IS an almost masculine quality to her singing voice, which is unusually commanding and powerful, in light of the fact that her speaking voice made her sound like a breathy little girl. It was very light and ultra-feminine sounding, almost cartoonish in a way.

Like another gay icon, it's a quality she shared with Judy Garland, whose singing voice was legendary in it's mix of power and vulnerability. Garland also had a girlish speaking voice, frequently punctuated with giggles. The two were very different women, but had an intrinsic passion in their singing, and an almost overwhelming emotional connection to their audiences.

Like Garland, and seemingly, like all the great divas, Springfield had her demons, and was notorious for her perfectionism in the studio. The fact that she pretty much single handedly found, produced and marketed her greatest hits of the sixties (at a time when women didn't do such things, and if they did, were never given credit for it) has never been properly credited to her. She couldn't read or write music, and yet she possessed an innate musicality that helped transform British pop. It was she who was credited for bringing the sounds of Motown to Britain. Likewise, when she went to the States in one of her earliest tours, she was the only white performer to sing with the likes of Martha and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, and other Motown stars.

That she was heavily influenced by the Motown sound was well known. What was not so well known was the furore she caused in the early sixties, by refusing to play to a segregated audience in Capetown, South Africa. Cannily, she had agreed to do the concerts under the proviso (actually stipulated by her in her contract) that the audiences she would be playing to, would be mixed. When she arrived, and the audience turned out to be all white, she refused, and was eventually asked to leave the country.

She wasn't just a white woman doing cover songs that black performers had made popular,(unlike a lot of the white cover artists of the segregated music scene of the 1950's) she was a woman who sang with soul, a sound that up to then, had been previously been seen solely as the province of singers like Aretha Franklin. The fact that the singer was a tiny blond Irish/Englishwoman, and quite young at that (her hits were all basically done before she was thirty years old) startled more than a few listeners. Check out her version of Nowhere to Run, or her duet with Jimi Hendrix on youtube if you don't believe me. She was an unusual singer in that she didn't like her voice to stand out from the background music, she liked to think of it as just another instrument in a wall of sound. Recording engineers would be awestruck by the fact that she would turn the music track up as high as she could and sing to it, when they knew she couldn't possibly hear what she sounded like. Amazingly enough, she would be in key, and the tracks would be brilliant.

She lost her musical direction after the sixties and spent a good ten years or so in exile in the United States, where she battled a host of demons and addictions before she returned to Britain to be reinvigorated by her success with the Pet Shop Boys. She was on the crest of a full-fledged comeback when she was struck by breast cancer in her late fifties. After a long battle of several years, she succumbed to the disease a month before her sixtieth birthday.

In an age of being inundated by the ersatz Britneys and the dried up Madonnas, I find a great solace in the music of Dusty Springfield. There's soul aplenty in that woman.