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Joy McKean, the Australian singer, songwriter and country music scene builder who, along with her husband, the late Slim Dusty, formed one of this nation’s great creative partnerships, died Thursday (May 25) following a battle with cancer. She was 93.
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“Joy passed away peacefully last night with family by her side,” reads a message from her family, issued Friday (May 26).
A trailblazer in the country scene, McKean enjoyed a career spanning more than 70 years, and composed some of the genre’s most celebrated songs, from “The Biggest Disappointment” to “Ringer from the Top End,” “Walk a Country Mile,” “Indian Pacific” and “Lights on the Hill,” an award-winning hit for her husband Slim Dusty, whom she married in 1951. Many others have covered the song, including Keith Urban.
Lauded as the “grand lady” of Australian country, McKean made cut her teeth in the 1940s and ‘50s, working alongside her sister Heather — as the McKean Sisters.
Joy McKean in the 1950s. Courtesy Kirkpatrick Family
Courtesy Kirkpatrick Family
After teaming up with Dusty, Australian country music had its golden couple. McKean wrote many of Dusty’s iconic songs, managed him for half a century, and the pair toured relentlessly in regional and remote Australia, at a time when the perceived role of women was that of home-maker.
With McKean as his support, muse and collaborator, Dusty released more than 100 albums and sold over eight million copies. Dusty died in 2003, aged 76.
McKean’s trophy collection is almost as impressive as her songbook. She’s a two-time inductee into the Australasian Country Music Roll of Renown and winner of the Industry Achiever Award, bestowed on her by the Country Music Association of Australia, which she co-founded back in 1992. She’s a winner of seven Golden Guitar awards, including the very first statue, won at the inaugural Tamworth Country Music Awards back in 1973.
In 1991, McKean was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for “service to the entertainment industry,” and, 30 years later, in 2021, was the recipient of the Ted Albert Award for Outstanding Services to Australian Music, one of the music industry’s highest honors. She said of the salute, “after what has been a lifetime of working in the music industry, and loving just about every minute of it, I find it fascinating to reflect on the changes that have taken place.” On the night, the award was presented by her children Anne and David Kirkpatrick.
Joy is survived by her two children, four grandchildren, and six great grandchilden. “She will be remembered as a pioneer in Australian music,” reads the statement from her family.
Australia’s music community is paying tribute to the country music legend.
“Where do I start about this beautiful woman, your songs will always be the melodies that makes my heart sing,” writes homegrown country star Troy Cassar-Daley. “Your emails always like a hand written note of encouragement and love.” He adds, “thank you for being the best yard stick a man can ask for.”
Joy McKean,Where do I start about this beautiful woman, your songs will always be the Melodies that makes my heart sing,Your emails always like a hand written note of encouragement and love.♥️ to Anne & David & kids thank you for being the best yard stick a man can ask for xx pic.twitter.com/AEQOKml8YN— Troy Cassar-Daley (@troycassardaley) May 26, 2023
“Vale Joy McKean OAM, the ‘Grand Lady of Country Music’, who has passed away at age 93,” reads a post from APRA AMCOS. “We extend our condolences to Joy’s family, friends and many fans. She will be greatly missed.”
Vale Joy McKean OAM, the ‘Grand Lady of Country Music’, who has passed away at age 93. We extend our condolences to Joy’s family, friends and many fans. She will be greatly missed.https://t.co/gQ7adMCdeU— APRA AMCOS (@APRAAMCOS) May 26, 2023
ARIA Award-winning country artist Fanny Lumsden writes, “What an icon. Someone I didn’t even realize I was following in the path of until quite recently. (I know, shameful). But will I will draw strength from as I continue to play halls throughout regional aus, sharing stories, running a business & a family. Thank you Joy.”
Joy McKean. What an icon. Someone I didn’t even realise I was following in the path of until quite recently. (I know, shameful). But will I will draw strength from as I continue to play halls throughout regional aus, sharing stories, running a business & a family. Thank you Joy— Fanny Lumsden (@Fannylumsden) May 26, 2023
Bill Lee — a well-regarded jazz musician who accompanied such artists as Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel and Harry Belafonte as well as scoring four of his son Spike Lee’s early films, including the hit Do the Right Thing and two songs for Jungle Fever — has died. He was 94. Explore Explore See latest […]
Tina Turner, whose gritty vocals and fierce, sizzling performances powered two iconic music careers — first as one-half of husband-and-wife duo Ike & Tina Turner and, later, an internationally revered solo star — died Wednesday (May 24) at age 83. Turner, who has born Anna Mae Bullock on Nov. 26, 1939, made her Billboard chart debut as […]
Tina Turner, whose gritty vocals and fierce, sizzling performances powered two iconic music careers —as one-half of husband-and-wife duo Ike & Tina Turner and later internationally revered solo star — has died, her rep confirmed to Billboard on Wednesday (May 24). The eight-time Grammy Award winner was 83.
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A statement announcing her death was also posted to her Instagram account. “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Tina Turner. With her music and her boundless passion for life, she enchanted millions of fans around the world and inspired the stars of tomorrow,” read the caption. “Today we say goodbye to a dear friend who leaves us all her greatest work: her music. All our heartfelt compassion goes out to her family. Tina, we will miss you dearly.”
By the time her last compilation album, Love Songs, was released in 2014, Turner had retired from music. But not before triumphing over a hard-fought journey that spanned more than 50 years, culminating in a legacy that’s influenced a diverse range of singers from Janis Joplin to Beyoncé and beyond. Her transformation from soul singer to survivor to pop superstar yielded three Grammy Hall of Fame entries: “River Deep — Mountain High,” “Proud Mary” and “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” A Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Kennedy Center honoree, Turner also played memorable roles as the Acid Queen in the rock musical Tommy and as Aunty Entity in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome with Mel Gibson.
She became a best-selling author with 1986’s I, Tina. Written with Kurt Loder, the autobiography detailed Turner’s childhood, early success with musician husband Ike, his domestic abuse and her adoption of Buddhism. Its highlight is Turner’s 1984 resurrection as a star in her own right with the album Private Dancer and its runaway Hot 100 No. 1 ,“What’s Love Got to Do With It.” Capping one of music’s most dramatic comebacks, the song rewarded Turner with three of her eight Grammys including record and song of the year. Eight years later, the track doubled as the title of the Turner biopic starring Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne.
Turner’s journey began in Nutbush, Tenn. Born Anna Mae Bullock on Nov. 26, 1939, the youngest of the family’s two daughters, she picked cotton on the farm where her father was caretaker and sang in the local Baptist church. Relocating to St. Louis as a teenager to live with her divorced mother, Bullock met future husband Ike when the guitarist and his band the Kings of Rhythm were playing the city’s Club Manhattan. Taking advantage of an impromptu moment to sing one night with the band, Bullock sparked her metamorphosis into Tina Turner.
Ike and Tina Turner pose for a portrait in 1972.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
With backing vocalists the Ikettes in tow, the Ike & Tina Turner Revue began drawing raves for its dynamic stage performances — as well as the first of several top 10 R&B chart hits beginning in 1960 with “A Fool in Love.” An appearance in the 1966 rock film The Big T.N.T. Show captured the attention of the film’s musical director Phil Spector. The famed “Wall of Sound” producer tapped Tina to sing the lead that same year for what has since gained status as a sonic classic, “River Deep, Mountain High.” By this time, the revue had been headlining shows in Las Vegas that brought out such music celebrities as David Bowie (whom she called “a passionate supporter of my career” in a tweet upon his death), Cher, James Brown and Elvis Presley.
Following a succession of signings with various labels plus high-profile gigs opening for the Rolling Stones, the Turners covered Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary.” Tina’s sultry vocals start the song off slowly. Then the track’s pace revs up (“we never do nothing nice and into an energetic funk-rock romp. Not only did the song net the pair its biggest pop hit in 1971 (No. 4), it also won a Grammy for best R&B vocal performance by a group. The pair’s last major hit together was the Tina-penned “Nutbush City Limits” in 1973. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991, Ike & Turner notched 20 hits from 1960 through 1975.
A fight en route to a show in Dallas the following year prompted Turner to leave Ike and file for divorce — setting the stage for Turner’s second act as a solo artist. Maintaining the rigorous touring schedule she began with Ike, Turner performed in a series of cabaret shows around the country in the late ‘70s before signing with veteran manager Roger Davies in 1980.
Aligning her gritty vocals with a harder rock style, Turner notched the first step in her comeback with a cover of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” Reaching No. 3 R&B and No. 26 on the Billboard Hot 100, the song gave the new Capitol Records signee her first solo U.S. hit.. Soon thereafter, the label released the singer’s career-defining album, Private Dancer. The 1984 set spun off the subsequent Grammy-winning singles “What’s Love Got to Do With It” and “Better Be Good to Me” plus the title track before peaking at No. 3 on the Billboard 200.
In the Billboard Book of Number One Hits, Turner recounted that she hated British songwriter Terry Britten’s demo of “What’s Love Got to Do With It” when she first heard it. “He said for me that he needed to make it a bit rougher, a bit more sharp around the edges,” she recalled. “All of a sudden, just siting there with him in the studio, the song became mine.”
With her famous mini-skirted legs sashaying energetically across the stage, black high heels flashing and wild mane of hair whipping back and forth, Turner crisscrossed the world in a series of top-grossing tours. Her last road trip, the 90-show Tina!: 50th Anniversary Tour, was the No. 9 top-grossing tour in 2009, according to Billboard Boxscore.
Tina Turner and Ike Turner playing acoustic guitar in the 1970s.
RB/Redferns
Between recording and touring, Turner pursued acting. Cast as the Acid Queen in the Who’s rock musical Tommy, Turner waited 10 years before her next acting role as Aunty Entity with co-star Mel Gibson in 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. That was followed by a cameo in the 1993 film Last Action Hero. She sang the U2-penned “GoldenEye” for the same-tilted 1995 James Bond Film.
Turner charted a total of 17 solo hit singles on the Billboard Hot 100, including “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome),” “One of the Living,” “Typical Male” and “I Don’t Wanna Fight.” Among her other top-selling solo albums: Break Every Rule and Foreign Affair as well as the compilation album All the Best. Her last studio album was 1999’s Twenty Four Seven.
Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé, Melissa Etheridge and Al Green saluted her in 2005 at the Kennedy Center Honors. Beyoncé reprised her then-performance of “Proud Mary” once more in 2008 — this time singing and dancing with the indefatigable Turner at the Grammy Awards. And proving that age is nothing but a number, Turner graced the cover of the German issue of Vogue in 2013. At 73, she was the oldest person to do so.
Turner married longtime beau Erwin Bach in July 2013, the same year she became a Swiss citizen. She had two sons, Raymond Craig from an earlier relationship and Ronald, her only child with Ike.
Rolf Harris, the disgraced entertainer who, prior to his downfall, enjoyed hits in the U.K. and his homeland, Australia, and who was once commissioned to paint Queen Elizabeth II, has died at the age of 93.
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Born March 30, 1930 in Perth, Australia, Harris’ life and career will be remembered in two halves.
At the peak of his celebrity, following a relocation to the U.K., Harris enjoyed a-list status on both sides of the globe, a star of TV and popular music, an enthusiast for the wobble board and didgeridoo who had a string of hit singles, and collaborations with The Wiggles and others.
Harris was, for decades, the face of British Paints in Australia, and was lampooned in the popular ‘70s and early ‘80s British comedy series The Goodies. For millions of Australians and Britons, he was a broadcast star from their youth.
He enjoyed a string of U.K. chart hits including “Two Little Boys” (Columbia), which has the distinction of being the very last No. 1 in Britain in the 1960s. “Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport” reached No. 9 in Britain back in 1960, and he had a No. 3 hit with “Sun Arise” in 1962. He enjoyed another U.K. top 10 in 1993, when his cover of “Stairway to Heaven,” a spin-off from the Australian TV show Money or the Gun, reached No. 7.
The Guinness World Records book of British Hit Singles had summed-up Harris as a “lovable Australian musician, artist and presenter.”
Along the way, he was elevated into the highest circles, by being named as Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE).
In 2005, another honor, when he was tapped by the BBC to create an oil painting of the Queen for the occasion of her 80th birthday, the sittings for which were captured for a documentary. The following year, in 2006, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).
In 2013, Harris was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO), in recognition for his distinguished service to the performing and visual arts, to charitable organizations and to international relations through the promotion of Australian culture, following his induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2008.
When his downfall was complete, Harris’ name had been scrubbed from those history books.
His spectacular fall from grace began in 2013, when Harris was questioned and arrested police under Operation Yewtree, the investigation into sexual abuse among members of the English media elite, including the late Jimmy Savile.Following a trial in 2014, Harris was found guilty of various indecent assaults between 1968 and 1986, and was sentenced to five years and nine months in prison. He was released in 2017, but denied any wrongdoing and never issued an apology to his victims.According to the BBC, Harris passed May 10, and has already been buried, though details have been kept under lock and key until now. His death certificate, the Corporation reports, notes that he died from neck cancer and “frailty of old age” at his home in Bray, Berkshire.
A statement from his family reads: “This is to confirm that Rolf Harris recently died peacefully surrounded by family and friends and has now been laid to rest. They ask that you respect their privacy. No further comment will be made.”
Songwriter and poet Pete Brown, who co-wrote “Sunshine of Your Love” and “White Room” for the short-lived rock supergroup Cream in the 1960s, has died. He was 82. The London-based Brown died of cancer late Friday (May 20), according to a post on his Facebook page. A poet who worked in the same circles as […]
Grace Bumbry, a pioneering mezzo-soprano who became the first Black singer to perform at Germany’s Bayreuth Festival during a career of more than three decades on the world’s top stages, has died. She was 86. Bumbry died Sunday at Evangelisches Krankenhaus, a hospital in Vienna, according to her publicist, David Lee Brewer.
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She had a stroke on Oct. 20 while on a flight from Vienna to New York to attend her induction into Opera America’s Opera Hall of Fame. She was stricken with the plane 15 minutes from landing, was treated at NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens and returned to Vienna on Dec. 8. She had been in and out of facilities since, Brewer said Monday (May 8).
Bumbry was born Jan. 4, 1937, in St. Louis. Her father, Benjamin, was a railroad porter and her mother, the former Melzia Walker, a school teacher.
She sang in the choir at Ville’s Sumner High School and won a talent contest sponsored by radio station KMOX that included a scholarship to the St. Louis Institute of Music, but she was denied admission because she was Black. She sang on CBS’s Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, then attended Boston University College of Fine Arts. and Northwestern, where she met soprano Lotte Lehmann, who became her teacher at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California, and a mentor.
Bumbry, known mostly as a mezzo but who also performed some soprano roles. was inspired when her mother took her to a recital of Marian Anderson, the American contralto who in 1955 became the first Black singer at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Bumbry became part of a generation of acclaimed Black opera singers that included Leontyne Price, Shirley Verrett, George Shirley, Reri Grist and Martina Arroyo.
Bumbry was among the winners of the 1958 Met National Council Auditions. She had a recital debut in Paris that same year and made her Paris Opéra debut in 1960 as Amneris in “Aida.”
The following year, she was cast by Wieland Wagner, a grandson of the composer, to sing Venus in a new production of Tannhäuser at the Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. Bumbry’s casting in a staging that included stars Wolfang Windgassen, Victoria de los Angeles and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau resulted in 200 protest letters to the festival.
“I remember being discriminated against in the United States, so why should it be any different in Germany?” Bumbry told St. Louis Magazine in 2021. “I knew that I had to get up there and show them what I’m about. When we were in high school, our teachers — and my parents, of course — taught us that you are no different than anybody else. You are not better than anybody, and you are not lesser than anybody. You have to do your best all the time.”
Reviews of her Bayreuth debut on July 23, 1961, were mostly positive. “A voice of very large size, though a little lacking in color. It is a voice that has not as yet `set,′ as the teachers say,” Harold C. Schonberg wrote in The New York Times. “She is obviously a singer with a big career ahead of her.”
As a result of the attention, Bumbry was invited by first lady Jacqueline Kennedy to sing at a White House state dinner the following February. Debuts followed at Carnegie Hall in November 1962, London’s Royal Opera in 1963 and Milan’s Teatro alla Scala in 1964.
She appeared at the Met on Oct. 7, 1965, as Princess Eboli in Verdi’s Don Carlo, the first of 216 performances with the company. “Her assurance, self-possession, and character projection are the kind from which a substantial career can be made,” Irving Kolodin wrote in the Saturday Review.
Bumbry’s final full opera at the Met was at Amneris in Verdi’s Aida on Nov. 3, 1986, though she did return a decade later for the James Levine 25th anniversary gala to sing “Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix (Softly awakes my heart)” from Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila.
Met general manager Peter Gelb said “opera will be forever in her debt for the pioneering role she played as one of the first great African American stars. “
“Grace Bumbry was the first opera star I ever heard in person in 1967 when she was singing the role of Carmen at the Met and I was a 13-year-old sitting with my parents in Rudolf Bing’s box,” Gelb said. “Hearing and seeing her giving a tour-de-force performance made a big impression on my teenage soul and was an early influence on my decision to pursue a career in the arts, just as she influenced generations of younger singers of all ethnicities to follow in her formidable footsteps.”
In 1989, she sang in the first fully staged performance on a work at Paris’ Bastille Opéra in Berlioz’s Les Troyens (The Trojans). In 2009, she was celebrated at the Kennedy Center Honors. Bumbry’s 1963 marriage to Polish tenor Erwin Jaeckel ended in divorce in 1972. Bumbry was predeceased by brothers Charles and Benjamin.
Brewer said memorials are being planned for Vienna and New York.
A day after the shooting death of Young Lo at a Miami Beach nightclub, the 37-year-old rapper/producer is being remembered by his longtime friend, creative collaborator and Grammy-nominated producer Christian “Hitmaka” Ward.
Along with Chrishan “Prince Chrishan” Dotson, Hitmaka is a co-founder of Makasound Records, where Lo worked in A&R. During his career, the late artist had also collaborated with other label executives and artists on various projects. Young Lo’s credits include collaborations with Drake, Chris Brown, Lil Wayne, Ray J and Tyga.
“Lo has been a longtime friend of mine for like 15 years,” Hitmaka aka Yung Berg tells Billboard. “We go as far back to when Ray J and I were doing ‘Sexy Can I’ and all these different records. Lo was just a great people person who knew how to put the right people together and had the resources to where maybe a Chris Brown or such-and-such [artist] might be good for a project. Lo was always a great asset to me. He was just great energy. Everybody loved to have Lo around. He was also very selfless, putting a lot of people before himself.
“This is truly a tragedy,” Hitmaka continues. “I haven’t lost a close friend like that, so this has rocked my world. I’m just dealing with picking up the pieces, helping out his mother, his family and his son. I’m sending super condolences to his family and loved ones. And man, I want to preach to everybody to just stay safe. Tomorrow isn’t promised. Tell loved ones that you love them on a daily basis because you just never know.”
According to reports from the Miami Herald, CBS News and other outlets, Young Lo was among three people who were shot at the South Beach nightclub Gala early Sunday morning. Born Lowell Grissom, Young Lo later died at the hospital. Two women were hospitalized with gunshot wounds and are expected to recover.
As of this writing, no arrests have been made.
Chris Strachwitz, a producer, musicologist and one-man preservation society whose Arhoolie Records released thousands of songs by regional performers and comprised an extraordinary American archive that became known and loved worldwide, has died. He was 91.
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Strachwitz, recipient in 2016 of a Grammy Trustee Award, passed away Friday (May 5) from complications with congestive heart failure at an assisted living facility in the San Francisco Bay Area’s Marin County, the Arhoolie Foundation said Saturday.
Admired by Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt and many others, Strachwitz was an unlikely champion of the American vernacular — a native German born into privilege who fell deeply for his adopted country’s music and was among the most intrepid field recorders to emerge after Alan Lomax.
He founded Arhoolie in 1960 and over the following decades traveled to Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana, among other states, on a mission that rarely relented: taping little-known artists in their home environments, be it a dance hall, a front porch, a beer joint, a backyard.
“My stuff isn’t produced. I just catch it as it is,” he explained in the 2014 documentary This Ain’t No Mouse Music.
The name Arhoolie, suggested by fellow musicologist Mack McCormick, is allegedly a regional expression for field holler.
Ry Cooder would call him “El Fanatico,” the kind of true believer for whom just the rumor of a musician worth hearing would inspire him to get on a bus and ride hundreds of miles — like the time he sought out bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins in Houston. Strachwitz amassed a vast catalog of blues, Tejano, folk, jazz, gospel and Zydeco, with Grammy winners Flaco Jimenez and Clifton Chenier among those who later attracted wider followings. An Arhoolie 50-year anniversary box set featured Maria Muldaur, Taj Mahal, Savoy Family Band and Cooder, who would cite the Arhoolie release Mississippi’s Big Joe Williams and His Nine-String Guitar as an early inspiration.
“It just jumped out of the speaker on this little school record player,” Cooder told NPR in 2013, adding that he decided “once and for all” to become a musician. “I’m gonna do this, too. I’m gonna get good on guitar, and I’m gonna play it like that.”
Strachwitz despised most commercial music — “mouse music,” he called it — but he did have just enough success to keep Arhoolie going. In the mid-1960s, he recorded an album in his living room for no charge by Berkeley-based folk performer Joe McDonald, who in turn granted publishing rights to Arhoolie. By 1969, McDonald was leading Country Joe McDonald and the Fish and one song from the Arhoolie sessions, the anti-war anthem “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” was a highlight of the Woodstock festival and soundtrack.
Arhoolie releases were cherished by blues fans in England, including Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. Around the same time Strachwitz met with McDonald, he taped more than a dozen songs by bluesman “Mississippi” Fred McDowell, including McDowell’s version of an old spiritual, You Gotta Move. The Stones sang a few lines from it during the 1970 documentary Gimme Shelter and recorded a cover that appeared on their acclaimed 1971 album Sticky Fingers. Strachwitz prevailed over the resistance of the band’s lawyers and ensured that royalties were given to McDowell, who was dying of cancer.
“I was able to give Fred McDowell the biggest check he’d ever seen in his life,” Strachwitz later said.
In 1993, Arhoolie was boosted again when country star Alan Jackson had a hit with “Mercury Blues,” a song co-written and first performed by K.C. Douglas for the label.
Besides his Grammy, Strachwitz received a lifetime achievement award from the Blues Symposium and was inducted as a non-performing member of the Blues Hall of Fame. In 1995, Strachwitz established the Arhoolie Foundation to “document, preserve, present and disseminate authentic traditional and regional vernacular music,” with advisers including Dylan, Bonnie Raitt and Linda Ronstadt. In 2016, Strachwitz sold his majority interest in the record label to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, part of the national museum in Washington.
“The ripple effect of Chris Strachwitz in the world of is immeasurable in preserving this music,” Raitt, a longtime friend, told the podcast The Kitchen Sisters Present in 2019.
The son of wealthy farm owners, he was born Count Christian Alexander Maria Strachwitz in the German region of Silesia, now part of Poland. His family, displaced at the end of World War II, moved to the United States in 1947, eventually settling in Santa Barbara, California. Strachwitz had already been exposed to swing overseas through Armed Forces Radio and became a jazz fan after seeing the movie New Orleans, a 1947 musical featuring Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. He also felt a strong kinship with country and other forms of “hillbilly music.”
“I felt it all had this kind of earthiness to it that I didn’t hear in any other kind of music. They sang about how lonesome you are, and how you miss your girlfriend and all this other thing,” Strachwitz told NPR. “Those songs really spoke to me.”
By his early 20s, he was taping local radio and live performances and he perfected his craft while attending the University of California at Berkeley. He served two years in the Army, completed his studies at Berkeley through the GI Bill and, starting in the late 1950s, taught high school for a few years in Los Gatos, California.
Often short on money, Strachwitz sold pressings from his collection of old 78s to support his early recording efforts. Arhoolie’s first release was Mance Lipscomb’s Texas Sharecropper and Songster, for which Strachwitz and friends personally assembled 250 copies.
“So much of pop music has all this slop added, with this mush background that I can’t even call music,” he said in a 2013 interview with the online publication waytooindie.com. “You can hardly hear the voices! They bury the voices. If somebody wants to sing, sing god damn it! You know? In the old days, you could hear them sing.”
Linda Lewis, the British vocalist who enjoyed hits in the 1970s with “It’s In His Kiss” and others, and was the envy of fellow singers due to her five-octave range, died Wednesday (May 3) at 72.
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The tragic news was confirmed by her sister, Dee Lewis Clay. “It is with the greatest sadness and regret we share the news that our beloved beautiful sister Linda Lewis passed away today peacefully at her home,” she writes on social media. “The family asks that you respect our privacy and allow us to grieve at this heartbreaking time.”
Born Linda Ann Fredericks in West Ham, London, Lewis attended stage school, and landed film roles, including a part as a screaming fan in Beatles film, A Hard Day’s Night.
Later, fans would scream for Lewis, as she reeled off U.K. hits through the 1970s with “Rock-A-Doodle-Doo,” “It’s In His Kiss,” “Baby I’m Yours” and “I’d Be Surprisingly Good For You.”
Written and composed by Rudy Clark, “It’s In His Kiss” would give Lewis a U.K. top 10 appearance, peaking at No. 6 in 1975, and a spot on the Billboard Hot 100, at No. 96.
Lewis’ extraordinary range, and her gifts across folk, soul, pop and reggae, would catch the attention of rock music’s superstars, including David Bowie and Rod Stewart, both of whom recruited her for backing vocals. She would also work with the likes Joan Armatrading, Basement Jaxx, Turin Brakes and Jamiroquai.
Covers and samples of her work has been artists including Joss Stone and Common.
Across her career, Lewis cut ten studio album, including Say No More, her 1971 debut, which was inspired by living with fellow artists in a commune in Hampstead, north London, a place where Cat Stevens (later Yusuf Islam), Marc Bolan and Elton John would drop by.
In 2002, Warner Music released a collection of her ‘70s music, Reach for the Truth. The following year, BMG issued a career retrospective The Best of Linda Lewis, and later, the 3-CD boxed set Legends, including hits and rarities. In 2017, to celebrate her 50th anniversary in the music business, Lewis released Funky Bubbles, a 5-CD box set including rarities and live versions.
The music community is paying tribute to the late singer. “Really sad to hear this,” writes Ultravox frontman Midge Ure in a social post. “I had a massive crush on Linda Lewis. ‘Not a little girl anymore’ was a great song and beautifully sung by her.”
Really sad to hear this. I had a massive crush on Linda Lewis. ‘Not a little girl anymore’ was a great song and beautifully sung by her🙏 https://t.co/Q6QC3ADePl— midge ure💙 (@midgeure1) May 4, 2023
Mike Scott, frontman of British band The Waterboys, tweets: “Very sorry to hear about the death of British singer Linda Lewis. She was fabulous.”
Very sorry to hear about the death of British singer Linda Lewis. She was fabulous.— Mike Scott (@MickPuck) May 3, 2023
Sex Pistols bass player Glen Matlock added that Linda was “lovely.”
That’s very sad. Linda was lovely whenever I met her. 😢— Glen Matlock (@GlenMatlock) May 4, 2023
Armatrading writes, “I’m so sad to hear of the death of Linda Lewis. She had a beautiful voice and was a really lovely person.”
I’m so sad to hear of the death of Linda Lewis. She had a beautiful voice and was a really lovely person. RIP Linda xhttps://t.co/6UF7nsfkc4— Joan Armatrading (@ArmatradingJoan) May 4, 2023
French indie pop band Tahiti 80 remembers Lewis as a talent “like no one else.” A post from the band reads, “Very sad to hear of Linda Lewis’s passing. We were lucky enough to collaborate with Linda on Your Love Shines on Fosbury. She sang like no one else. I discovered her music in Japan and was instantly hooked. Collaborating with her was such a high.”
Very sad to hear of Linda Lewis’s passing. We were lucky enough to collaborate with Linda on Your Love Shines on Fosbury. She sang like no one else. I discovered her music in Japan and was instantly hooked. Collaborating with her was such a high ❤️✨ pic.twitter.com/mPhZGWjrlG— Tahiti 80 (@wearetahiti80) May 4, 2023