This Day in Pop Music History (Death of Laura Nyro, Songstress Supreme)

April 8, 1997—Laura Nyro, who influenced subsequent generations of musicians with songs covered in hit versions by Barbra Streisand, the Fifth Dimension, and Three Dog Night, died at age 49 of ovarian cancer, the same disease that claimed the life of her mother.

Next month, 19 years after first becoming eligible—and in her third straight year of being nominated—Nyro is, at long last, being inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Like her female contemporary singer-songwriter, Joni Mitchell, her late admission makes one incredulous. Why the delay—a twisted definition of what constitutes rock ‘n’ roll, or, more simply, misogyny?

Nyro might have come from a different place, musically and geographically, from the Canadian-born, folk movement-influenced Mitchell, but this product of New York soul was a similarly unique talent whose records could barely contain her passion.

In one way, Nyro came of musical age at the best possible time—young enough to absorb, on the streets of New York, the late ‘50’s and ‘60’s girl groups, jazz, Motown, Pete Seeger, Dylan, the Beatles, even Ravel and Debussy—but before MTV put a premium on a singer’s looks as much as their sound.

In his history of how agents and managers made the counterculture a huge portion of rock 'n' roll, The Mansion on the Hill, Fred Goodman likens Nyro to “a chunky Morticia Addams.” A few more details settle exactly what he means by this: “Dressed in black with her long hair reaching down to her thighs, Nyro wore purple lipstick and used Christmas-tree decorations as earrings.”

This was the teenager that record company exec Artie Mogull beheld in 1966. He had agreed to audition her as a favor to her father, who, between sessions of tuning Mogull’s piano, had incessantly importuned him about his singer-songwriter daughter. The next day, at the piano, Nyro let loose with a song of her own composition, belting out: “I was born from love/And my poor mother worked the mines,/I was raised on the good book Jesus/Till I read between the lines.”

Put yourself in Mogull’s place after hearing these opening lyrics to what would become “Stoney End.” What would you do? You got it—“I signed her for everything,” he recalled years later.

By signing on as her manager (a role assumed, within a couple of years, by David Geffen), Mogull got not only an unusually talented artist, but an uncompromising one. She fought, often bitterly, for her arrangements, and after seemingly agreeing to requests, she would simply back out and do things her way.

Case in point, on her first LP for the Folkways imprint of Verve, More Than a New Discovery (acquired by Columbia in 1973 and renamed The First Songs), “Stoney End.” The Folkways execs blanched at that stanza about “the good book Jesus,” dreading friction that might come their way. To placate them, Nyro came up with an alternate set of lyrics: "I was born from love/ and I was raised on golden rules/ till the love of a winsome Johnny/ taught me love was made for fools."

That “winsome Johnny” isn’t bad, but it doesn’t quite pack the punch of "good book Jesus." Nyro, undoubtedly realizing that, went ahead in the studio with the original version. That was the one that Barbra Streisand turned into a #1 hit in January 1971.

Streisand was only the tail-end of a succession of artists who found gold records in Nyro material in those years. Others included Blood, Sweat and Tears (“And When I Die”), Three Dog Night (“Eli’s Comin’”), and the Fifth Dimension (“Wedding Bell Blues” and “Stoned Soul Picnic”). Her impact was even wider: most prominently on female musicians such as Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones, Jane Siberry, Phoebe Snow, and Suzanne Vega, but also males such as Todd Rundgren and Elton John. (In the inaugural episode of Elvis Costello’s interview series, Spectacle, Sir Elton discussed how she freed artists from standard song structures, and demonstrated how her use of unconventional chord changes had influenced his “Burn Down the Mission.”)

A number of labels have been assigned to Nyro over the years, including “shy,” “publicity-averse,” “idiosyncratic,” “eccentric,” even “weird.” But when I consider the musician who could wring sweet anguish from her piano and unbridled soprano, I prefer another: “glorious.”