Quote of the Day (Claude McKay, on a Lonely Winter Night in Harlem)

“Through the long night until the silver break
Of day the little gray feet know no rest;

Through the lone night until the last snow-flake

Has dropped from heaven upon the earth's white breast,

The dusky, half-clad girls of tired feet

Are trudging, thinly shod, from street to street.”—African-American poet, novelist, and essayist Claude McKay (1889-1948), title poem of Harlem Shadows: Poems (1922)

I recounted some details on the life of Claude McKay in this post from four years ago. But this year, on the centennial of Harlem Shadows, seemed like a good time to sample the work of this major figure of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

In this title poem from the volume, McKay evokes the plight of Harlem prostitutes. They ply their trade under the worst possible weather conditions. (I can't read about that "snow-flake" without a shudder.) They are only “girls,” compelled to take up degrading work (in the prior stanza, to “bend and barter at desire’s call”) on desolate streets.

Though McKay evokes a larger “stern harsh world” responsible for their condition, the “poverty, dishonor and disgrace” they experience really come at the hands of a prejudiced white society.

In its vivid picture of sex workers in the inner city, this poem reminded me of “Buy and Sell,” a melancholy song from Laura Nyro’s debut album. I don’t know if she read any McKay growing up, but I would not be surprised, because she absorbed so many lyrical and musical influences. But the works of both are individual and unforgettable.

Video of the Day: Laura Nyro’s ‘Stoned Soul Picnic,’ Covered by Swing Out Sister

Fifty years ago this month, “Wedding Bell Blues” was released as a single. It climbed to Number One on the charts for the Fifth Dimension in 1967 and has been covered many times since then (including by Lesley Gore and on the TV show Glee), but for me and countless others, there was no substitute for the original.

Laura Nyro wrote “Wedding Bell Blues” for her first album, More Than a New Discovery (retitled in 1973 as The First Songs by Columbia Records). For sheer listening pleasure, from first note to last, it’s hard to improve on this. The sad thing was that it reaped far greater rewards for the artists who covered its tunes (Blood, Sweat and Tears, Barbra Streisand, and the Fifth Dimension) than herself.

When I first thought of this post, I was going to write that Nyro was one of the most influential female singer-songwriters of the Sixties. Now, I realize how limiting that is. Gender doesn’t matter. She was one of the most influential singer-songwriters of the whole postwar pop era, period.

In June 1976, I saw Nyro in concert in Holmdel, N.J. She was touring to promote her first album of original songs in five years, Smile, a collection that downplayed rock and soul in favor of jazz. Her performance that night, perhaps because it gave short shrift to her hits, was respectfully but not ecstatically received. Nobody quite knew of what to make of her new direction, and since then I wonder if that included Nyro herself.

The band Swing Out Sister shows an alternate path that Nyro might have taken into jazz, particularly in this cover version of “Stoned Soul Picnic,” another Nyro tune turned into gold by the Fifth Dimension. Though the core melody of this classic from the 1968 LP Eli and the Thirteenth Confession remains, the outstanding backup musicians—including percussionist, drummer, guitarist, and sax players—launch into surprising different chords toward the end that recall Junior Walker’s “Walk in The Night.”

Is the group’s style pop or is it jazz? Leery of music-industry pigeonholing, the band resists definition. Interviewed in 2013 by Kristi York Wooten for The Huffington Post, lead vocalist Corinne Drewery said, “Record companies have never known what to do with us. Jazz was a bit of a swear word when we started out, but acid jazz was OK. Whenever something new has come along, they’ve tried to squeeze us into that category, but we’d have to make up our own category, which would be something like ‘pizazz,’ like pop and jazz.”

The band has an abiding affection for Sixties pop tunes by the likes of Burt Bacharach, and Nyro’s is of a piece with this in its boundary-pushing and sometimes tricky meter shifts. That gives some degree of latitude to artists thinking of covering these tunes—including jazz musicians. That also happens to be the pre-band experience of Drewery’s musical and life partner, keyboardist-pianist-arranger Andy Connell.

Most important, the harmonies of Drewery and backup singer Gina Foster retain the blissed-out counterculture vibe of the original. But the effervescent Drewery makes a greater effort to engage the audience than Nyro did.

Drewery and Connell helped form Swing Out Sister nearly 30 years ago, but I only just discovered them recently, while searching YouTube for covers of Nyro songs. I can see that I’ll have a lot of fun making up for lost time in listening to them.

Photo of the Day: ‘Time Is Gonna Bring You Spring’

“So winter froze the river

And winter birds don't sing

So winter makes you shiver

So time is gonna bring you spring.”—Laura Nyro, “Time and Love,” from her New York Tendaberry LP (1969)

I took the image accompanying this post this past weekend at Overpeck County Park, not far from where I live in Bergen County, N.J.

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.”