No small fuss was made in Israel when Rolling Stone published their list of 200 best singers of all time, including Ofra Haza in position 186. Nice that they've heard of her. I admit that I haven't heard of many of the singers placed in these positions.
Anyway, I idly wondered whether the late great Sandy Denny would appear in the list. And appear she does: position 164!
Denny’s buttery, mystical croon is so timeless that it sounds centuries older than the Sixties
folk revival, making her the perfect choice to appear on a song about
Middle-earth (and take home the award for Led Zeppelin’s only guest vocalist,
on “The Battle of Evermore”). In both Fairport Convention and her solo work,
she commanded a sense of longing with her phrasing and feathery register that
gave her an ethereal quality on par with other tragic folk icons like Nick
Drake and Judee Sill. She died in 1978 at just 31, making her obscurity all
the more alluring to those who stumble upon her catalog. “What you heard
was a kind of awe at the contingency of human life and the beauty of the
world,” Greil Marcus wrote in her Rolling Stone obituary. “A certain reverence for the past, and a steady determination to
take her place in the long story she was telling.” —A.M.
Good news for her birthday that by chance is today. And also by chance, the t-shirt at the top of the pile that I took today to wear underneath my buttoned shirt was the one with the David Bailey picture of Sandy.
This day in history:
| Blog # | Date | Title | Tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| 666 | 05/01/2014 | End of year blues | ERP |
| 1104 | 05/01/2018 | Business rules in Priority which do not apply to specific users/2 | Priority tips |
| 1455 | Sandy Denny would have been 75 years old today | Sandy Denny |
Correction: Wikipedia has Sandy's birthday as tomorrow, meaning that the coincidences that I wrote about are not coincidences. Today is, however, Maartin Allcock's birthday.
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