Rock World magazine lists her as one of the twelve First Women of Rock;
Rolling Stone declares her "Britain's best ever pop-singer."
In the '60s, Cliff Richard dubbed her "the white negress,"
while Max Bygraves called her "a trouble-maker."

Yes, it's the one and only Dusty Springfield. As one critic has noted:
"What can you say about a vocalist who could master
the rawness of rhythm and blues,
the smooth, tricky sophistication of Bacharach and David,
the false bravado of the Broadway standards,
and the cunning simplicity of classic pop?
Like Elvis, there was nothing that Dusty couldn't sing."



Dusty Springfield was born Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien in London on April 16, 1939. As a young girl her first introduction to music was through her father's love of Beethovan and other classical composers. Jazz was also a genre of music popular in the O'Brien household, with Jelly Roll Morton, Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee being major influences on the young Dusty.

In 1960, Dusty accepted the invitation of her brother, now going by the name of Tom, to join him and friend Tim Field in what was soon to become the internationally successful folk-pop band, The Springfields. Together they sang of escaping the mad rushing crowd to the "Island of Dreams" and of the broken heart that not even "Silver Threads and Golden Needles" could mend when money is substituted for love. Musically, it was light, pseudo-folk (with elements of Latin thrown in for good measure). Yet Tom's lyrics and Dusty's soaring vocals imbued the songs with a depth of sincerity and yearning that transcended the folk-pop musical framework.

Dusty, however, found such a framework increasingly restrictive, especially after hearing the rhythmically vibrant sounds emanating from black urban America during a Springfields trip to the States. She was soon going solo, complete with a chart-topping debut single, "I Only Want To Be With You," a mod new look, and a best-selling album dominated by credible covers of American soul and R&B classics such as "Mockingbird," "Mama Said," and "Twenty-four Hours From Tulsa". It was 1963 and Dusty had arrived! Yet her ascent to the top of both the British and American charts was not without its obstacles - or detractors.

For a start she was a woman - a "girl singer" - one who was determined to extract from the British musicians she worked with, the new sounds she had heard and loved in the States. She soon gained a reputation for being "difficult."


"I was asking musicians to play sounds they'd never heard before," she would later remark. "For instance, Motown hadn't released any records in Britain but I'd heard them on tour in the States. I wanted to use those influences in a country where they were still playing stand-up bass and the only black music they knew about was jazz. So, I would scowl a lot. They knew what I wanted but the last person they were going to take it from was a bee-hived bird."

Musically too, Dusty wasn't afraid to cross lines or make waves. She could duet with Jimi Hendrix or Liberace - and carry off each with equal aplomb. Her eclectic taste in music was matched only by her interpretative skills, to the extent that one critic would later be left to wonder: "What can you say about a vocalist who could master the rawness of rhythm and blues, the smooth, tricky sophistication of Bacharach and David, the false bravado of the Broadway standards, and the cunning simplicity of classic pop?" Indeed, from florid Italian ballads like "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me" to the simmering soul of "Son Of A Preacher Man", Dusty traversed all over the musical landscape.



By 1968 Dusty was Britain's Number 1 female singer with her own TV series and guaranteed top billing at cabaret venues and nightclubs around the world. Yet Dusty found the "supper club" scene artistically deadening and so orchestrated an escape by accepting the invitation to sign with Atlantic Records in the US and work with Aretha Franklin's producers Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd and Arif Mardin.


The resulting album, Dusty in Memphis, is considered her masterpiece and spurred the soulful "Son Of A Preacher Man" up the international charts. Yet surprisingly at the time of its release, the album itself charted poorly on both sides of the Atlantic.



Yet Dusty's comment to London's Evening Standard in 1970 was considerably more than five years ahead of its time, at least for an established pop singer: "I know that I'm perfectly capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy," she remarked, ensuring that she was the first artist in pop music to openly identify herself as bisexual.


Dusty never recanted her remark, yet also never used it, or her relationships, to further her career. "My relationships have been pretty mixed, and I'm fine with that," she would state in 1995. "Who's to say what you are? Right now I'm not in any relationship by choice . . . Yet I don't feel celibate, either. So what am I? It's other people who want you to be something or other - this or that. I'm none of the above."




With the advent of the rock-dominated '70s, Dusty's profile in music dropped. She recorded sporadically as pickings were slim for interpreters, even of Dusty's caliber, in a decade that deified the singer/songwriter. To her credit Dusty never opted to live in the past, thus sparing herself the twilight existence of the nostalgia circuit.


Instead, 1982 found her in Toronto recording and co-producing her intense and edgy album, White Heat, whereon in an often snarling vocal, she explored the darker side of sexual relationships. Later in the decade, the Pet Shop Boys invited her to sing with them on "What Have I Done To Deserve This?" The song was a worldwide hit. Her acclaimed Reputation album followed in 1990 and Dusty found herself firmly back in the public eye and once again high in the charts - at least in Europe.



In the summer of 1995 Dusty traveled to the windswept Atlantic coastline of Ireland to make the video for her single "Roll Away." An ode to the inherent mystery of life and to the soul's meandering journey to a state of wholeness, "Roll Away" resonates with a spirit of trusting openness to all that may come. It became, appropriately enough, Dusty's swan song, as within two years of its release she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.


Dusty Springfield died on March 2, 1999 - the day she had originally been scheduled to receive the Order of the British Empire (OBE) from the Queen of England. Arrangements however, had been made for her manager and long-time friend Vicki Wickham to collect the award a month earlier. It was presented to Dusty at the Royal Marsden Hospital in the presence of close friends and hospital staff. Dusty's passing at her home in Henley-on-Thames came within two weeks of her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and less than seven weeks before her 60th birthday on April 16.