Phoebe Snow apparently never really came out of the coma she fell into after having a brain hemorrhage last year, and today she died.
"At the end of '77, I toured for five weeks while this young couple looked after Valerie. When I came home, she was literally starving herself, and I was virtually insane. I would say that I had a breakdown. I took her down South for treatments, and the doctor at a clinic there said to me, 'Have you ever thought about a little voluntary rest commitment for yourself?' I said, 'I've been away from my kid for over a month, and I'm not gonna do it again.' He said, 'What are you going to do when you tour again?' He said he knew a woman who would take Valerie while I was on tour, and I agreed to talk to her.
I kept meaning to see Snow live, but I never did, though I return to her albums again and again. After her career as a recording artist stalled, she was never really in the public conscience except as a singer of ad jingles. But listen to her records, after all these years of being clobbered into submission by Whitney and Mariah and Christina, and you remember what it's like to listen to a gorgeous, limber voice with an impossible range that serves the song rather than shoving its impressiveness in your face all the time. And unlike the bitter/smug Joni Mitchell of The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Snow critiqued post-war American suburbia from the inside, as one of its products, and with real empathy underneath the resentment. Only a few of her albums are great overall, but almost all of them have great songs: "Two-Fisted Love," "Something Real," "I Don't Want the Night to End," "All Over," and lots that's not on YouTube: "My Faith Is Blind," "Key to the Street," and scads of wonderful covers (such as "Love Makes a Woman," which is on YouTube). A remarkable legacy from a remarkable woman.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 26th, 2011 at 23:14	and is filed under Cipro and alcohol. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I don't think I ever listened to her. There are these lacunae in my exposure to American culture, because not everything filtered through. But now I will. She sounds like what I try to be (and often fail.) — the people who do what they feel they must, instead of sitting around dreaming up things people must do and ways people must behave. They're not angels, by any means, but they are often admirable.
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