Singer-songwriter and pianist who paved the way for many female artists to follow. Other artists like the Fifth Dimension have covered her material (“Stoned Soul Picnic” and “Wedding Bell Blues”). ” And When I Die” was her first hit as a songwriter when she sold it to Peter, Paul & Mary for $5,000. It was later covered by Blood, Sweat & Tears. ” Eli’s Coming” was a hit for Three Dog Night.
Nyro’s career was not about hits, however. An avid reader of poetry in her youth, Laura was a music aficionado whose influences ranged from the doo-wop groups she grew up with on the streets of New York, to impressionists like Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, opera singer Leontyne Price, and Billie Holiday, to the protest movement of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Pete Seeger. It is not unusual, then, that Nyro’s music would incorporate so many seemingly disparate elements: folk, impressionism, jazz, poetry, and R&B.
She has in turn influenced a variety of artists including Rickie Lee Jones, Joni Mitchell, and Todd Rundgren, who said after hearing her he stopped trying to sound like The Who and more like Laura Nyro.
Laura’s father was a trumpet player and piano tuner and one of the pianos he tuned belonged to Artie Mogull, a record exec who arranged an audition for her. He signed her to a contract and became her manager. Nyro was only eighteen when she performed her first live gig.
In 1966, she released her first album, the impishly titled More Than A New Discovery. A follow-up, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, was released two years later. A third album, New York Tendaberry, was released during the “Summer of Love”. Christmas and the Beads of Sweatsaw in the new decade. In 1971, Laura released Gonna Take A Miracle, an album of soul covers. She married David Bianchini in the same year and subsequently retired.
Her “retirement” and marriage turned out to be more like a five-year hiatus. By 1976, she was divorced and had recorded a comeback album, Smile, which was followed by a four-month tour and a live album, Season of Lights. Another new album, Nested, was released in 1978. It was ironically titled, considering she was about to take a six-year hiatus to take care of her son Gil. Her next album, Mother’s Spiritual, was released in 1984.
A year later,Nyro was asked to write the title song for a documentary called Broken Rainbow which won an Oscar in 1985. The film is about the mistreatment of the Navajo people. It was not the first or the last of her causes. In 1988, she went on the road again and dedicated the tour to the Animal Rights Movement. It resulted in another live album, Laura: Live at the Bottom Line.
Another five-year hiatus followed and “Broken Rainbow” was re-released on the 1993 album Walk the Dog and Light the Light. It would be the last album she would ever record.
Nyro was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1996. A year later, she was dead. Tragically, it was the same disease her mother had died of, and at the very same age. Eerily, in between the diagnosis and her untimely death, Laura was asked to hand-pick the material that would be included on her two-CD set at Columbia Records, Stoned Soul Picnic: The Best of Laura Nyro. She got to hear her own “retrospective” while she was still alive.
Many posthumous recordings have been released since, including Time and Love: The Music of Laura Nyro, a tribute album featuring such diverse artists as Roseanne Cash, Phoebe Snow, and Suzanne Vega. It was released shortly after her death, in 1997. Five years later, a biography of her life, written by Michel Kort, was published, Soul Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro. In 2005, BBC Radio 2 aired a documentary entitled Shooting Star: Laura Nyro Remembered.
Dee Rossello recordings
I Was a Free Port and You Were the Main Drag (Laura Nyro)
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