The Alternative Remedies Guide

Dusty Springfield is a musical legend, but she certainly didn’t have it easy during her lifetime. While Dusty Springfield songs were still popular, she often found that she had to work for respect among her musical peers.

By the end of the 1967, Springfield was becoming disillusioned with the showbusiness carousel on which she found herself trapped. She appeared out of step with the summer of love and its attendant psychedelic music. Her BBC television series attracted healthy viewing figures, but it was anathema to the sudden change in the pop scene. The comparatively progressive and prophetically titled Where Am I Going? attempted to redress this. Containing a jazzy, orchestrated version of Bobby Hebb’s “Sunny” and Jacques Brel’s “If You Go Away” (English lyrics by Rod McKuen), it was an artistic success but flopped commercially (or, in the words of biographer Lucy O’Brien, was “released to stunning indifference”). The following year a similar fate awaited the excellent Dusty … Definitely. On this she surpassed herself with her choice of material, from the rolling “Ain’t No Sunshine Since You’ve Been Gone” to the aching emotion of Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today”, but her continuing good choice of songs was no longer attracting fans.

In 1968, as Britain was swamped by the progressive music revolution, the uncomfortable split between what was underground and hip, and what was pop and unhip, became prominent. Springfield, well aware that she could be doomed to the variety club chicken-in-a-basket circuit in the UK, departed for Memphis, Tennessee, one of the music capitals of the world, and immediately succeeded in recording a stunning album and her finest work, Dusty In Memphis. The expert production team of Tom Dowd, Jerry Wexler and Arif Mardin were the first people to recognize that her natural soul voice should be placed at the fore, rather than competing with full and overpowering string arrangements. The album remains a classic and one of the finest records of the 60s. The single “Son Of A Preacher Man” became a major hit, but the album failed in the UK and only reached a derisory number 99 in the US chart.