A Tribute to Dusty Springfield

In her teens, however, Springfield transformed herself into a glamorous blond singing sensation with the help of a whole lot of hairspray (“I used so much hair spray that I feel personally responsible for global warming” Springfield once quipped), joining the girl group The Lana Sisters. In 1960, she started belting tunes for her brother Tom’s band, The Springfields, with pal Tim Field.

It was during the successful folk trio’s tours of the US that Dusty got turned onto the sound of Motown, a sound she tried to export back with her across the Atlantic.

Springfield ran into difficulties with the British male musicians who were backing her on her first solo-efforts: “Motown hadn’t released any records in Britain... 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 ... They knew what I wanted but the last person they were going to take it from was a bee-hived bird.”

When asked why these British session men had trouble adapting the hip American R&B sound, Springfield explained, “I would say there’s a singular lack of 'feel' for what I can only describe as 'funk.' We can produce the most marvelous big, fat sounds, but we seem incapable of producing the sort of loose, uninhibited sort of funk.”

But with her first solo-single “I Only Want To Be With You,” Springfield made it clear to the world in 1963, at the age of twenty-four, that the small, free-spirited young woman not only had an undeniable feel for funk, but that she had the heart-cracking, lived-in voice to belt it out. Holding her own with Motown’s Martha Reeves in a live special for the BBC, Springfield soon won the respect of Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler, who invited her back to America to make a record in the same studio where her all-time heroine Aretha Franklin had recorded.

The album Springfield released in 1969, Dusty in Memphis, unanimously considered her greatest by critics, is perhaps best described by Hoerburger: “She rippled over and curled around the songs of carnality, of love’s psychosis (the hypnotic 'Windmills of Your Mind') and mostly, of love’s memory, love in exile, love as asymptote. It was some of the most emotionally literate music ever put to vinyl; while other pop singers were still wondering who wrote the book of love, Springfield was teaching a course in comparative literature.”

Springfield’s best known tune from this album is probably the toe-tapping "Son of a Preacher Man," reinvigorated in popularity in 1994 by its inclusion on the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino’s hit film Pulp Fiction. Fans of The L Word will recognize another song on the album "Just a Little Lovin'" from the show's season-two soundtrack.

Although Dusty in Memphis has since been named one of the Top 10 Coolest Records by Rolling Stone, at the time it did not do glowingly on the charts, leading Springfield to spiral into an alcoholic and cocaine-filled depression in which she stayed throughout most of the seventies. She tried throughout that decade to make multiple comebacks with successive albums A Brand New Me (1970), Cameo (1973), It Begins Again (1978), and Living Without Your Love (1979) to no avail. For years she traipsed in and out of hospitals, rehab, and rocky relationships.

Living in Los Angeles, which Springfield called “a sick place, under the cover of everyone being so healthy and sunbleached,” Dusty went into recovery from drugs and alcohol in 1983. In 1986, a comeback finally did stick, in the form of “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” a song she did with new wavers The Pet Shop Boys that soon became a worldwide hit, re-launching her career. Moving back to her native England, in 1990 she put out the fairly-popular Reputation, followed by the album A Very Fine Love (1995), before her death in 1999.

At her funeral, The Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant dubbed Dusty Springfield “fab” — a sentiment with which, despite her tragic moments, few could argue.

Immeasurably influential to vocalists to come with her characteristically vulnerable, gutsy, rawly-emotional voice, Dusty Springfield will long be remembered for breaking ground for women in music in the ‘60s. It will be a delight to see Dusty’s heyday played tribute to in Jessica Sharzer’s upcoming film about her life, and satisfying, too, to see her lesbian romantic life depicted, especially if it is done so honestly.