In 1968, the British pop singer Dusty Springfield signed to Atlantic Records and began working with the producer Jerry Wexler on “Dusty in Memphis,” her fifth solo album and the first she made in the United States. Springfield, who was already a star in the U.K., wore her hair in a voluminous blond bouffant, wreathed her eyes in heavy mascara, and sang in a tender mezzo-soprano. Her voice was effortless, yet there was something warm and vulnerable at the center of each note. “Dusty in Memphis” is now considered a creative apex for “blue-eyed soul”—the teasing sobriquet, coined in the nineteen-sixties, given to Black music performed by white singers—but sales of the album were measly at first, and Springfield made just one other record for Atlantic, “A Brand New Me,” in 1970, before leaving the label. A new compilation, “Dusty Springfield: The Complete Atlantic Singles 1968-1971,” collects the original, mono mixes of all twenty-four tracks that Springfield recorded during what was arguably the richest stretch of her career.
Springfield was born Mary O’Brien in Hampstead, London, in 1939. In 1960, she changed her name and joined the Springfields, a vocal trio that included her older brother, Tom. “If you’re seventeen years old and you’re called Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien, and you don’t like who you are, you’re going to find a mask, or a front,” Springfield later said. The Springfields’ début LP, “Kinda Folksy!,” was full of polite, resolutely cheerful folk standards. Springfield released “I Only Want to Be with You,” her first solo single, in 1963. Her performance is exuberant, far more indebted to Motown’s girl groups than to the folk revival. I find it almost impossible to feel bad while it’s playing. The song appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 for ten weeks. Springfield had arrived at a style—soulful, rhythmic, American—that worked for her.
From then on, Springfield was steadfast in boosting Motown musicians. In 1965, she hosted a special Motown-themed episode of the U.K. musical variety show “Ready Steady Go!” and invited the Temptations, the Supremes, the Miracles, and Stevie Wonder to make their first appearance before a sizable British audience. It’s possible to piece together most of the episode online. Springfield wears a mod, floor-length dress and occasionally seems giddy. “You should see them move,” she says, incredulous, as she introduces the Temptations. At one point, Springfield and Martha Reeves duet on “Wishin’ and Hopin’,” a track on Springfield’s début album, “A Girl Called Dusty,” from 1964. If you’ve grown accustomed to watching oppressively choreographed television appearances, what Springfield and Reeves do will feel especially joyful and free.
Springfield followed the melody and was not inclined toward vibrato or improvisation, which meant that she could make even oversized compositions feel intimate. Her delivery was coy. “Being good isn’t always easy, no matter how hard I try,” she sings on “Son-of-a Preacher Man,” a single from “Dusty in Memphis.” It’s easy to witness a performer such as Aretha Franklin—still the greatest soul singer of all time—and hear only her vigor and potency. It’s far more difficult to perceive Franklin’s control, economy, and grace. In 1969, the critic Greil Marcus reviewed “Dusty in Memphis” for Rolling Stone. “Most white female singers in today’s music are still searching for music they can call their own,” he wrote. “Dusty is not searching—she just shows up.”
In 1999, Jerry Wexler wrote an essay for the Oxford American about meeting Springfield. He had invited her to his home on Long Island to choose the tracks for what became “Dusty in Memphis,” and played her seventy or eighty acetate demos. “Most of the day, and well into the night, I became first fatigued, and then spastic, as I moved from floor to player, then back to the shelves, the chairs, and the tables, in what turned eventually into a ballet of despair,” Wexler wrote. Springfield wasn’t feeling the material. She flew back to the U.K., and Wexler cancelled a recording session at FAME Studios, in Muscle Shoals, Alabama—the same place where, a year before, he had brought a twenty-four-year-old Franklin and launched her R. & B. career.
Ultimately, Wexler and Springfield agreed on eleven songs, and Wexler booked a new session, at American Sound Studio, in Memphis. He enlisted a crackerjack group of musicians. Virtuosity and ease are frequently thought of as antithetical, but the band was as loose as it was perfect; listening to these arrangements feels like drifting downriver on a raft. Springfield, though, sensed the spectre of Franklin hanging over the sessions. In the end, she didn’t sing in Memphis, instead recording her parts later, in a studio on Fifty-seventh Street. (The album may as well have been called “Dusty in Manhattan.”) Wexler recalled, in a piece for Rolling Stone, “She was timorous; almost neurotic about letting a vocal go for fear that it might not meet her empyrean standards. But the thing is: she always met them.”
In May, 1969, Springfield and Wexler recorded a cover of Tony Joe White’s “Willie and Laura Mae Jones.” It’s my favorite cut from the Atlantic era—a rich expression of Southern culture. “The cotton was high / And the corn was growing fine / But that was another place and another time,” Springfield belts. I’m not sure I’ve ever been more convinced by a British person singing the word “y’all.” Soon after, she recorded an album in Philadelphia, with Kenneth Gamble, Leon Huff, and Thom Bell, a trio of soul producers known as the Mighty Three. The title track features a sweeter, more lighthearted Springfield. “Since I met you, baby, I got a brand new style,” she sings.
Springfield’s relationship to Black culture was complex, particularly during the Atlantic years. It’s tempting to think of the interracial recordings made in these studios as representative of some kind of utopian détente for American race relations. (The idea that music could function as a panacea for certain foundational American tensions has lingered in popular music, from Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” to Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation.”) Charles Hughes, in “Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South,” questions the notion that any American studio truly represented “a transcendent space in which racial conflict or even identity did not exist.” Instead, Hughes argues, these musicians “understood that records could be made in an interracial context and still represent a society that was separate and unequal.”
In 1964, Springfield scheduled a brief tour of South Africa. Under apartheid, it was standard to hold separate shows for Black and white audiences, but Springfield’s contract stated that she would perform only for nonsegregated crowds. Before each show, Doug Reece, her bass player, surveyed the crowd to insure that it was racially mixed. “Most of the music we played was Black music,” Reece told the BBC. “She couldn’t live with herself, with her friends, knowing that she was going to go there and do specific concerts for white people.” After five shows, South Africa rescinded Springfield’s visa and gave her forty-eight hours to leave the country. In a statement, the government said that Springfield had failed to observe “the South African way of life” and instead “chose to defy the government.”
It’s odd to think of Springfield as defiant—part of the allure of her music is how hard she worked to make it palatable, and how intensely she valued her audience’s satisfaction. She recorded six additional singles for Atlantic after the release of “A Brand New Me,” but she was unhappy with their commercial performance, and soon quit the label. She released seven more full-length records before dying, of breast cancer, in 1999. (An eighth, “Faithful,” was released posthumously, in 2015.) Some of her work from the late seventies and the early eighties is worth seeking out—it includes a few buoyant experiments with disco and a lot of easy listening—but mostly she seemed to be moving away from something. The music she made with Wexler between 1968 and 1971 remains her deepest and most dynamic. One gets the sense that Springfield never really let herself stop thinking about how her work would be received, but, for a brief time, she sounded open to every possibility. 