Dusty Springfield life and biography

Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien known professionally as Dusty Springfield, was a British pop singer whose career extended from the late 1950s to the 1990s. With her distinctive sensual sound, she was an important white soul singer, and at her peak was one of the most successful British female performers, with 18 singles in the Billboard Hot 100 from 1964 to 1970. She is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the U.K. Music Hall of Fame. International polls have named Springfield among the best female rock artists of all time.

The daughter of a tax consultant, Springfield grew up in prosperous Hampstead in North London. After success in the early 1960s with her brother Tom in the British country-music trio the Springfields, she went solo and made her way into the heart of “Swinging London.” Part cartoon, part unresolvable desire, part bruised despair, she peered through heavy mascara and a stack of peroxided hair while singing with breathy sensuality. Bringing a fragile uncertainty to her cover versions of songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David that had been hits in the United States for Dionne Warwick, Springfield had a string of British hits. The high point of her career, though, was the ballad “You Don't Have to Say You Love Me” (1966), which reached number four on the American charts.

In the late 1960s she began to take herself seriously as a soul diva, signing with Atlantic Records and cutting her Dusty in Memphis (1969) album in the famed American Sound Studios with producers Jerry Wexler and Arif Mardin. It brought her an international hit with “Son of a Preacher Man,” but her career trailed off into a slurry of drug and alcohol abuse. By the mid-1970s she was a session singer in Los Angeles. Repeated comebacks failed until she teamed up with the Pet Shop Boys in 1987 on “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” and the soundtrack for Scandal (1988), a film set in the pre-Swinging London of her earliest success. By the 1990s she was a camp icon. Resettling in England, she battled cancer and in 1998 received the Order of the British Empire. She was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999.

Discography:

1964: A Girl Called Dusty
1965: Ev'rything's Coming Up Dusty
1967: Where Am I Going?
1968: Dusty... Definitely
1969: Dusty in Memphis
1970: A Brand New Me
1972: See All Her Faces
1973: Cameo
1974: Longing (Unreleased)
1978: It Begins Again
1979: Living Without Your Love
1982: White Heat
1990: Reputation
1995: A Very Fine Love

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