Phoebe Snow

New York-born singer Phoebe Snow achieved fame as a jazz-blues singer with an indefinable style that she said was influenced by her early frustration playing guitar; she used her multi-octave voice to sound like a guitar and sometimes even a saxophone. A poet, she adapted her poems to lyrics for many songs and recorded many works by other songwriters. She played guitar and sang in Greenwich Village clubs and in 1972 Denny Cordell produced her self-titled debut album, which generated the hit single 'Poetry Man'. It reached the top five on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned her a Grammy nomination as Best New Artist. She made several well-received appearances on the TV show 'Saturday Night Live' and opened in concert for Paul Simon and Jackson Browne. Her burgeoning career was threatened when in 1975 her daughter Valerie Rose was born with severe brain damage and she elected to care for her at home (Valerie died in 2007 aged 31). She released the successful album 'Second Childhood' in 1976 followed in 1977 by 'It Looks Like Snow' and 'Never Letting Go' and in 1978 'Against the Grain'. Her 1979 cover of Paul McCartney's 'Every Night' garnered praise but after 'Rock Away' in 1981, her recording career was negligible through the 1980s until comeback album 'Something Real' in 1989. Although Snow never regreted her choices to take time out, she lost her recording contract and had to take work singing on radio and TV commercials. Performances with Donald Fagan's all-star soul revue and in a spiritual group with Mavis Staples, CeCe Peniston, and Thelma Houston led to three more albums 'I Can't Complain', 'Natural Wonder' and 'Live in Woodstock'. Snow, who said she took her stage name from a spotless character dressed all in white that she played in an early railroad commercial, died in 2010 in New Jersey after a cerebral haemorrhage left her in a coma. She was 60 years old.

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