Red yellow honey, sassafras and moonshine...

I've been raving about Laura Nyro for close to a week now.

The only sad thing was that none of the people I've asked if they knew her knew her. A few of them knew Joni Mitchell, and even fewer, Janis Joplin, but none of them knew Laura Nyro. Such a shame because she was a really talented musician. Though I've probably just been asking the wrong demographic (been asking people my age--Nyro was a 70's gal). Plus, she had never been popular as a performer, mainly because she'd always shunned the limelight (yup, a female version of JD Salinger we got here). The limelight had always tried to chase her, though, because she was songwriter to a lot of hits by other artists like The 5th Dimension, Peter, Paul and Mary, Carole King, etc. She had reportedly been chased by talk show writers/researchers to be a guest on their shows but had repeatedly turned them down.

I am so loving her songs, mostly the ones she had penned in her early years as a songwriter, songs like "Stoned Soul Picnic" (my absolute favorite, hands down!), "Timer", "Eli's Coming", "And When I Die", "Sweet Blindness", "The Bells", and "Blowing Away", among others. Her voice has got lots of power and soul and her music is a hybrid of jazz, rhythm and blues, rock, and pop (of the 70's, that is).

Her elusiveness (both then and now) has completely spiced up how I see her. Having a jazz trumpeter for a dad and a mom who listened to Billie Holiday and Debussy must've helped her figure out what it was she wanted to be, what it was she wanted to do. Listening to her music transports me to her era and, at the same time, keeps me more grounded to mine, because here was a woman who knew, from the start, the direction she wanted to take and didn't allow anyone, and anything--neither limelight, shadow, nor broken marriage--from straining her.

She died of cancer at 47, another one of those incredibly talented people who died relatively young. Such a pity. She could've written more, sang more. Though, as it is, she had been a prolific songwriter and her cache of works is really pretty impressive.