When Barbara Keith, acoustic in hand, headed from Massachusetts to Greenwich Village in the course of the top of the folks period, she grew to become one in all numerous aspiring troubadours tentatively following in Dylan’s footsteps, singing people requirements at Café Wha? and Gerde’s Folks Metropolis. She fell in with a bunch of Café Wha? regulars, they usually fashioned the short-lived band Kangaroo. By the point they’d scored a file deal, Keith was beginning to write songs, and shortly after the group dissolved, she was signed by MGM/Verve, with Peter Asher assigned to provide her self-titled 1969 debut album. Though the LP brought on barely a ripple, a number of labels noticed sufficient promise within the teen to maintain tabs on her.
Throughout a short fling with A&M in 1970, Keith had her first style of success when her tune “Free The Folks” was coated by Delaney & Bonnie and Barbra Streisand, dramatically rising her visibility. Earlier than lengthy she was auditioning for Columbia chief Clive Davis and Warner/Reprise Chairman Mo Ostin, who personally signed Keith to a three-album deal. Producer/A&R rep Larry Marks (Gene Clark, Phil Ochs, The Flying Burrito Brothers), who’d turn out to be her co-manager, bought the job of helming her LP, and his first transfer was recruiting the easiest musicians in LA to play on it.
Ostin had signed Keith on the good time – or so it appeared to the Warners brass on her arrival in 1972. Joni Mitchell had simply jumped to Asylum and Bonnie Raitt was simply getting began, so there was a void to be stuffed, and the 26-year-old Keith appeared to have the products to turn out to be Mitchell’s inheritor obvious. She’d grown exponentially as a songwriter and had matured right into a strikingly authentic singer, the urgency of her supply additional enlivened by her “hummingbird” vibrato, as one critic described it. However what most distinguished Keith from her contemporaries was her utter fearlessness, which was obvious from the opening notes of the second LP bearing her title.
Who of their proper thoughts would dare cowl Dylan’s “All Alongside The Watchtower” after Jimi Hendrix had made it monumentally, indelibly his personal? Keith didn’t simply cowl it, she opened the album with it, her feral vocal powering by a gauntlet fashioned by John Brennan’s galloping acoustic, Lee Sklar’s rumbling bassline and David Cohen’s pecking wah-wah licks. By the point Jim Keltner joins the fray, the efficiency has attained a sinewy ferocity. “…Watchtower”, like the majority of the LP, was minimize reside off the ground, as Marks skilfully matched the gamers with Keith’s songs. The austere ballad “Burn The Midnight Oil No Extra” accommodates nothing greater than Sklar’s bass and Keith’s regal piano amid a gossamer Nick DeCaro string association. On the different excessive are “Shining All Alongside”, which will get a full-bodied, Band-like remedy, as Lowell George, pianist Spooner Oldham, organist Mike Utley, drummer Jim Keltner, Sklar and percussionist Milt Holland wail away in sepia-toned bliss, and the vivid highway anthem “Detroit Or Buffalo”, which climaxes with pedal-steel maestro Sneaky Pete Kleinow and George conjuring a gilded rhapsody out of metal cylinders sliding over strings.
A half century later, “Free The Folks”, with its secular-gospel uplift, appears rooted within the period of Nixon and Vietnam, in distinction to the timeless country-folk ballad “The Bramble And The Rose” and the rousing rock anthem “A Stone’s Throw Away”. Keith had co-written the latter tune with Doug Tibbles, who’d not too long ago deserted a profitable profession as a sitcom scriptwriter to strive his hand at drumming for a dwelling. He was enlisted to maintain the beat throughout rehearsals, and it wasn’t lengthy earlier than Tibbles and Keith fell head over heels in love, turning her priorities the wrong way up. Quickly after the album was accomplished, she returned her advance cash and blithely walked away from a profession full of seemingly limitless potential. Reprise launched Barbara Keith in 1973 with zero fanfare, and among the many handful of individuals conscious of the album’s existence had been singers from Valerie Carter to Olivia Newton-John, who had been delighted to cowl its songs.
Keith and Tibbles spent a few many years in LA earlier than finally settling again in Massachusetts, the place they raised two sons and, in 1998, when elder son John was 11, fashioned a household band, The Stone Coyotes. Early on, Elmore Leonard grew to become a giant fan, describing the band as “AC/DC meets Patsy Cline”. He used Keith’s lyrics in his 1999 novel Be Cool, which was launched with a Stone Coyotes CD sampler, and took the band on a tour selling the e book. Thus far, they’ve stuffed 16 LPs and three EPs with songs penned by the prolific Keith, who’s as energised as ever at 76. If ever an artist’s story begged to be made right into a biopic, it’s Barbara Keith’s topsy-turvy saga.
