Here's what you need to know about the incomparable, notoriously underrated Phoebe Snow: She had a powerhouse voice capable of a schoolgirl hum or a red-hot blues mama growl. Her voice was an octave shy of Mariah Carey's. All of that was packed into what some have called an ethnically ambiguous woman. What is known about Phoebe Ann Laub, aside from the surname "Snow" that came from the name of a 1900s advertisement of a woman on the side of a train, is that she was born a little Jewish girl in New York in 1950 and raised in New Jersey. Growing up on a healthy musical diet of everything from Folk, Broadway, and Blues, this is perhaps the reason her vocals are out-of-this-world and possess many colors, textures and timbres.
Armed with her guitar, she strummed and sang through many Greenwich Village clubs eventually being signed to Shelter Records, co-founded by Leon Russell, the genius songwriter behind "A Song For You." In 1974 Phoebe released "Phoebe Snow," her self-titled debut. This album is a collection of 9 songs (10 on CD/iTunes, with a bonus track "Easy Street") that captures this wonderful bluesy, folksy, jazzy feeling of the summer of '74. How I wish I were alive then to experience it. For me, this album goes along with the previous entry for albums reminiscent of New York. While other female singer songwriters were singing songs of whimsical stories set to soft guitars or pianos, Phoebe Snow was giving you bluesy introspection--a music and lyrical combo that was deeper than the straight-to-the-point lyrics of the Blues. In addition, this album finds her using a lot of Delta Blues Resonator Guitar for that twang sound. Though this album of her brief but rich catalog doesn't showcase her entire vocal range like her other albums do, what "Phoebe Snow" does is introduce us to Ms. Snow as a songwriter that can cleverly lace subtext into a witty line and be delivered with a coo one moment or a roar the next. Jill Scott is great at doing this with her vocals, and many of her phrasings harken back to that of Phoebe's. Other current-day artists such as Alana Davis, Diane Birch, and Lianne La Havas inflect their guitar and piano laden songs with a similar yodel-like melismatic quality. Get those thank you cards in the mail to the spirit of Phoebe snow, ladies!
"Good Times," written by Sam Cooke, opens the album but Phoebe's arrangement is a soulful stroll that nixes the ebullient bounce of Sam's and incorporates a wailing blues mama!
"Harpo's Blues," the second track, is Phoebe giving you a jazz club vibe, with a walking, plucking upright bass and wistful piano/guitar that gives you the feeling you should be rowing a boat on the lake in Central Park. "I wish I was a willow, and I could sway to the music in the wind." When the saxophone comes in, the listener is transported to the smokey basement of a jazz cabaret.
Phoebe's most memorable song, her signature and one that I feel really captures the zeitgeist of a New York summer is "Poetry Man." This song has Phoebe enamored with a man as she pleads, "Talk to me some more, you don't have to go, you're the poetry man, you make things all rhyme." Another song that has a walking bass, Phoebe's layered, harmonizing vocals bounce over the music like a daydream, with a harp setting you into full "Calgon take me away" mode! This song really captures a summer fling unlike any other.
One of my personal favorites on the record is "Either Or Both." With a bit of a country twang, Phoebe is ruminating on how she sees herself. We all have those days where we're content with ourselves and then other days where we want to be someone else. "Sometimes this face looks so funny that I hide it behind a book; But sometimes this face has so much class that I have to sneak a second look. What I want to know from you, when you hear my plea: Do you like or love, either or both of me."
Another of my favorite tracks is "It Must Be Sunday" because I liken it to having those moments of total awareness: "I watched the world surround me from inside a phone booth, and it began to astound me, I tried to keep my couth. I said it must be Sunday 'cause ev'rybody's tellin' the truth; Then again it might be Monday 'cause ev'rybody's drinkin' vermouth." My favorite verse is the following because it's soooo true! "December thirty-first is the very worst time of the year; You got to think of people that you like enough to share your beer. Just when you're having fun, it's January one and you wait for explanations to appear..."
Phoebe recorded most of her work between 1973 and 1981; she took a great deal of time in between to care for her special needs daughter Valerie--she refused to institutionalize her. If her voice sounds familiar to you in a different way, it's because she did two famous commercial jingles: "Stouffer's, nothing comes closer to home" and "The touch, the teel of Cotton, the fabric of our lives." Ring a bell? By the late 1980s Phoebe was back at it, recording and touring. In 2008 she gave us her first and only live album before she passed away from a coma and congestive heart failure in 2011. To me she is gone but not forgotten, and her supreme vocal styling, horrendously omitted from "greatest singers lists" all too often, continues to influence me. May you and your daughter rest, Phoebe Snow!