How did Dusty Springfield discover American soul?

Martha and the Vandellas joined by Dusty Springfield on Ready Steady Go, 1965

I recently watched a great documentary When Motown Came To Britain, made last year by the BCC. Dusty Springfield featured in it as a great supporter of the label, and I was curious to find out more about that connection. 

In the documentary Just Dusty (from 2009, posted below), UK music journalist Keith Altham says "she was a very early supporter of the Motown sound, and the groups like the Shirelles, the Temptations, the Four Tops. Her big love was Martha and the Vandellas."

Vicki Wickham (Dusty's manager): "There was a shop in London called Soul City, which Dave Godin ran, and Dave bought in American imports and so Dusty and I would go down there practically every Saturday and buy a pile of records."

So how did Dusty discover American soul? 

She told Paul Du Noyer in a 1995 interview for Mojo that discovery happened when she was in a folk trio called The Springfields, with her brother Dion. They had gone to Nashville to record an album in the early 1960s.

Du Noyer: 'Two moments of that trip were to permanently alter her course. One occurred in her Nashville hotel room when the radio played Dionne Warwick singing Don’t Make Me Over: “I had to sit down on the bed, fast, because I thought, Pop music’s never going to be the same again. I want to do that! And I knew I couldn’t do it in Nashville.” 

The other had happened in New York, en route to Nashville: “It was Tell Him, by The Exciters. I was standing outside the Colony Record Store on Broadway about 2 in the morning, hearing that voice, ‘I know – something – about love’ and going Wow! How do I do this? I knew it could work if I could adapt them in some way.

“And it worked because there was a space for me, and for all the early people. All of a sudden it opened up. I don’t know if the planets were lined up right or what. There was this musical void that we all fell into, without any calculation.” She and Tom dissolved The Springfields, and he helped launch The Seekers, producing them and writing hits such as I’ll Never Find Another You, Georgy Girl and A World Of Our Own.'

Vicki Wickham was working as a tv producer when she first met Dusty and became friends. She made a pilot for a new pop tv show called Ready Steady Go with The Springfields, and the agreement was if it got picked up, the acts in the pilot would come back. By the time the show got picked up, Dusty appeared and said the Springfields had split and she was going to perform instead. Dusty ended up becoming the show's MC.

Amanda Petrusich writes in the New Yorker, Dec 2021: "The Springfields’ début LP, “Kinda Folksy!,” was full of polite, resolutely cheerful folk standards. Springfield released “I Only Want to Be with You,” her first solo single, in 1963. Her performance is exuberant, far more indebted to Motown’s girl groups than to the folk revival. I find it almost impossible to feel bad while it’s playing. The song appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 for ten weeks. Springfield had arrived at a style—soulful, rhythmic, American—that worked for her."

When The Motown Revue came to tour England for the first time in 1965, Dusty arranged for a number of the artists to record appearances for a special for the show, but it didn't screen until after the tour had ended. The clips of her performing with the Motown acts are joyous. 

Dusty and her band had spent a week in New York in 1964, playing on a bill for DJ Murray The K, doing  6 shows a day from 10am til 10pm. She got to hang out with the other acts on the bill like the Temptations, The Miracles, The Ronettes, the Shangri-las, Martha and the Vandellas, and Marvin Gaye, and joined some on backing vocals, from offstage. Millie Smalls went over with her too. Apparently Dusty had a ball. 

Dusty toured NZ and Australia in April 1964 as part of a tour including Gene Pitney, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Brian Poole and the Tremeloes. While in Australia they filmed a TV special which only screened there, but has been reissued on DVD. 

In 1968 she signed to US label Atlantic Records, and started working with legendary soul producer Jerry Wexler. While signed to Atlantic she was also the instigator in getting the label to sign Led Zeppelin - their bass player John Paul Jones had worked with Dusty on one of her earlier albums. 

Petrusich: 'In 1999, Jerry Wexler wrote an essay for the Oxford American about meeting Springfield. He had invited her to his home on Long Island to choose the tracks for what became “Dusty in Memphis,” and played her seventy or eighty acetate demos. “Most of the day, and well into the night, I became first fatigued, and then spastic, as I moved from floor to player, then back to the shelves, the chairs, and the tables, in what turned eventually into a ballet of despair,” Wexler wrote. 

"Springfield wasn’t feeling the material. She flew back to the U.K., and Wexler cancelled a recording session at Fame Studios, in Muscle Shoals, Alabama—the same place where, a year before, he had brought a twenty-four-year-old Franklin and launched her R&B career....

"...Springfield, though, sensed the spectre of Franklin hanging over the sessions. In the end, she didn’t sing in Memphis, instead recording her parts later, in a studio on Fifty-seventh Street. (The album may as well have been called “Dusty in Manhattan.”) Wexler recalled, in a piece for Rolling Stone, “She was timorous; almost neurotic about letting a vocal go for fear that it might not meet her empyrean standards. But the thing is: she always met them.”

In the liner notes for the 1992 Rhino reissue of the album, Dusty recalled that selection process, contradicting Wexler's account that she didn't like any of the songs suggested; "Poor Jerry Wexler, I drove him mad, because I originally only picked two -  Son of a preacher man, and Just a little lovin'. And then we plowed ankle deep thru demos. We disagreed on a few that I let him win on (she laughs), The windmills of your mind for one - and he was right. I mean, it was such an odd thing to have on an album that I wanted to be more R&B-based. But he knew something I didn't."

The sessions happened at American Sound Studios in Memphis as Fame was unavailable. Wexler had previously used the studio of Stax Records (distributed by Atlantic) in Memphis for Atlantic acts Sam and Dave, then Wilson Pickett, but the Stax team grew tired of being guns for hire (and weren't too keen on Pickett's arrogance after his initial success) and turned Wexler down for Aretha Franklin's sessions. 

Dusty told Paul Du Noyer that she didn't enjoy making that album. "“I hated it at first. I hated it because I couldn’t be Aretha Franklin. If only people like Jerry Wexler could realise what a deflating thing it is to say, 'Otis Redding stood there'. Or, 'That’s where Aretha sang'. Whatever you do, it’s not going to be good enough. Added to the natural critic in me, it was a paralysing experience. I was someone who had come from thundering drums and Phil Spector, and I didn’t understand sparseness. I wanted to fill every space. I didn’t understand that the sparseness gave it an atmosphere. When I got free of that I finally liked it, but it took me a long time. I wouldn’t play it for a year. 

“Son Of A Preacher Man was just not good enough. Aretha had been offered it but didn’t record it until after I had, and to this day I listen to her phrasing and go, Goddamit! That’s the way I should have done it: ‘The only one, WHO could ever reach me’ instead of ‘the only one who could EV-er reach me’. Now, if I do it onstage I’ll cop her phrasing! It was a matter of ego, too: if I can’t be as good as Aretha then I’m not gonna do it at all.

“I wasn’t used to singing to a sparse rhythm track. To this day I prefer to sing last, after the strings have been written, because I get moved by a string line or an oboe solo and it will bring things out of me. I was the opposite of the normal thing which is to say, The singer’s the important thing, let’s surround her.”

Dusty met Aretha after she'd done Son of a preacher man - "All Aretha ever said to me - and I died - we were in a lift and she just put her hand on my arm and said 'Girrll!'"

Son of a preacher man was included by Quentin Tarantino on the soundtrack for his film Pulp Fiction in 1994, which resulted in the only platinum disc Dusty ever received. It also helped introduce her to a whole new audience, alongside her late 1980s work with the Petshop Boys. 

Dusty In Memphis is widely acclaimed as a classic today but was not a success on release, with the album just scraping into the Top 100 at #99 in the US in Jan '69, and failing to make the charts in the UK - her UK label Phillips had a big success when they released Son of a preacher man as a single in Nov 1968, but delayed the album until April 1969, by which time that single was most likely a distant memory for the record buying public. 

Vicki Wickham said Dusty was absolutely beside herself with joy about the album once it was completed, and kept ringing her up and playing Son of a preacher man down the phone to her.

Wickham: "It was critically acclaimed but sales-wise were dismal. It didn't get a great deal of airplay, and it just didn't catch people's imagination. I don't know whether it was that they were used to Dusty doing pop and so couldn't accept it which is probably it but you know. 

"There wasn't a buzz on it there wasn't anything, just so disappointing. The lack of success was a huge knock back for her, she really felt violated, she felt that people didn't understand her, that what she loved, and she felt that her instincts for once were wrong, that perhaps she shouldn't have done it and she should have stuck to the same old formula. 

"Although having said that Dusty was  never somebody that wanted to go back, she  always wanted to break new ground and go forward." (BBC2 Long Player, April 2013)

She recorded another album for Atlantic, Brand New Me (released under a different name outside the US - From Dusty ... with love), done at Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia with Thom Bell, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff aka The Mighty Three. 

After that album, she cut half a dozen more singles for Atlantic, but was disappointed with their lack of success, and departed the label. There's a compilation of all her Atlantic singles from 1968 to 1971 that came out in 2021 that's worth investigating. All in glorious mono. 

There's a tune in there called Haunted that is just fantastic, produced by Jeff Barry for a proposed third album for Atlantic that was never completed. The 1999 Rhino CD reissue of Dusty in Memphis has most of that third album as bonus tracks. 

Dusty produced many of her own records, but chose not to get credited for it. 

She told Du Noyer why: "The magic of my situation with Johnny Franz [her recording manager at Philips] was that he allowed me the freedom to follow my enthusiasm. He’d sit in the control room while I’d go out and scowl at the musicians. It was very difficult for them because they’d never heard this stuff before. I’m asking somebody with a stand-up bass to play Motown basslines, and it was a shock. 

"The ones who thought I was a cow, I didn’t work with again. The ones who wanted to learn with me, they had the greatest time. Johnny had played piano for Anne Shelton, and had perfect pitch. Bless his heart, he’d sit there and read Popular Mechanics. But he had good ears, he’d suddenly look up from Popular Mechanics and go, E flat!

“I never took the producer’s credit for two reasons. For one, he deserved it and I was grateful. And then there was the calculating part of me that that thought it looked too slick for me to produce and sing. Because women didn’t do that. And there remains in the British audience, though less so, that attitude of ‘Don’t get too slick on us. Don’t be too smart or we won’t love you.’ And I wanted to be loved.

“Men have been good to me. But I shouldn’t feel they've been good to me. They should have just bloody well listened. But in those days it was quite something to listen to a woman who had a musical mind. 

"You sang the song. You sang it fast and cheaply. And they might take you out for a meal. I worked with some bastards, and some nice guys who saw that I knew what I was doing. A few of them went away and said what a cow I was, having made a great deal of money off me. And those are the people I don’t want in my life. I don’t want to sit at their dinner tables.

“That’s true to this day. I’m having my kitchen done and there’s a real idiot who fitted it, and it was two or three millimetres off. I don’t know how to put cupboards in, but I knew this was off. And the whole time there was this humouring of the little lady: There there, what does she know? I had to call a male friend and have him come down and say it was two or three millimetres off. Then it was: Oh! Course it is, guv!"

Vicki Wickham (in Definitely Dusty a BBC doco screened in 1999, after she had passed away that year): "It was hard, no doubt about it, because first of all she's extremely musical, and knew sounds and knew what she wanted on her records. And of course was influenced by America, so she felt really strongly when she went into the studio that she wanted to get certain sounds, which English musicians perhaps hadn't played before, arrangers hadn't really thought about. 

"So she was constantly playing people bits of records and saying This is what we should do this is the sound we want this is the echo ... In fairness Johnny Franz, who was the producer, was excellent. I mean, he was older, and he was more than happy to sit back put his feet up and smoke his cigar, and let her get on with it"

Madeline Bell (one of Dusty's backing vocalists 1965-69): "If she wanted a certain sound, which in the days of Motown in her life she wanted the Motown sound, it was always a battle for her with the sound guys, because she knew what sound she wanted and they didn't. I mean nowadays they call them divas, but in those days she was a bitch, and she wasn't being a bitch, she wasn't being difficult, she just knew what she wanted and they didn't know what she wanted, really.

"She was incredible, she really was, you know, and because I saw her in the studio, and I mean, as soon as she would stop something in the middle of a rehearsal or something, and say I can't hear so and so, and then she'd go upstairs to the sound box, and everybody would be going - all the guys - going oh God here we go again, you know. It wasn't a question of her being hard, it was a question of her wanting the sound to be right, and a lot of times she didn't get it.

"In her days of going over to New York to the Brill Building to get songs, I mean she used to receive demos from Goffin and King, and they were perfect, they were absolutely perfect demos. All we had to do was go in the studio and put our voices down just like we had just heard on the demo. [Dusty talks about collecting Carole King demos and how utterly wonderful they are in another interview.]

"We never had any real problems doing the backing vocals because it was already down I mean basically everything we did was a cover version of either an original or the demo which had, you know, suddenly we get sent to Carole King song, and she [King] would be doing the lead vocal. I remember one session that I was on in New York when Dusty did ‘What's it gonna be’, the backing vocalists were Carole King, Valerie Simpson and Nick Ashford, I mean, hello!"

BONUS WATCH: Dusty's life and career dissected by Dusty, Dawn French & Jennifer Saunders from 1994. (also includes only known footage of Dusty dueting with Jimi Hendrix when he was a guest on her tv show. They sing Mockingbird.)