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THE NEWYORKER, FEBRUARY 8, 2021 73
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. Spring-
field 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.
Ultimately, Wexler and Springfield
agreed on eleven songs, and Wexler
booked a new session, at American Sound
Studio, in Memphis. He enlisted a cracker-
jack group of musicians. Virtuosity and
ease are frequently thought of as anti-
thetical, but the band was as loose as it
was perfect; listening to these arrange-
ments feels like drifting downriver on a
raft. Springfield, though, sensed the spec-
tre of Franklin hanging over the sessions.
In the end, she didn’t sing in Memphis,
instead recording her parts later, in a stu-
dio 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; al-
most neurotic about letting a vocal go
for fear that it might not meet her em-
pyrean standards. But the thing is: she
always met them.”
In May, 1969, Springfield and Wexler
recorded a cover of Tony Joe White’s
“Willie and Laura Mae Jones.” It’s my
favorite cut from the Atlantic era—a rich
expression of Southern culture. “The cot-
ton was high / And the corn was growing
fine / But that was another place and an-
other time,” Springfield belts. I’m not sure
I’ve ever been more convinced by a Brit-
ish person singing the word “y’all.” Soon
after, she recorded an album in Philadel-
phia, with Kenneth Gamble, Leon Huff,
and Thom Bell, a trio of soul producers
known as the Mighty Three. The title
track features a sweeter, more lighthearted
Springfield. “Since I met you, baby, I got
a brand new style,” she sings.
Springfield’s relationship to Black cul-
ture was complex, particularly during the
Atlantic years. It’s tempting to think of
the interracial recordings made in these
studios as representative of some kind of
utopian détente for American race rela-
tions. (The idea that music could func-
tion as a panacea for certain foundational
American tensions has lingered in pop-
ular music, from Funkadelic’s “One Na-
tion Under a Groove” to Janet Jackson’s
“Rhythm Nation.”) Charles Hughes, in
“Country Soul: Making Music and Mak-
ing Race in the American South,” ques-
tions the notion that any American stu-
dio truly represented “a transcendent
space in which racial conflict or even
identity did not exist.” Instead, Hughes
argues, these musicians “understood that
records could be made in an interracial
context and still represent a society that
was separate and unequal.”
In 1964, Springfield scheduled a brief
tour of South Africa. Under apartheid,
it was standard to hold separate shows
for Black and white audiences, but
Springfield’s contract stated that she
would perform only for nonsegregated
crowds. Before each show, Doug Reece,
her bass player, surveyed the crowd to
insure that it was racially mixed. “Most
of the music we played was Black
music,” Reece told the BBC. “She couldn’t
live with herself, with her friends, know-
ing that she was going to go there and
do specific concerts for white people.”
After five shows, South Africa rescinded
Springfield’s visa and gave her forty-eight
hours to leave the country. In a state-
ment, the government said that Spring-
field had failed to observe “the South
African way of life” and instead “chose
to defy the government.”
It’s odd to think of Springfield as
defiant—part of the allure of her music
is how hard she worked to make it pal-
atable, and how intensely she valued her
audience’s satisfaction. She recorded six
additional singles for Atlantic after the
release of “A Brand New Me,” but she
was unhappy with their commercial per-
formance, and soon quit the label. She
released seven more full-length records
before dying, of breast cancer, in 1999.
(An eighth, “Faithful,” was released post-
humously, in 2015.) Some of her work
from the late seventies and the early eight-
ies is worth seeking out—it includes a
few buoyant experiments with disco and
a lot of easy listening—but mostly she
seemed to be moving away from some-
thing. The music she made with Wexler
between 1968 and 1971 remains her deep-
est and most dynamic. One gets the sense
that Springfield never really let herself
stop thinking about how her work would
be received, but, for a brief time, she
sounded open to every possibility.