Overlooked and underestimated, Melanie was framed as a winsome folkie and left out of the pantheon of greats. Fifty years on from classic album Gather Me, she wants to be understood
Melanie remembers the day she busked in London well. The year was 1983 and the concert she was to play had been cancelled due to unsatisfactory ticket sales. So she was sitting with friends, drinking Pimm’s, when someone called to tell her that fans had congregated outside the Royal Albert Hall. “I thought, I’m just going to grab my guitar and go over there and sing,” she tells me by phone from her home in Tennessee. And so she did. The police arrived to move her on – and shortly thereafter, the headlines spun.
“It wasn’t a press stunt, I was just doing what instinctively occurred to me,” says the 74-year-old once lazily hailed as the female Bob Dylan. It’s a philosophy that helped her defy her critics, as she tried to ignore the labels the business applied to her: winsome folk singer, flower child with an edge. “I had a guitar, I had long hair, so I must be a folk singer,” she jokes. Instead, her music is a beguiling mix of earthy folk, mournful blues and rhapsodic pop belted out with a soulful voice; equal parts naive and knowing, she sings with a gravelly rasp that seems to lasso your body.
