LOS ANGELES — Kenny Rankin, a singer-songwriter and musician whose song “Peaceful” was a hit for Helen Reddy and who had popular covers himself of a pair of Beatles hits, died Sunday of lung cancer, which was diagnosed just three weeks ago, his management company said.
He was 69.
His career, which spanned more than five decades, almost defied categorization. A well-regarded guitarist, he played in Bob Dylan’s backup band on the influential 1965 album “Bringing It All Back Home.” He also spent several years on the road opening for comedian George Carlin.
Rankin appeared on the “Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson more than 25 times. Carson was such a fan that he wrote the liner notes for Rankin’s 1967 debut LP “Mind Dusters.”
As a singer with a velveteen tenor voice, he had highly successful covers of the Beatles’ “Blackbird” and “Penny Lane” in the mid-1970s and recorded “The Kenny Rankin Album” of standards in 1976 with a large orchestra conducted by Don Costa.
In addition to Reddy’s version of “Peaceful,” jazz singers Carmen McRae and Mel Torme recorded versions of Rankin and Ruth Batchelor’s “Haven’t We Met.”
Rankin was born Feb. 10, 1940, and grew up in the Washington Heights section of New York. He was signed to Decca Records as a teenager and released a handful of singles. He later signed with Columbia Records.
One of his major influences was Laura Nyro, the late songwriter who wrote “Wedding Bell Blues” and “Stoned Soul Picnic,” whom he met in Greenwich Village in 1960.
“She profoundly changed my musical life, and affected it to this day, more than anyone or anything else,” he told the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto in 2007. “She was deep, dark and light, the spectrum of passion.”
His peak recording years came in the 1970s with the albums “Silver Morning,” “Inside” and “The Kenny Rankin Album.”
Paul McCartney was so pleased with Rankin’s covers of the Beatles hits that he asked Rankin to sing a medley of them when McCartney was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987.
