NEW YORK — It wasn’t long after the release of “Poetry Man,” the breezy, jazzy love song that would make Phoebe Snow a star, that the singer experienced another event that would dramatically alter her life.
In 1975, she gave birth to a daughter, Valerie Rose, who was found to be severely brain-damaged. Her husband split from her soon after the baby was born. And at a time when many disabled children were sent to institutions, Snow decided to keep her daughter at home and care for the child herself.
The decision to be Valerie’s primary caretaker would lead her to abandon music for a while and enter into ill-fated business decisions in the quest to stay solvent enough to take care of Valerie.
Snow, who worked her way back into the music performing world in the 1980s and continued to perform in recent years, died Tuesday from complications of a brain hemorrhage she suffered in January 2010, said Rick Miramontez, her longtime friend and public relations representative. She was 60.
Snow never regretted her decision to put aside music so she could focus on Valerie’s care. She was devastated when her daughter, who was not expected to live beyond her toddler years, died in 2007 at 31.
“She was my universe,” she told the website that year. “She was the nucleus of everything. I used to wonder, am I missing something? No. I had such a sublime, transcendent experience with my child. She had fulfilled every profound love and intimacy and desire I could have ever dreamed of.”
After her stroke last year, Snow endured bouts of blood clots, pneumonia and congestive heart failure, said her manager, Sue Cameron.
Known as a folk guitarist who made forays into jazz and blues, Snow put her stamp on soul classics such as “Shakey Ground,” “Love Makes a Woman” and “Mercy, Mercy Mercy” on more than a half-dozen albums.
Snow’s defining hit, however, was “Poetry Man,” which she wrote herself. The song, anchored by her husky voice and a fluid guitar, was a romantic ode to a married man. It reached the Top 5 on the pop singles chart in 1975 and garnered her a Grammy nomination for best new artist.
Soon after that, her daughter was born. She started to make her way back into the music business, and by the early 1980s, she was performing shows again. In 1989, she released her first album in eight years, “Something Real.” She also supplemented her income doing through the 1980s and into the 1990s by singing commercial jingle for companies including Michelob, Hallmark and AT&T.
Among her other hits was her duet with Paul Simon on the song “Gone at Last.” She also sang “Have Mercy” with Jackson Browne.
Snow was born Phoebe Ann Laub to white Jewish parents in New York City in 1950, and raised in Teaneck, N.J. Though many assumed she was black, Snow never claimed African-American ancestry.
She changed her name after seeing Phoebe Snow, an advertising character for a railroad, emblazoned on trains that passed through her hometown. Snow quit college after two years to perform in amateur nights at Greenwich Village folk clubs.
Other Deaths
Poly Styrene, 53, the braces-wearing singer who belted out “Oh bondage, up yours!” with the band X-Ray Spex, died of breast cancer Monday.
X-Ray Spex released just one album, 1978’s “Germ Free Adolescents.” But its aggressively catchy single “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!” became a punk anthem.
Of British and Somali heritage, Styrene was born Marion Elliott-Said in 1957 in the London suburb of Bromley. As a teenager, she had a reggae single but was inspired to form a punk band after seeing the Sex Pistols in 1976.
Styrene later joined the Hare Krishna movement and released several solo albums, the most recent, “Generation Indigo,” just last month.
She is survived by her daughter, Celeste Bell-Dos Santos, who fronts the band Debutant Disco.
Peter Lieberson, 64, a major American composer, died Saturday in Israel of complications from lymphoma, according to music publishing company G. Schirmer.
Lieberson, who lived in Santa Fe, wrote his most inspired songs for his love, the late mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. He was in Israel for medical treatment and had been diagnosed with the cancer while still mourning Hunt Lieberson’s 2006 death from breast cancer.
He was a well-established composer years before he met her in 1997. His works were performed by the top U.S. orchestras and soloists, including cellist Yo-Yo Ma and pianists Emanuel Ax and Peter Serkin.
Hubert “Hub” Schlafly, 91, a key developer of the device that came to be known as the teleprompter, died April 20 in Stamford, Conn.
He won an Emmy Award for his contributions to the innovation. Schlafly was a friend of actor Fred Barton Jr., who wanted a way to remember his lines. Author Laurie Brown says Schlafly, Barton and business partner Irving Berlin Kahn developed the teleprompter, which made its debut in 1950 on the soap opera “The First Hundred Years.” Schlafly eventually became president of TelePrompTer Corp.
Herbert Hoover became the first politician to use the device in 1952.
Denver Post wire services
