She wrote songs for Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and Doris Day, co-composed with Harold Arlen (Over the Rainbow\u2019) \u2013 and was a pioneering singer-songwriter of the early 1970s.<\/p>\n
She wrote a song called \u2018Control Yourself<\/a>\u2018, had a career defined by men\u00a0 \u2013 and became an icon of female strength and independence.<\/p>\n She had a number of well-documented and spectacular psychotic episodes and was committed to mental institutions several times in her life\u00a0 \u2013 and wrote some of sanest, most piercingly personal lyrics of the second half of the 20th century.<\/p>\n Funny, intelligent, vulnerable and talented enough to be hired my MGM as a songwriter within five months of writing her first lyric,\u00a0Dory Previn<\/a>\u00a0never fitted into any category and until her death in 2012, few critics understood her (\u2018She\u2019d never won the fight between self and soul,\u2019\u00a0one wrote mysteriously).<\/a><\/p>\n Perhaps it shouldn\u2019t be a surprise that Dory Previn is less well- known than she should be.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Years before spilling your emotional guts in songs and in print became fashionable, she was writing bravely naked versions of her life in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She had lived the life \u2013 parental abuse and weirdness, pills, stratospheric success, pills, marital betrayal (her husband Andre Previn ran off with the young Mia Farrow), breakdown, freakouts, insecurity\u00a0 \u2013 and, when she moved away from Hollywood after the break-up of her marriage, she made that life the theme of her songs.<\/p>\n It turns out that the album I listened to obsessively all those years ago,\u00a0Mythical\u00a0Kings and Iguanas<\/em>, was written while Dory Previn was in a mental institution. In spite of its hippy-dippy title, the ten songs on the album give as clear-eyed a view of desire, love and insecurity (above all, that) as any collection of songs, then or since.<\/p>\n The tunes are good but not spectacular, the production is clunky (like many of the time, it couldn\u2019t make up its mind whether to go pared back\/simple or lush\/sophisticated), but the lyrics and the stories they tell are distinctive and powerful.<\/p>\n Listen to\u00a0\u2018Lemon-Haired Ladies\u2019<\/a>\u00a0(a first crack at Mia \u2013 \u2018Beware of Young Girls\u2019 was to follow).<\/p>\n \u2018Those lemon haired ladies of twenty or so<\/em> I like most of the songs on the album but have chosen\u00a0\u2018The Lady With the Braid\u2019<\/a>\u00a0as my Friday song. There aren\u2019t many songs which capture the danger, romance and fear of one-night stands. Loudon Wainwright\u2019s \u2018Motel Blues\u2019 has a stab at it but this song, with its edgy conversational tone, dipping occasionally into confessional longing and dread,, adds loneliness and longing to the mix.<\/p>\n I read Dory Previn\u2019s first memoir\u00a0Midnight Baby\u00a0<\/a><\/em>when it was published in 1976 and found it compelling if a little \u2018spacey\u2019 as we used to say \u2013 and I plan now to track down her second memoir\u00a0Bogtrotter: An Autobiography with Lyrics\u00a0<\/em>(1980).\u00a0 Her reviews at the time and later, usually written by male critics, tend to be patronising \u2013\u00a0she was \u2018a delicate, schizzy lady, \u2018 according to\u00a0 a journalist in\u00a0People<\/em>\u00a0magazine 1977, \u2018schizzy\u2019<\/a>\u00a0being a first cousin to \u2018ditsy\u2019.<\/p>\n It\u2019s difficult not to conclude that Previn was a victim not just of her own honesty but of gender attitudes of the time (and perhaps today).\u00a0 Her achievements were astonishing. She was hired as a songwriter in a Hollywood as a complete unknown at a time when few women, apart from Dorothy Fields, were writing songs for movies.<\/p>\n The\u00a0 songs for which she then wrote the lyrics were for films like\u00a0The Valley of the Dolls\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Inside Daisy Clover.\u00a0<\/em>They won Academy awards and Oscar nominations. They were covered by all the great singers and groups of the day. Yet look up on YouTube songs like \u2018The Morning After<\/a>\u2018, written with none other than the great Michael Arlen, or \u2018You\u2019re Gonna Hear From Me<\/a>\u2018, sung by Barbra Streisand and Frank Sinatra among other,\u00a0 and she is rarely, if ever, prominent in the credits. It\u2019s Andr\u00e9 Previn who is in the limelight.<\/p>\n Then think of the next stage of extraordinary self-invention. Who else has moved from Hollywood to being a singer-songwriter, creating an entirely different kind of song which was way before its time? In an interesting (date unknown)\u00a0interview with Michael Billington on BBC Radio 4\u2019s\u00a0Kaleidoscope<\/em><\/a>, she said:<\/p>\n \u2018I wrote \u201c<\/em>Control yourself, contain yourself\/ Restrict yourself, restrain yourself\u201d in 1959, I think, and in 1969 I wrote \u201cScreaming in the 20-Mile Zone\u201d \u2013 let it out, you know\u2026. If you wanted to look at two songs and see the difference 50 years from now in what happened to women\u00a0 \u2013 you wanted to see in shorthand what happened \u2013 I think if you just took those two songs, you would see the difference.\u2019<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n That is why she is such a key figure and so fascinating in herself. Not only was she responsible for some terrific songs, but she reflected her moment in history by moving moving successfully from the glossy, romantic world of film to the raw folky expression of her own uncertainties. No one else has had a career like that.<\/p>\n Dory Previn has a few devoted fans, among them Father John\u00a0 Misty who performs a cover of \u2018The Lady with the Braid\u2019. There are one or two clips of her playing live, like\u00a0this hopelessly over-guitared 1974 performance of \u2018Cold Water Canyon<\/a>\u2018, but I\u2019ve not come across a live version of this terrific song which lives up to the original recording.<\/p>\n
\nOf course you must see them, just don\u2019t let me know<\/em>
\nDon\u2019t let me know, whatever you do<\/em>
\nFor you are younger than I, younger than I, younger than I<\/em>
\nAnd I am weaker than you.\u2019<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n