Remembering Dory Previn (1925 – 2012)

HOT columnist Sean O’Shea remembers Dory Previn née Shannon, songwriter, singer and poet who died February last year.

The American singer, songwriter and poet Dory Previn died on the 14^th February 2012. Her career included work as a composer and she wrote extensively for film and television. Among her film credits was the title song for Last Tango in Paris and she co-wrote the theme score for Valley of the Dolls.

When I started to include a few of Dory’s songs in my own repertoire around town last spring I was amazed to discover that many of my peers had never even heard of her. Though she was second generation Irish she sang with an Irish lilt in her accent. She was also among the best poets of the questing heart that I have ever heard speak or sing.

Dory had a troubled personal life and though she received many accolades she also experienced much anguish and had a number of admissions to mental hospital. However, from her cauldron of demons she managed to craft many fine and soulful lyrics.

A continuous theme in her work was the fragility of human relationship and the often disappointed search for love and spiritual fulfilment.  She was married to, and for a time somewhat overshadowed by, the composer Andrew Previn, who in the late sixties decided to trade in Dory for the youthful Mia Farrow.

Her 1970s album On My Way to Where, made in response to the breakdown of her marriage, was one of her most confessional albums and a pathway out of her personal crisis. It was described by one reviewer as one long therapy session. It contains the song “Beware of Young Girls” which is an acerbic comment on the younger woman and a song called “Mister Whisper” which gives an inside view of an episode of psychosis.

Her third album Reflections in a Mud Puddle was included in The New York Times critics’ choice as one of the outstanding albums of the 1970s. It contained one of her most famous songs “One Last Dance for My Father” which gives an account of their unresolved relationship.

“Mythical Kings and Iguanas” from her 1971 album of the same name is one of my favourites. The album also contains the song “Her Mother’s Daughter” and “Stone for Bessie Smith” which is the poignant account of how Janis Joplin purchased a stone for the unmarked grave of the blues singer Bessie Smith a few months before her own untimely death.

Mythical Kings and Iguanas

I have ridden comet tails
In search of magic rings
To conjure mythical kings
Mythical kings
Singing scraps of angel-song
High is right and low is wrong
And I never taught myself to give
Down, down, down
To where the iguanas live
Going home is such a ride
Going home is such a ride
Isn’t going home a long and lonely ride

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVy5hAZ8Pdw

Finally, there is her beautiful poem Listen a short extract from which I quote below. It is a pantheistic enunciation of a priestess who seems to speak to us with authority from a place beyond language itself and to my ears it evokes the spirituality of the ancient Celtic seers.

Listen

i no longer plead with heaven
or go rummaging in books
for answers to the questions life contains
no i listen
listen
listen to this inner thing resounding
in the resounding
in the pulsing and the pounding
of my infant ancient veins

 i no longer seek instruction
from my father and my mother
i have mastered
all their pleasure and their pain
no i listen
listen
listen to this inner thing resounding
in the pulsing and the pounding
of my infant ancient veins

the feeling in my bloodflow
is a simple thing you see
everything and nothing
in the parody is me

 

Listen to Dory’s rendition of this poem on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBOxjh8dUJs

SOS February 2013

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