She is only 22 years old when she jumps into the helicopter that will take her to the stage. She has the guitar hanging on her back. She has no manager with her, just mother Polly who is a jazz singer.
There has been a bit of buzz around her first album “Born to be”, especially in Europe, but in her home country the American singer/songwriter Melanie is still relatively unknown. Like Joni Mitchell, the young artist from Queens, New York, has played some of the small, vibrant folk clubs in Greenwich Village and thus made a name for herself in the city’s music circles. But it is only when Melanie Safka-Schekeryk steps into the spotlight when the Woodstock music festival is organized for the first time, in August 1969, that it completely explodes.
For her part, she doesn’t really know what she’s gotten herself into.
“It was an incredibly scary day”, she will later recall in an interview with The Guardian in 2021. “I thought it would be a weekend of song, I saw families on picnic blankets in front of me, arts and crafts. I had no idea! I walked into the lobby and there was Janis Joplin.”
At first she is terrified.
She has never played in front of such a large audience. She doesn’t have a band, just the acoustic guitar and the songs she’s been hammering out since her teens. Musically, she is influenced by jazz, French chanson and American folk songs. She has refined her own songwriting, among other things by studying folk singer Joan Baez’s songs. At first she just imitates, but eventually Melanie finds her own melodic language and expression. One that over the years will blossom into songs such as “Beautiful people”, “Together alone”, “I am not a poet (Night song)”, “Any guy”, “It’s me again” and “Someday I’ll be a farmer”.
Of the Woodstock festival’s 32 acts she is one of three female solo artists. In addition to Melanie, Janis Joplin plays and so the role model, Baez. Melanie has neither finds nor experiences to fall back on, but to her surprise, the audience responds almost instinctively. In retrospect, she will describe the experience as almost sacral; how it felt like the 500,000 people in the audience instantly understood what she wanted to do and say. The breakthrough was not long in coming. “I stepped onto the stage as an unknown person, but I left it as a star”, (USA Today, 2018).
If anything, Melanie’s music was right on time. Her mix of folk, wistful blues and poking pop harmonies was distinctive
If anything, Melanie’s music was right on time. Her mix of folk, wistful blues and poking pop harmonies was distinctive. But it was above all the soulful voice and the lucid lyrics that made her songs so magnetic. In many ways, she fit perfectly into the rolling singer/songwriter wave that swept through the US, Canada and Europe during the sixties and seventies. Side by side with fellow artists such as Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Joan Baez, Carly Simon, Judy Collins and Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Melanie set the direction for what a female artist or songwriter was, could be – or would become.
When she performed at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1973, she took the opportunity to highlight what the pioneer Baez meant to her own artistry. “I think there’s someone out there even now who just got a guitar, and might even be learning my songs […] and I think that girl who sings Melanie songs will one day do her own interpretation of what I do and I will, in a way, be a part of it.”
During her long but winding career, Melanie released 28 studio albums and a long line of live records. Singles such as “Brand new key”, the Rolling Stones cover “Ruby Tuesday” and the gospel-sparkling pop ballad “Lay down (Candles in the rain)”, inspired by the Woodstock concert, climbed the charts. Among the albums, it is above all her fourth album “Gather me” that stands out. It’s a hauntingly beautiful, and strikingly often subversive, collection of songs. Melanie shows her greatness as a lyricist not least in the song “Some say (I got devil)” where she sings; “some have tried to sell me / all kinds of things to save me / from hurting like a woman”.
She described herself like a beatnik, rather than a hippie. The criticism of the system was often present in her songs, regardless of whether they were about the feeling of being stuck in a woman’s body, the longing to live a more natural life or about refusing to eat animals. In her songs, she often returned to the grace in nature and in creation, as well as to the inherent power of the latter. Sometimes she was wildly funny, like when she sang; “If you do me wrong / I’ll put your first and last name in my rock n’ roll song”. Even more often, she was disarmingly wise, as in the ingeniously unconventional love song “Lay your hands across the six strings”, where a failed twosome most of all becomes a starting point for a truly exquisite, musical introspection.
Melanie Safka-Schekeryk was 76 years old.
Melanie Safka-Schekeryk 1947–2024
American singer/songwriter, born in Queens, New York.
Debuted on record in 1968 with the album “Born to be”. Shortly afterwards, she released the records “Affectionately Melanie” (1969), “Candles in the rain” (1970), “The good book” (1971) and “Gather me” (1971).
In 1968 she married with music producer Peter Schekeryk and took the name Melanie Safka-Schekeryk. Left the record company Buddah Records and instead started his own with his husband.
Her latest studioalbum ”Ever since you never heard of me” kom 2010.
When she died Melanie worked on a cover album, which included songs by Morrissey, Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, Depeche Mode and David Bowie.
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