I Can See You - by Paddy Summerfield c. 1986

Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Judee Sill | profile (from Weird But True Facebook)

 


Judith Lynne Sill was born on October 7, 1944, in Oakland, California, into a family that would bring her little peace.


Judee Sill - Lopin’ Along Through The Cosmos  

Her father worked as a cameraman in Hollywood. Her childhood might have been comfortable, even glamorous, but tragedy arrived early and often. Her father died when she was young. Her brother also died during childhood. Her mother remarried, but the new family was troubled. By most accounts, Sill's home life was unstable and painful.

She ran away as a teenager.


The streets of 1960s Los Angeles offered few kind options for a young girl on her own. Sill fell into addiction. She turned to crime to support her habit. At one point, she robbed a liquor store at gunpoint. She was caught, convicted, and sent to reform school.

This was not the trajectory of a future recording artist. This was the trajectory of someone society had written off.

But somewhere in the chaos, Sill had discovered music.


She had taught herself piano and guitar. She had begun writing songs. Even while living on the margins, she was composing music of startling complexity and beauty, blending folk, gospel, and classical influences in ways no one else was attempting.


After reform school, she managed to get clean. She studied composition at UCLA extension, immersing herself in counterpoint and theory. She was particularly drawn to the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose interlocking melodies seemed to her like musical prayers.

She started writing songs that sounded like nothing else in the early 1970s folk scene. While her contemporaries wrote about love affairs and social protest, Sill wrote about transcendence, redemption, and the search for divine grace. Her compositions featured intricate harmonies and classical structures hidden inside deceptively simple acoustic arrangements.

She began performing in Los Angeles clubs, her voice pure and clear, her songs dense with meaning.


In 1970, she came to the attention of David Geffen, who was in the process of founding Asylum Records. Geffen signed her, making Judee Sill the first artist to release a solo album on his new label.


Her self-titled debut appeared in late 1971. Graham Nash produced several tracks. The album opened with a song called "Jesus Was a Cross Maker," a stunning piece of baroque folk that used religious imagery to explore themes of betrayal and longing.

Critics recognized they were hearing something extraordinary. Rolling Stone praised her. Other reviewers noted the sophistication of her compositions, the purity of her voice, the depth of her spiritual searching.


The public mostly shrugged.

"Judee Sill" sold poorly. The music was perhaps too complex, too earnest, too religious for the early 1970s market. Radio stations did not know what to do with songs that sounded like hymns wrapped in folk arrangements.


But Asylum believed in her. In 1973, they released her second album, "Heart Food."

It was even more ambitious than her debut. The arrangements were lusher, the compositions more intricate. Songs moved through multiple movements like classical pieces. The spiritual yearning that had animated her first record burned even brighter here.


One track intertwined multiple vocal lines in the manner of Bach. Another built from quiet meditation to orchestral crescendo. The album was her masterwork, a fusion of sacred music and singer-songwriter intimacy that had no real parallel in popular music.

Critics again praised it. Sales again disappointed.


Asylum Records, facing commercial realities, declined to release a third album. Judee Sill, who had fought her way from the streets to the recording studio, found herself without a label.

Then came the accident.


Details vary in different accounts, but at some point in the mid-1970s, Sill was involved in a serious car crash. She suffered back injuries that caused chronic, debilitating pain. The pain led her back to the drugs she had fought so hard to escape.


Without a record deal, without money, without the recognition she deserved, Sill descended again into addiction. She had been clean for years. Now she was not.

The late 1970s were a dark blur. She continued writing music, recording demos, hoping for another chance. But the industry had moved on. The baroque folk spirituality she offered was out of step with punk and disco. Labels were not interested in a troubled artist with a history of poor sales.


On November 23, 1979, Judee Sill died in her apartment in North Hollywood. She was 35 years old.

The cause of death was acute cocaine and codeine intoxication. Whether it was intentional or accidental could not be determined.

Her body was not discovered for several days.


She died alone, broke, and forgotten. The two albums she had poured her soul into were out of print. Her name meant nothing to most music listeners. The redemption she had sung about so beautifully had not arrived in time.


The story might have ended there, another talented life destroyed by addiction and neglect.

But music has a way of outlasting the people who make it.

In the decades after her death, Judee Sill's albums were quietly rediscovered. Critics stumbled across her work and wrote about it with astonishment. How had they missed this? How had everyone missed this?


Her records were reissued. In 2005, a compilation called "Dreams Come True" gathered unreleased material, including tracks intended for the third album Asylum never released. Listeners finally heard music that had sat in vaults for 30 years.


Musicians began citing her as an influence. Jim O'Rourke championed her work. Members of Fleet Foxes and other contemporary folk acts named her as essential listening. Her songs appeared on critics' lists of overlooked masterpieces.


The girl who had robbed liquor stores was now discussed alongside Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro as one of the great singer-songwriters of her era.

Her music defies easy description. It is folk music with the structural complexity of classical composition. It is religious music made by someone who had lived in the gutter. It is heartbreakingly vulnerable and technically brilliant at the same time.

She sang about God and grace and redemption with the authority of someone who had desperately needed all three.


Whether she found them, we cannot know. Her final years suggest she did not, at least not in the way she hoped. The transcendence her songs reached for remained just out of grasp.

But the songs themselves achieved what she could not. They transcended her circumstances, her commercial failure, her early death. They outlasted everything that destroyed her.

Fifty years after her first album, people are still discovering Judee Sill. They listen to her intricate compositions and wonder how such beauty emerged from such pain. They hear her pure voice singing about divine love and know she was searching for something real.


She never found the audience she deserved while alive. She finds them now, one listener at a time, each person who stumbles across her music and realizes they have found something precious.

It is not the ending she wanted. It is not redemption.

But it is something.

If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, help is always available.  

You are not alone.


#JudeeSill #LostGenius 

~Weird but True

Bob Harris from the Old Grey Whistle Test remembers Judee Sill here with ‘The Kiss’

A documentary titled Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill was released in 2024, further spotlighting her life and artistry

I’ve always been interested in this man : FRANK PROFFITT

 

Frank Proffitt pictured in 1940 with guitar. 
Proffitt was born in Laurel Bloomery, Tennessee and grew up across the line in the Beech Mountain area of North Carolina. He was a luthier and carpenter known especially for his fretless banjo playing and song repertoire.

Frank Proffitt at the 1st University of Chicago Folk Festival - 1961

I grew up singing songs like Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley

Buddy Guy: Don’s Tunes - Jas Obrecht interview

 When do you play your best?

Buddy Guy: When I’m not trying to be my best. When I’m not pressing myself to try to make this audience get into what I’m doing. I feel like I’m not doing a good job if I don’t see them smiling or saying, “Yes.” For example, when we first started going to Europe playing blues, the Europeans were like, “We take this as a serious music, almost like opera.” Nobody said anything or patted their feet—nothing. I was thinking, “Oh, Jesus, I’m not doing nothing right now. Maybe I got to flip out or do something.” Then I got booed. I talked to Muddy again, and he said, “Don’t feel bad. It happened to me.” When Chris Barber took Muddy back to England for the first time, they booed him for playing this loud stuff through the amp! They invited him back the next year, and he left the amp and took the acoustic guitar, and they booed him for not playing the amp! [Laughs.]
The same thing happened to me in Germany. I had to go stepping out in front of Roosevelt Sykes, John Lee Hooker, and Big Mama Thornton, and they would just boo every time they’d see me. I said, “Oh, my God!” Me being shy, man, I was just like going under the table. And then when I went back, I said, “I know what I’ll do. I’ll get me a chair and sit down like John Lee and them and play.” I went back, and they got me the same way they did Muddy. They said, “No, no. You’ve got to get out there and move around. That’s what we’re looking for now.” It takes you so long to figure out what they’re saying, unless someone comes up and translates it for you.
Interview: Jas Obrecht 1990



Buddy Guy - I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man 
(Carlos Santana Tribute) - 2013 Kennedy Center Honors


Jeff Beck w. Buddy Guy - Let Me Love You 
- Madison Square Garden, NYC - 2009/10/29&30

Grateful Dead - Playing In The Band [Lyceum Theatre 1972] |jt1674

 

https://www.tumblr.com/jt1674/805715313637408768/grateful-dead-playing-in-the-band

A Message from Stevie Wonder | Route (books)

 Steve sends a message . . . and no you’re not the only one. Whichever God you chose superstition you follow or none . . . . . . 


Jimi Hendrix Experience - Foxy Lady live (remixed and remastered?)

 Jimi Hendrix - Foxy Lady 

The Band - Java Blues | The Band: A History

About coffee time here and it is a running joke of mine about coffee on my facebook page that anuses as I really only have one cup here per day (of the good Java Jive of course!) but there is this from Rick and the boys . . . . . . . heck we miss the gang huh?


Rick Danko and The Band performing "Java Blues" during their Band Is Back! tour. 
Java Blues was originally released on Rick Danko's 1977 solo album for Arista Records. 


The Band: A History

Tuba Skinny - Gotta Man in The Bamma Mines [Merline Johnson 1937]

from the Skinny’s Facebook page comes the old timey classic   . . . .well roll mah biscuits

Larkin Poe : I Can’t Help Myself (Four Tops cover)

I know let’s start the day with this . . . . . .  


Sugar Pie Honey Bunch . . . . 

Tuesday, January 13, 2026

John Prine . . . just because

John Prine - Angel From Montgomery (Live) 


might just sign of for the night with this favourite John Prine song live here