101 songs: A Margo Guryan archaeology

A deep dive playlist illuminating a great American songwriter. Her interpreters & fans: Max Roach, Clairo, Elton John, Bobbie Gentry & Astrud Gilberto. ALSO: the Sub Pop tribute LP

Earlier this year, I wrote about Margo Guryan’s musical legacy for the New York Times. While researching, as I often do, I compiled a playlist. Not just tracks that the great jazz-schooled musician recorded but, because she was a songwriter above all, many songs of hers recorded by other artists. Sometimes the tracks featured just her lyrics (one-hit soul queen Freda “Band of Gold” Payne’s haunted piano bar reading of Guryan’s verses to Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman”). Sometimes they were just Guryan’s instrumental compositions (“This Lovely Feeling” by Dizzy Gillespie). Some were songs she wrote but evidently never recorded herself (“I’m On My Way To Saturday” by Harry Belafonte; “I Want To Sing A Song” by Anita O’Day; “Song For The Dreamer” and “If I Were Eve” by Nancy Harrow). Sometimes the lyrics were re-written in translation, as on Shula Chen’s 1969 hit remake of Guryan’s signature “Sunday Morning” — a delightful ballad pretty clearly about weekend brunch-fucking that became, far as I can tell, a more restrained but equally tuneful song of longing (and that’s not to mention the 21st century raver remix)

Later, my Guryan research playlist swelled, as I learned of the artists she was besotted with: Bach, Brian Wilson, Harry Nilsson, Judee Sill. I scared up photos, too. Above: Elton John and the (perpetually-mischievous) Guryan circa 1970, probably in Los Angeles in the summer of his breakout shows at the Troubadour.

The Times piece was occasioned by the release of Words and Music, a triple-LP box set that’s the most complete packaging to date of Guryan’s fairly small body of recorded work, with a great historical essay by Jenn Pelly, one of our best writers about music, especially by artists who fly under mainstream radar (see her essential book on The Raincoats). On November 8, Sub Pop will drop Like Someone I Know: A Celebration Of Margo Guryan, a song-for-song remake (w/one bonus song) of Guryan’s sunshiny 1968 LP Take a Picture by the likes of Clairo, Margo Price, Kate Bollinger, Bedouine, and Frankie Cosmos, among others. Here’s an adorable video for Empress Of’s take on “Someone I Know” — it’s very Free To Be You and Me, no doubt intentionally.

To fully vibe the playlist below, click here for my NY Times story. If you did that already, or just wanna listen, here’s some bonus archival photos (with annotations) to set the scene: