Dusty Springfield - Musical Style

Musical Style

Influenced by US pop music, Dusty Springfield created a distinctive blue-eyed soul sound. BBC News noted "er soulful voice, at once strident and vulnerable, set her apart from her contemporaries ... She was equally at home singing Broadway standards, blues, country or even techno-pop". Allmusic's Jason Ankeny described her as:

finest white soul singer of her era, a performer of remarkable emotional resonance whose body of work spans the decades and their attendant musical transformations with a consistency and purity unmatched by any of her contemporaries ... the sultry intimacy and heartbreaking urgency of voice transcended image and fashion, embracing everything from lushly orchestrated pop to gritty R&B to disco with unparalleled sophistication and depth.

Most responses to her voice emphasise her breathy sensuality. Another powerful feature was the sense of longing, in songs such as "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself" and "Goin' Back". The uniqueness of Springfield's voice was described by Bacharach: "You could hear just three notes and you knew it was Dusty". Wexler declared, "er particular hallmark was a haunting sexual vulnerability in her voice, and she may have had the most impeccable intonation of any singer I ever heard". Greil Marcus of Rolling Stone captured Springfield's technique as "a soft, sensual box (voice) that allowed her to combine syllables until they turned into pure cream." She had a finely tuned musical ear and extraordinary control of tone. She sang in a variety of styles, mostly pop, soul, folk, Latin, and rock'n'roll. Being able to wrap her voice around difficult material, her repertoire included songs that their writers ordinarily would have offered to black vocalists. In the 1960s, on several occasions, she performed as the only white singer on all-black bills. Her soul orientation was so convincing that early in her solo career, US listeners who had only heard her music on radio or records sometimes assumed that she was African American. Later, a considerable number of critics observed that she sounded black and American or made a point of saying she did not.

Springfield consistently used her voice to upend commonly held beliefs on the expression of social identity through music. She did this by referencing a number of styles and singers, including Martha Reeves, Carole King, Aretha Franklin, Peggy Lee, Astrud Gilberto, and Mina. Springfield instructed UK backup musicians to capture the spirit of US musicians and copy their instrumental playing styles. In the studio, she was a perfectionist. The fact that she could neither read nor write music made it hard to communicate with session musicians. During extensive vocal sessions, she repeatedly recorded short phrases and single words. Despite producing many tracks, she did not take credit for doing so. The Philips Record company's studio was slated as "an extremely dead studio", it felt as though it had turned the treble down which meant one could not get an edge, "There was no ambience and it was like singing in a padded cell. I had to get out of there". Springfield would end up in the ladies' toilets for its superior acoustics. Another example of refusal to use the studio is "I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten" – it was recorded at the end of a corridor. When recording songs, headphones were typically set as high in volume as possible – at a decibel level "on the threshold of pain".