3) Verdelle Smith: A Piece of the Sky (1966)



In 1966 my elder sister went on a trip to Italy in the school holidays and brought back an infuriatingly catchy song  from the San Remo Song Festival  called Il ragazzo della via Gluck . I had no idea what the lyrics were but it sounded very Continental for sure. Francoise Hardy did a version and it became a veritable Continental explosion, Italian with a French accent. Inevitably, an English lyric was quickly penned, the song became Tar and Cement  and didn’t sound continental any more. However, it did provide the only commercial success for an American singer, Verdelle Smith, who scored a No 1 in Australia with the song.

 She is another of those artists who released a single or two, maybe  even an album, that contained a few minutes of pure musical magic, and then vanished from sight. She had an extraordinarily compelling voice, powerful and wrap around warm at the same time. However, she didn’t fit easily into any genre and record companies didn’t really know how to market her. Her one album ranged from the kind of melodramatic ballad that Dusty Springfield and the Walker Brothers excelled in to Bacharach/David  tinged songs that  Dionne Warwick might have done to the kind of soul of Brenda Holloway. She did, for example,  a great soulful version of the Tommy James and the Shondells’ track, Baby, Baby.


There was a real oddity too, A Piece of the Sky ,a track that reminded me of a short Ray Bradbury story. It became a Northern Soul classic but could also be a bit of psychedelia-lite 2 years early. Verdelle Smith, however, apparently became disillusioned with the music business after this brief moment and left to become a preacher and social activist. In terms of genres she fell through the cracks but her musical  legacy were some sublime  moments.


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