Laura Nyro

Amid the late-1960s and early-1970s surge of confessional singer-songwriters, Laura Nyro ranked among the most admired composers, creating emotionally intense, intellectually layered pieces that merged the inward-looking folk leanings of her contemporaries with infusions of soul, R&B, jazz, and gospel, producing a distinctive expressive force. As a performer she earned respect for her assured keyboard playing and her full, emotive singing, which helped turn 1968’s Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and 1969’s New York Tendaberry into enduring works; she further explored her deep roots in classic R&B and girl-group repertoire on the all-covers album Gonna Take a Miracle, made with Labelle. Although her recordings were strong, Nyro’s highly personal approach proved too unconventional for widespread Top 40 acceptance, so her compositions gained greater fame through interpretations by others; the 5th Dimension, Three Dog Night, Barbra Streisand, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Peter, Paul & Mary all reached the charts with her songs. Disappointed by limited performing success and protective of her private life, she stepped away from the studio and stage at intervals, yet 1984’s Mother’s Spiritual and 1993’s Walk the Dog and Light the Light confirmed that her piano-and-voice artistry remained potent while her growing focus on social, political, and ecological themes steered her writing in fresh directions.

Laura Nyro entered the world as Laura Nigro on October 18, 1947, in New York City’s Bronx. Her father, Louis Nigro, played jazz trumpet and also tuned pianos; her mother, Gilda Nigro (née Gilda Mirsky), worked as a bookkeeper. Nyro later recalled an often unhappy childhood that drove her toward music and poetry; she taught herself piano and absorbed the vocal styles of her mother’s favored singers, among them Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, and Leontyne Price. By age eight she was already composing songs, and she later enrolled at the Manhattan High School of Music & Art, where she deepened her grasp of folk and jazz traditions. She also took part in gatherings at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, an experience she credited with shaping her progressive outlook. During adolescence she gravitated toward the vocal-harmony ensembles that performed at gatherings and on street corners, developing a lasting appreciation for girl-group sounds, soul music, and the sophisticated material that emerged from the Brill Building.

In 1966 veteran A&R executive and publisher Artie Mogull retained Louis Nigro to tune the piano in his office; Louis urged Mogull to hear his daughter perform her own material. The following day Nyro presented “Wedding Bell Blues,” “And When I Die,” and “Stoney End,” prompting Mogull to offer her a publishing contract; he and partner Paul Barry also assumed management duties. After experimenting with several stage names, she adopted Laura Nyro as her professional identity. Her new representatives secured appearances at San Francisco’s Hungry i and the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival; that same year her debut album, More Than a New Discovery, appeared on Verve-Folkways. Though sales remained modest, Peter, Paul & Mary scored a hit with “And When I Die,” launching Nyro’s rising profile.

David Geffen soon assumed management, successfully voiding her prior agreements because she had signed them while underage. With Geffen’s assistance she formed her own publishing company and moved to Columbia Records. Her first Columbia release, 1968’s Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, displayed greater personal depth and arranging sophistication than the debut and drew strong critical praise. Commercial results were respectable but fell short of the acclaim, a pattern repeated with 1969’s New York Tendaberry. Meanwhile her songwriting reputation grew: the 5th Dimension achieved major chart success with “Stoned Soul Picnic,” “Sweet Blindness,” “Wedding Bell Blues,” and “Blowing Away,” while Blood, Sweat & Tears placed “And When I Die” on the charts, drawing attention back to her own versions. By the time Christmas and the Beads of Sweat arrived in 1970—yielding her sole Top 100 single, a reading of “Up on the Roof”—she had sold her publishing catalog for $4.5 million. Additional hits followed, including Three Dog Night’s treatment of “Eli’s Coming” and Barbra Streisand’s album Stoney End, which contained three Nyro songs whose title track echoed the earlier recording.

Nyro issued Gonna Take a Miracle in 1971, revisiting beloved soul and R&B numbers from her teenage years with Labelle supplying the vocal harmonies. Later that year she married and withdrew from public life, seeking distance from mounting fame and embracing a quieter existence. Columbia reissued More Than a New Discovery in 1973 under the title The First Songs. Following her divorce, she returned in 1976 with Smile, an album marked by a relaxed, jazz-inflected sound and heightened interest in Eastern philosophy and spirituality. Although she had previously performed alone at the piano, she assembled a band for the Smile tour; the concerts yielded the 1977 live set Seasons of Light, originally trimmed by Columbia to a single disc from a planned two-LP package (the omitted tracks were restored on a 2008 CD edition). Nested, released in 1978 while she awaited her first child, was followed by a handful of appearances before she again retreated to focus on family.

Nearly six years passed before Mother’s Spiritual appeared in 1984, a comparatively airy, folk-leaning collection that addressed feminism, environmental issues, and motherhood. Columbia pressed for a new studio album in 1988, yet Nyro chose instead to tour with a band; when the label declined to issue live recordings from those shows, she released 1989’s Laura: Live at the Bottom Line on Cypress Records (distributed by A&M), which contained five new compositions, among them “Broken Rainbow,” written for an Oscar-winning documentary about the 1983 forced relocation of a Native American reservation. From the late 1980s onward she toured regularly, but another studio album, Walk the Dog & Light the Light, did not surface until 1993 on Columbia; that record added animal rights to the causes addressed in her lyrics. Work on a subsequent project begun in 1994 halted when she received an ovarian-cancer diagnosis. She collaborated with Columbia on the 1997 two-disc anthology Stoned Soul Picnic: The Best of Laura Nyro, her final release; she died of cancer on April 8, 1997.

Rounder Records issued the previously unreleased 1994–1995 studio recordings as Angel in the Dark in 2001, while 2002’s The Loom’s Desire gathered Christmas performances from New York’s Bottom Line recorded in 1993 and 1994. Another archival set, 2004’s Spread Your Wings and Fly: Live at the Fillmore East, documented a 1971 New York concert. In 2017 Real Gone Music paired the monophonic mix of Eli and the Thirteenth Confession with the original sequence of More Than a New Discovery under the title A Little Magic, A Little Kindness: The Complete Mono Albums Collection.