Melanie

Melanie, a vocalist and composer, achieved widespread recognition toward the end of the 1960s after stepping onto the stage at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair in 1969, the gathering that came to symbolize the countercultural mood of its time. Though her artistic perspective and personal demeanor aligned with flower-child ideals, a distinctive mix of folk-rock, art-song forms, deliberately whimsical pop, and boldly confessional self-examination set her work apart, rendered through a smoky, trembling vocal fervor that sharpened the effect of her weightier material. Candles in the Rain, issued in 1970 and containing the singles “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)” and “Ruby Tuesday,” served as her first major commercial success and signature recording. Gather Me, released the following year and featuring the chart-topping single “Brand New Key,” became her most widely recalled album, yet she maintained an unusually steady pace of recording and performing that extended into the 2020s while remaining faithful to the creative outlook that first secured her listeners.

Born Melanie Safka in Astoria, Queens, on February 3, 1947, she grew up with a mother who performed as a jazz vocalist; at the age of four the young singer made her initial public appearance on the radio program Live Like a Millionaire. After the family relocated to New Jersey, her classmates found her unconventional outlook puzzling, prompting a period when she left home for California. She later returned to finish high school in Red Bank, New Jersey, where she was refused her diploma for failing to return a library book. Enrolling at the New York Academy of Fine Arts, she soon launched a performing career while still a student, appearing at clubs throughout Greenwich Village. A publishing agreement followed in 1967, the same year she cut her debut single, “Beautiful People,” for Columbia Records. The label paired her early sides with glossy, inflated arrangements, and after one additional release she departed.

Peter Schekeryk, a producer involved in her Columbia sessions, recognized her ability and became a steadfast supporter. They married in 1968; he subsequently acted as her primary musical partner, overseeing nearly every later project. She secured a contract with Buddah, which issued her first album, Born to Be, in November 1968. On August 16, 1969, she performed at the Woodstock Music & Art Festival in Bethel, New York; her song “Birthday of the Sun” later appeared on the Woodstock 2 album and, two decades afterward, on the video Woodstock: The Lost Performances alongside material by Janis Joplin, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and the Who. Shortly thereafter she recorded her second album, Melanie (issued in the U.K. as Affectionately Melanie), which performed modestly better than its predecessor by reaching the lower rungs of the Top 200. Eleven months after Woodstock came her commercial breakthrough with “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain),” cut with the Edwin Hawkins Singers. Written as an homage to the Woodstock crowd and styled like a gospel hymn, the track climbed to number six on the U.S. charts, while the accompanying LP Candles in the Rain entered the Top 20. The album also featured a reflective reading of the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday,” which reached number 36.

In 1970 Melanie issued Leftover Wine, a live set captured at Carnegie Hall with only her acoustic guitar for accompaniment. She also contributed two songs to the soundtrack of the film R.P.M., a drama about campus protests starring Anthony Quinn. That year the New Seekers scored an international success with her composition “What Have They Done to My Song, Ma,” prompting Buddah to re-release her own version in January 1971, which had previously appeared as the B-side of “Ruby Tuesday.” March brought The Good Book, which peaked at number 80 despite strong material that included a moving interpretation of Phil Ochs’ somber self-elegy “Chords of Fame.”

Her Buddah contract required frequent releases, and Melanie eventually resisted, seeking greater authority over her output. Together with Schekeryk she established Neighborhood Records in the summer of 1971. The resulting single “Brand New Key” ascended to number one and achieved million-seller status; its understated sexual suggestions turned it into a private joke in some circles and led to radio censorship, yet the track helped make her one of the year’s biggest sellers. (It later featured prominently in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Boogie Nights.) The parent album Gather Me was widely viewed as her strongest work, reaching number 15 and earning gold certification.

Buddah capitalized on the momentum by issuing Garden in the City, an anthology of earlier unreleased tracks. While Gather Me produced the follow-up single “Ring the Living Bell,” Buddah simultaneously pushed “The Nickel Song.” The overlapping releases from separate companies split airplay and sales, effectively neutralizing each other; competing Buddah product continued to appear for several years. Garden in the City climbed to number 19, but Stoneground Words, her next original Neighborhood album, stalled at number 70 in late 1972. In June 1973 the double live set At Carnegie Hall, recorded the previous year, failed to enter the Top 100.

Melanie had by then largely stepped away from live performance, concentrating on family life after the birth of the first of three children within three years. She returned briefly for a short tour in 1974, yet Madrugada barely registered on the charts, and the subsequent pair of LPs—As I See It Now and Sunset and Other Beginnings, both from 1975—sold even less. As Neighborhood’s sole sustained commercial success, she could no longer sustain the label once her own sales declined. She moved to Atlantic in 1976; label head Ahmet Ertegun produced her debut for the company, Photograph, which adopted a smoother, more current production style. Poor sales followed, and her next album, Phonogenic (Not Just Another Pretty Face), surfaced on RCA in Europe and the U.K. and on Midsong International in the United States. It did not chart. Ballroom Streets, released on Tomato in 1978, marked the end of her recording activity for four years.

She staged a return with Arabesque for RCA in 1982; the following year the single “Every Breath of the Way” reached the middle of the British charts and generated a round of English concerts. Neighborhood was briefly revived to issue Seventh Wave in 1983, an album that appeared in the U.K. and Europe—territories where she retained a devoted audience—though it was not released domestically. That same year she supplied lyrics for a planned musical on the life of Annie Oakley titled Ace of Diamonds; the show never opened, but several staged readings took place in New York with actress and singer Annie Golden (formerly of the Shirts) joining her. Melanie also co-wrote the theme for the television series Beauty & the Beast, which premiered in 1987 and earned her an Emmy. She maintained a regular schedule of recordings for independent labels on both sides of the Atlantic, issuing more than twenty albums between 1985 and 2020, frequently accompanied in the studio and onstage by son Beau Jarred Schekeryk and daughters Jeordie Schekeryk and Leilah Schekeryk.

Jarvis Cocker of Pulp programmed her appearance at London’s Meltdown Festival in 2007; the Royal Festival Hall performance drew strong notices and was later issued on DVD as One Night Only. Peter Schekeryk passed away in 2010, the year he produced Ever Since You Never Heard of Me. Two years later Melanie premiered the musical Melanie and the Record Man, drawn from her artistic and personal partnership with Schekeryk and developed with John Haldoupis. In 2015 Red Bank High School inducted her into its Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame, finally pardoning the overdue library book that had once cost her a diploma. Ever Since You Never Heard of Me remained her final studio album; she was still working on a set of cover songs when she died on January 23, 2024, at age 76. A single from that project, her version of Trent Reznor’s “Hurt,” appeared shortly after her death.