Melanie, the husky-voiced singer and songwriter who was one of many shock stars of the Woodstock music competition in 1969 and two years later had a No. 1 single with the disarmingly childlike “Brand New Key,” died on Tuesday. She was 76.
Her dying was announced on social media by her kids, Leilah, Jeordie and Beau Jarred. Neither the trigger nor the situation had been cited.
Melanie, born Melanie Safka in 1947, was solely 22 however already a presence on the New York folks scene when she appeared at Woodstock. She was one in every of solely three ladies who carried out unaccompanied on the competition — and, as she later recalled, she was petrified on the considered performing in entrance of a crowd vastly larger than the coffeehouse audiences she was used to.
It began to rain earlier than she took the stage, and he or she would later say that the sight of individuals within the crowd lighting candles impressed her to jot down “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain),” which she recorded with gospel-style backing from the Edwin Hawkins Singers. Released in 1970, it turned her first hit, reaching No. 6 on the Billboard Scorching 100.
Her biggest hit, “Brand New Key,” charmed listeners with its simplicity however generated controversy — and was stated to have been banned by some radio stations — as a result of some individuals heard sexual innuendo in lyrics like “I’ve got a brand-new pair of roller skates/You’ve got a brand-new key.” She acknowledged that the phrases could possibly be interpreted that means, however insisted that this was not her intention.
“‘Brand New Key’ I wrote in about 15 minutes one night,” she advised one interviewer. “I thought it was cute; a kind of old ’30s tune.
“I guess a key and a lock have always been Freudian symbols,” she continued, “and pretty obvious ones at that. There was no deep serious expression behind the song, but people read things into it.”
