
The song was Lady With The Braid by Dory Previn. She had been the wife of Andre Previn in the sixties, and successfully worked with him on music for films such as Inside Daisy Clover, Valley Of The Dolls, and The Sterile Cuckoo - which won her an Oscar. When Andre left Dory for Mia Farrow she had a breakdown. One way out of her crisis was songwriting for herself, not for the movies. She was already in her mid-forties by the time her first, deeply confessional, album On My Way To Where came out in 1970. "They were all based on true experiences" she tells me. "The music I write for films is not. These songs were for me. I know myself better than anyone else, so it helped me. It was self-revelation".

Dory Previn would never back away from admitting Lady With The Braid and other songs are autobiographical. "There's nothing I wouldn't say. I don't want to sound like I'm always talking about myself, but I've been there. In life and on stage. I've been in mental hospitals, I've been up and down those stairs."
Her New Jersey upbringing is still apparent in her voice. She was born in 1925 and, after a strict Catholic upbringing, decided to become a chorus girl. "When I was a kid I was the star of Woodbridge, New Jersey. I thought I could it do the same thing in other towns, so I did. I was a walk on and each night I'd add things and get laughs. I was getting more laughs than (main act) Rust Hills, the comedian. One day he said 'I wanna talk to you, in my office'. I thought he was going to say what a good job I was doing but he said 'Don't do that again, ever.' He got me fired. I've got his picture on the wall. When I get bum raps I like to hang 'em on the wall!"
Chastened, she took a train to Hollywood in the late fifties where she landed a job at MGM. "Andre was head of the musical department at MGM. We became partners. It was nice. He was a bit miffed when I showed up because in those days women didn't know very much, apparently. He said 'show me something.' So I played some material I'd been doing in a little club - I was very shy about this - and he said 'These are good'. Like I didn't know! Next thing we got married.
They recorded an album of Dory's songs, as Dory Langdon, for the Verve label in 1958. And for a while life was sweet, with regular film work through the sixties. "I'm not the kind of person where things happen and everything's wonderful. But me and Andre started fooling around, I asked if he would accompany me, and suddenly we were doing a movie. We did songs for Judy Garland and men and women of that ilk. I received an Oscar! It was wonderful." At this point, Mia Farrow arrived on the scene. Dory expressed her outrage in Beware Of Young Girls a few years later: "She was my friend, my friend/oh what a rare and happy pair, she inevitably said/as she glanced at my unmade bed."
"Andre and I were married. But he had a long term commitment to work, not to marriage. I understand that. She was young and beautiful and blah blah blah. He went to South America or somewhere and got a divorce. It frightened me, being alone, having to write with people I didn't know."
Does she know if Farrow ever heard the song?
"With her ego? Of course she did. She's probably got the record framed in the bathroom! It's OK. These experiences do us a lot of good. I got through."
Though she was twice their age, Dory Previn's early seventies albums sat well on sensitive student shelves alongside open-wound, female songwriters like Janis Ian and Laura Nyro."Who else was I listening to? I was listening to myself. If your father says you're not his child, if your mother had terrible experiences, a life like that is so outrageous... you begin to reveal in songs what you don't reveal even to your friends". Stories surfaced from memory like Left Hand Lost, a song about being born "sinister" but being forced by the nuns at her school to write with her right hand. "Yes, they hit me, those darling girls. When you write a song, you can get an answer to something that's been bugging you for years. Over time I'd begin to feel I wasn't using my correct hand, like I needed to get a better grasp on a pen, on a word, an idea. It resulted in my nervous breakdown."
Like Harry Nilsson or Randy Newman, Dory's songs drew largely on Americana, with vaudeville leanings that made them blackly humorous. Contemporaneous to On My Way To Where was John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album which was somewhat shorter on laughs. Maybe it was something in 1970's grey post-Aquarian air; Dory Previn's Twenty Mile Zone was about an occasion where she "was screaming in fury and frustration in the car. This so-called shout therapy lead to the unwanted attentions of the law."

Even now it seems hard for her to break out of her mental binds. Trying to explain whereabouts she lives these days, she tells me "That's a question that's hard for me to answer. I'm where I live. I'm in the country, on a farm, with horses. And that's what it is. Where I live inside myself, that's quite a different question."
It seems hard to square this person with someone who could have played Carnegie Hall with just a piano for accompaniment. "They had to escort me down the stairs, I was so nervous I couldn't stand up. I was on stage, alone! Strange? I can't begin to tell you... The best part was that I was a strictly raised Catholic singing on stage to a whole row of nuns. They must have planned it, because when I sang Did Jesus Have A Baby Sister they all got up and walked out! All in their nunny caps. Everyone started laughing."
1976’s We’re Children of Coincidence And Harpo Marx was Dory's last album. Her autobiography, Midnight Baby, was published in 1977, and music took a backseat. In 1997 she was working once more with André Previn on a piece called The Magic Number, performed by the New York Philharmonic.
Art therapy for Dory Previn now consists of keeping a small pile of books handy "so that if a thought goes through my head I can look into it to see if I can make sense of it. I've got this Pope encyclopedia by my bed, though I'm not religious at all. And the book of Lilith, which I love. One called Mind Prophecies, and one of my own to remind myself that I can do it."
Yet in spite of all the red-raw confession in her songwriting, I start to think I may have been prying too much, poking at old wounds. "Listen" she laughs, a little fiercely. "The world has delved into my life. It knows all my secrets! That's what I'm here for."
Should've kept the original album title for your reissue. You're trying to change the album into something chic with the new cover pic and title. It's not right.
ReplyDeleteThe booklet has a reversible sleeve, so if you want the original front cover you can just flip it around. It's a pretty 'chic' record, full of beautiful songs worthy of the Great American Songbook, which the original title doesn't convey at all.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad that this is being released on CD and I will likely buy it. I just am not sure it's right to change what the artist originally intended, but if you're content with what you're doing, then so be it. By the way, thank you so much for putting Suite London on CD a few years ago. It's one of my most treasured discs.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great interview, and wonderful reissue. I have been hoping this would be reissued for years! I agree with Rob that the title and cover should have been kept as originally issued -- it shows that even back then, Dory was a singular talent and her quirky, poetic way with words was already intact. I'm glad the original cover is included.
ReplyDeletenice blog. keep it up & i also see another site to more or more giving the extract introduction about psychotherapy & counselling. thanks,jacob.you can also search more information about this on this site:-www.counsellingcroydon.com
ReplyDeleteHi...there seems to be mention on various sites that Bill Evans plays piano on this album but elsewhere piano is credited to Andre Previn...this is more likely I guess. And why a 'top notch jazz trio' and no mention of Kenny Burrell? Still, it's a fine album and good to get out into the world again. Thanks for that.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, many thanks for posting the details of this fantastic interview. I have followed Dory Previn for more years than I can remember and was privileged to see her perform in Glasgow in the mid 1970s. I have a vinyl copy issued in 1982 by DRG Records as part of a Jazz Master Series but now that I have a received my CD copy of the album I can finally listen to the music. The LP cover is quite different from the original - I am not sure that I can upload pictures of it. Anyway - once again Thank You for recognising this artist. Christine (Glasgow)
ReplyDeletePiano definitely not Bill Evans, but is by Andre Previn, himself a brilliant jazz pianist, largely before his classical music days. As for Kenny Burrell - still a master guitarist at 88 years 'old'. I have the Verve original of this and recently bought this new CD. As you guess, I'm a fan of Dory Langdon, Dory Previn, Bill Evans and Kenny Burrell, as well as Andre Previn...thanks to Croydon Municipal too :)
ReplyDeleteA brilliant and gifted woman. Please rest, at last, in peace. Thank you for everything.
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