hypersongs

Dory Previn

An American lyricist and singer-songwriter who wrote Oscar-nominated film songs for MGM and then, from 1970, made a run of confessional albums, among them Mythical Kings and Iguanas (1971).

MGM lyricist

Dorothy Veronica Langan was born on October 22, 1925, at midnight, in Rahway, New Jersey according to the Quietus (Wikipedia says Rahway or Woodbridge, where an obituary says she grew up), to an Irish Catholic family. She attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts for a year and worked as a chorus-line dancer and singer. In 1958, as Dory Langdon, she recorded The Leprechauns Are Upon Me for Verve with Andre Previn and Kenny Burrell, reissued in 1983 as Dory and Andre Previn. Through the producer Arthur Freed she became a lyricist at MGM, and she married Andre Previn in 1959.

Her film songs include "The Faraway Part of Town" (Pepe, 1960), "A Second Chance" (Two for the Seesaw, 1962) and "Come Saturday Morning" (The Sterile Cuckoo, 1969, with Fred Karlin), each Oscar-nominated, and five songs for Valley of the Dolls (1967), whose theme was a hit for Dionne Warwick; Frank Sinatra recorded "You're Gonna Hear from Me". Her last film credit was the title song of Last Tango in Paris (1973, with music by Gato Barbieri).

The albums

On My Way to Where (Mediarts, July 1970, produced by Nik Venet) began her solo recordings, and Mythical Kings and Iguanas followed in March 1971, then Reflections in a Mud Puddle (1971), Mary C. Brown and the Hollywood Sign (1972), the double Live at Carnegie Hall (recorded April 18, 1973), Dory Previn (Warner Bros., 1974) and We're Children of Coincidence and Harpo Marx (1976). She wrote two autobiographies, Midnight Baby (1976 or 1977) and Bogtrotter (1980), toured Europe by ship, as she did not fly, and gave her last concerts in 1988 in Dublin and at the Donmar Warehouse in London. A 1977 UK tour played Birmingham Town Hall, the Glasgow Apollo, Edinburgh's Usher Hall, Manchester's Free Trade Hall and the Royal Albert Hall on May 28.

She won an Emmy in 1984 for "We'll Win This World", from Two of a Kind, and was nominated again in 1985, made The Magic Number with Andre Previn in 1997 (premiered by the New York Philharmonic) and put out Planet Blue as a free download in 2002. She died on February 14, 2012, aged 86, at her farm in Southfield, Massachusetts. She was compared to Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Laura Nyro; Harold Arlen said she knew how to write pain, and Camera Obscura's 2006 album Let's Get Out of This Country has a track called "Dory Previn". The documentary Dory Previn: On My Way to Where (2024, directed by Julia Greenberg and Dianna Dilworth) has her diaries read by J. Smith-Cameron.

Albums

  • Mythical Kings and Iguanas 1971 · Mediarts

    Her second solo album: ten songs, with Joe Osborn, Larry Knechtel and Ron Tutt among the session players, on the quest for spiritual fulfilment and a loving relationship.

Songs

Sources

  1. Dory Previn, Wikipedia
  2. No Ordinary Thing, The Quietus (2024-11-05)
  3. Dory Previn, lyricist, was nominated for Oscars, Boston Globe (2012-02-16)
  4. On My Way to Where, Wikipedia