Phoebe Snow, a singer and songwriter who gained fame with her 1974 self-titled album that featured the hit single “Poetry Man,” has died. She was 60.
Snow died Tuesday in Edison, N.J., her longtime friend and public relations representative, Rick Miramontez, said. She had suffered a brain hemorrhage in January 2010.
The album “Phoebe Snow” turned the singer, blessed with multi-octave range, into a star. She made the cover of Rolling Stone appeared on “Saturday Night Live” and was nominated for a Grammy Award as best new artist.
“Phoebe Snow has made it,” Stephen Holden wrote in a 1975 review for Rolling Stone. “On a musical level she shows the potential of becoming a great jazz singer. Among confessional pop songwriters she immediately ranks with the finest.”
Rolling Stone described her nine original compositions in “Phoebe Snow” as “light jazz torch songs” but freer in form and attitude. (Two other songs on the album were her versions of others’ material).
Snow was hard to categorize musically; a Times reviewer early in her career called her style “a helter skelter amalgam of pop, jazz, blues, gospel and folk.” She explained to the New York Times in 2003, “No creative person should ever produce the same thing over and over.”
Dennis Hunt, writing in the Los Angeles Times in 1976, said her voice had “a marvelous ‘cracked’ quality” and she “glides through and glances off notes in an appealing offbeat manner.”
But Snow was never able to duplicate her early commercial success. Her career took a backseat to caring for her daughter, Valerie Rose Laub, who was born in 1975 with severe brain damage.
“It was very, very tight,” Snow told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008. “Occasionally I put an album out, but I didn’t like to tour and they didn’t get a lot of label support. But you know what? It didn’t really matter because I got to stay home more with Valerie and that time was precious.”
She sang commercial jingles for such companies as Stouffer’s and General Foods, which she said paid well.
Her daughter died in 2007. A few months later, Snow started performing again, trying to deal with her loss.