Yuro made a brief return in the mid Seventies but the albums failed to ignite and she was diagnosed with throat cancer in '79. It was a lost career and she could have been as big and as influential as Dusty Springfield or even Aretha Franklin if she had picked more consistent material. Her '64 album The Amazing Timi Yuro finds her at her most consistent, but even the many "best of" collections come off as oddly diverse and when one heart-tearing ballad finishes she can just jump right in with something absurdly overwrought.īy the mid Sixties however the times they had a-changed and although she had a solid fan following, the album sales dried up and in the absence of hits she retired from music in 1969. She started cranking out albums quickly - four in a little over two and a half years, plus a "best of" compilation - and for her fifth, Make the World Go Away, she picked up blues and country material (including Permanently Lonely by Willie Nelson).Īnd that was the problem with Yuro (as it was with PJ Proby): her albums are often so stacked with such diverse songs - from belted out show tunes to blue-eyed soul and blues - that it is hard to recommend one over another. Hurting was her theme, and she delivered it with conviction and soul power. Many listeners assumed she was black. Her first big hit was Hurt in 1961 and she followed it with the equally good What's a Matter Baby (Is It Hurting You?) the following year. as well as pulling r'n'b and country music into the mix. She had an undeniable soulful quality but also a keen sense of jazz phrasing. Yuro from Chicago (born Rosemary Timothy Yuro, 1940) was an Italian-American gal who could belt out a ballad with such power she could peel paint. They knew each other in Los Angeles before Proby went to Britain. If PJ Proby had a predecessor it was probably the great Timi Yuro, and in fact he sang a number of songs that she did. The cool people of the early Sixties favoured slightly sleazy nightclubs, cocktails with swizzle sticks, and singers with expressive voices which sat atop string sections arranged by the likes of Quincy Jones and Nelson Riddle. Just a few years previous big, aching ballads and torch songs had been massively popular. Proby in fact seemed to belong to an earlier era, but one which had passed rapidly with the arrival of the Beatles. Yet Proby was never really a pop singer: he had a massive voice and right from the start would cover show tunes (Somewhere from West Side Story was an early hit) and his albums were often full of big-voiced ballads. He split his trousers in performance (which meant he was banned in some places, but incorporated it into his act) and that - plus his outspoken belief that he was better than anyone - ensured plenty of headlines. He cracked a number of big pop hits in '64-'65 (Hold Me, Mission Bell, Let the Water Run Down) and with his velvet suits and ponytail (adopted from the movie Tom Jones) he cut quite a figure. The Texas-born singer had been doing demos for various people in the States (including Elvis) and arrived in the UK to appear on a Beatles television special. When PJ Proby burst onto the British pop scene in 1964 he was an amazing anomoly.
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