It was her appearance at the Woodstock festival in upstate New York in August 1969 that helped propel Melanie Safka to stardom. Performing as Melanie, she had already released two albums, which had not created much of a stir, other than giving her a chart-topping single in France with Bobo’s Party, but Woodstock allowed her to catch the wind of countercultural change sweeping the US.
“I had never performed in front of so many people in my life,” she told Rolling Stone. “I was just thrown into it, and I had my first out-of-body experience.”
The sight of the half-million-strong crowd lighting candles inspired her to write Lay Down (Candles in the Rain), from her third album, Candles in the Rain, released a few months later in 1970. This was a rousing soul-gospel anthem featuring the Edwin Hawkins Singers, and gave her a US Top 10 hit single. It was also a splendid advertisement for the range and raw power of her voice, demonstrating that Melanie, who has died aged 76, was far from the wispy folk singer the press had tended to pigeonhole her as.
The Candles in the Rain album was a mixture of original material and intensely felt cover versions of James Taylor’s Carolina in My Mind and the Rolling Stones’ Ruby Tuesday (the latter a UK Top 10 hit), and reached 17 in the US and 5 on the British chart.
There was further proof of Melanie’s range and ambition in the somewhat Kurt Weill-ish song What Have They Done to My Song Ma, partly sung in French. It became one of her trademark pieces, reaching the UK Top 40 and inspiring cover versions by numerous artists including Nina Simone, Ray Charles and the New Seekers.
She scored her biggest hit in 1971 with Brand New Key, which topped the US chart and reached No 4 in Britain en route to selling 3m copies worldwide. The chorus of “I’ve got a brand new pair of roller-skates, you’ve got a brand new key” proved irresistibly catchy, though the song was banned on some US radio stations, who suspected it of being some kind of sexual innuendo.
The song was also notable for its use of a piano specially prepared with tacks, clothes pegs and paperclips to produce its distinctive tinkling sound. However, Melanie had mixed feelings about the song, saying it “doomed me to be cute the rest of my life”.
She was born in the Astoria district of Queens, New York, and grew up in Long Branch, New Jersey. Her father, Frederick Safka, was Ukrainian, while her mother, Pauline (nee Altomare), a jazz singer, came from an Italian background. Her parents separated when Melanie was five, and she was raised by her mother, who encouraged her to sing. She won her first talent contest when she was four.
“I grew up listening to a lot of blues and jazz, like Billie Holiday,” she recalled. “I discovered Kurt Weill and Edith Piaf in my mid-teens. I think my whole style of singing began with a dream to sound like Lotte Lenya.”
Melanie attended Long Branch high school, and began performing at 16, at venues such as the Inkwell coffee house. After running away briefly to California, she returned to New Jersey and enrolled at Red Bank high school, graduating in 1966. She took acting classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, while also singing in Greenwich Village clubs.
Her entry to the recording industry happened by chance, when she had been for an acting audition on Broadway. She had brought a guitar with her, and caught the eye of an employee of the music publishers Hugo & Luigi. She was invited to perform her songs, and impressed the producer Peter Schekeryk, who coincidentally was Ukraine-born. He became not only her producer but also her husband and father of their three children.
They made some demo recordings, which prompted Clive Davis to sign her to Columbia Records. However, he was not entirely convinced and allowed the Buddah label to buy her out of her contract. It was they who released her debut album Born to Be in late 1968, with critics finding it interesting but stylistically unfocused. She took a step forward with the follow-up, Affectionately Melanie, which was followed by the quantum leap of Candles in the Rain.
After Woodstock, she made further appearances in 1970 at the Powder Ridge rock festival in Connecticut (an event that went ahead in defiance of a court injunction), the Strawberry Fields festival in Toronto, and the Isle of Wight festival, where she was introduced by the Who’s Keith Moon. She would return to the Isle of Wight in 2010. In 1971 she sang at the Glastonbury fair, the forerunner of the Glastonbury festival, at which she would perform in 2011, marking the 40th anniversary of the original event.
The 1971 album, Gather Me, which featured Brand New Key, went Top 20 on both sides of the Atlantic. It was also the first album released on the Neighbourhood label, founded by Melanie and her husband, and it produced another US Top 40 hit single with Ring the Living Bell. Meanwhile her former label, Buddah, released The Nickel Song (recorded while Melanie was still signed to them), and it also reached the Top 40. Her final Top 40 entry was Bitter Bad (1973).
She now began to devote more time to her family, though would continue to release both live and studio albums at regular intervals.
In 1989 she received an Emmy award for her lyrics to the song The First Time I Loved Forever, the theme from the TV series Beauty and the Beast. In 2007, she won rave reviews for her performance at the Meltdown festival on the South Bank in London, curated by Jarvis Cocker.
Peter died in 2010, and in 2012 she wrote the music for a stage musical about him, Melanie and the Record Man. This was staged at the Blackfriars theatre in Rochester, New York. She had recently been working on an album of cover versions entitled Second Hand Smoke.
She is survived by two daughters, Leilah and Jeordie, and a son, Beau.
• Melanie Anne Safka, singer and songwriter, born 3 February 1947; died 23 January 2024
