Crying in the sunshine
A glimpse of my recent Margo Guryan liner notes
Many days, in the summer and fall of 2023, I felt like my job was to wake up and hang out in my head with the late, great Margo Guryan.
I had been commissioned to write liner notes for a 46-track Numero Group box set, titled Words and Music, archiving Margo’s brilliant work across jazz, chamber pop, and singer-songwriter terrain. I was primarily familiar with Margo as a 1960s sunshine-pop singer who I might see on, say, Clairo’s NTS playlist or hear on Blonded Radio, but it was quickly clear to me that there was so much more to this whip-smart songwriter from Far Rockaway, Queens than most people knew. As is often the case with projects like this — about overlooked women artists who garnered cult status many decades later than they should have — her story had never really been told in full. The deeper I dug in, the more the weight and richness of her history shocked me.
Before a 1967 issue of Billboard called her “one of the most sought-after writing talents in the music business,” before her songs were recorded by Astrud Gilberto, Miriam Makeba, Dizzy Gillespie, Harry Belafonte, Anita O’Day, Julie London, Bobbie Gentry, Cass Elliot — the list goes on and on — Margo Guryan was born in 1937 and raised among extended family in a sprawling home built by her grandfather, a Russian-Jewish immigrant. Her mother was an x-ray technician and her father a pianist, who stayed home and performed Tin Pan Alley standards for his daughter. There are so many things about Margo’s life that continue to fascinate me, but it was especially revelatory to learn about her origins playing jazz. Studying piano and then composition at Boston University in the mid-‘50s, Margo was turned onto jazz overhearing guys in the school’s practice rooms, and she ultimately earned a scholarship to a short-lived but influential summer program called the Lenox School of Jazz, where she was one of six women, out of about 150 students, ever admitted.
She put herself into rooms with giants and seemed to impress everyone around her. One of her B.U. teachers was Newport founder George Wein, who became an early mentor. Wein would let Margo into his jazz club Storyville through a side door and it was there that she once performed an impromptu set opening for the Miles Davis Quintet. (Margo would later describe how Miles approached her after with his review: “Yeah baby!”) Around this time, Margo auditioned for Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler at Atlantic, and they brought out contracts for her songs on the spot. She studied with pianist Jaki Byard right before he joined Mingus’s band. She became Creed Taylor’s secretary right after he founded Impulse! Records. At the Lenox School, under the instruction of Max Roach, she worked in a student ensemble that also included Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, for whom she composed some music. In a meta twist that I appreciated, eventually Margo was called upon by Roach to do liner notes for his 1961 LP, Percussion Bitter Sweet.
This was all a first act, before Margo got into pop via a life-altering intro to Pet Sounds. Can you imagine being a ’50s jazzer who totally wrote off pop as vapid, unworthy, only to have your soul utterly reoriented by “God Only Knows” in the very moment of its release? She went out and bought a copy, re-dropping the needle on that song’s aching grandeur over and over again, then sat at her Wurlitzer and wrote her own melancholy mini-masterpiece, “Think of Rain.”
I spoke with a dozen people for this project — the box set was finally released back in June — including Margo’s cousin Peter Shulman and her stepson Jonathan Rosner. I went to visit her friend Nancy Harrow, a jazz singer, at her beautiful book-filled Manhattan apartment overlooking the East River. (Margo used to babysit for Nancy’s son, who happens to be my friend and fellow critic, Damon Krukowski.) I tracked down Take a Picture producer John Hill, a one-time Beatlemaniac and rock’n’roller, and spoke with others who played vital roles in the original rediscovery of Margo’s music in the late ’90s and the safeguarding of her history.
Margo’s sophisticated compositions and hushed, proto-indie-pop singing were fully ahead of their time. Her lyrics were masterclasses in pop concision — clear-eyed observations of romantic in-betweens that could be clever or profound or bittersweet, often all at once. Some of my personal favorite early Margo tunes are “Half Way in Love,” about protecting yourself in the throes of a crush; “Kiss and Tell,” like a piano-jazz “Call Your Girlfriend”; and “More Understanding Than a Man,” which, with no shortage of moxie, describes the experience of seeking clarity from the river instead of trying to talk to some impossible guy. I hear so many classics in the Margo songbook — “Something’s Wrong With the Morning,” “I Think A Lot About You,” “I’d Like to See the Bad Guys Win,” “Someone I Know” (which interpolates Bach). Here are some lines I cherish from “Love Songs”:
Today, I was crying in the sunshine
When someone said, “Is something wrong?”
I said “No, it’s just a song,
And I can’t tell you why
Pretty love songs always make me cry”
My Words and Music notes ultimately clocked in at 9,180 words for a 32-page booklet: a story of how popular music and women’s agency within it were radically changing during the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. The songs all seem to chart one woman’s process of coming to know herself, her heart, her mind and her artistry in a way that is so wise and cool and eternal. She sang about crying in the sunshine, laughing in the rain, and by the ‘70s (in songs that went unreleased until the 2000s) she voiced wry commentary on Watergate, earthquakes, and the so-called American Dream.
Margo was born around the same time as both of my grandmothers, but unlike many women of their generation, her sense of what she could do and how she could be in the world seemed boundless. Another one of those limitless women was the iconic Astrud Gilberto. While I loved learning about Margo’s friendships with the likes of Elton John, Max Roach, and Harry Nilsson, it was just amazing to me to hear about her correspondence with Gilberto (who died while I was working on this project, and whose music has also become singularly important to me in my 30s).
Clearly there is no end to the story of Margo’s music, so I will leave you here with a sweet relic that her stepson gave me permission to share, a letter from Astrud to Margo, sending a new album and love:
Words and Music is out now from Numero Group