Brenda Wootton, my mother, pictured here with my wonderful cuddly dad, John, known to me as Mr Wooty (as a teenager I felt it was beneath my dignity to call him dad or daddy) Brenda was a singer. A singer with a phenomenal voice and an equally phenomenal stage presence, who sang with church choirs as a child, in pantomimes as a young woman, and eventually as a career from the early 1970s onwards.
She sang mostly of the love of her life and her home… Cornwall. She hated to be called a folk singer, as that was only a small part of what she was capable of. She sang blues, jazz, popular ballads, rock and pop songs, spirituals, hymns, lullabies and nonsense songs - all with equal enjoyment and with the same ease and fluidity of crystal clear notes.
She made around 30 albums, and sang all over the world, but her career was mostly in France and Germany.
I will post thoughts, links and photos on here periodically, as I find them, as I am in danger of disappearing under the weight of memorabilia Brenda’s career has engendered… and writing about Brenda is a labour of love that will not be accomplished in one or a hundred sittings.
Brenda singing with John the Fish in the 1960s... and here is what she sounded like then - a recording of Brenda singing at the Folk cottage near Newquay in Cornwall around that time...
 |
| Brenda singing in the Palace of the Popes at Avignon in France in the 1980s |
And here's Brenda performing live on French TV in the 1980s...
OK - video needs some work, but the sound seems to be ok... I'll get back to you...
No comments:
Post a Comment