Wednesday March 2, 2022 “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” Dusty Springfield
Originally, this was an Italian song composed by Pino Donnagio. Springfield heard Donnagio perform it at the San Remo festival and asked her friend Vicki Wickham, who produced the British TV show Ready Steady Go, to write some English lyrics for it, which Wickham did with the help of the Yardbirds manager Simon Napier-Bell.
This English version of the song had a profound effect on Dusty Springfield. She said that she cried when she first heard the song, maybe because it also required forty seven takes to get it exactly the way Springfield wanted it.
Described as Britain’s greatest pop diva, Dusty Springfield was one of the finest ‘blue eyed’ soul singers of her time. Springfield is a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as well as the UK Music Hall of Fame, she is number thirty five on Rolling Stone’s Greatest Singers of All Time, has recorded twenty one albums and sixty nine singles.
Her friend Elton John inducted her into the R&R Hall of Fame, declaring: "I'm biased, but I just think she was the greatest white singer there ever has been ... every song she sang, she claimed as her own.”
Dusty Springfield died on March 2, 1999 from cancer at age 59.
Stay safe and well…and enjoy the immediately identifiable voice of Dusty Springfield.