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Laura Nyro (born Laura Nigro) (October 18, 1947 – April 8, 1997) was an American composer, lyricist, singer, and pianist. Her style was a hybrid of Brill Building-style New York pop, jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, show tunes and rock.
She was best known, and enjoyed her most commercial success, as a composer and lyricist rather than as a performer. Between 1968 and 1970 a number of other singers had significant hits with her songs: The 5th Dimension with "Blowing Away", "Wedding Bell Blues", "Stoned Soul Picnic", "Sweet Blindness", "Save The Country" and "Black Patch"; Blood, Sweat & Tears and Peter, Paul & Mary with "And When I Die"; Three Dog Night with "Eli`s Coming"; and Barbra Streisand with "Stoney End", "Time and Love", and "Hands off the Man (Flim Flam Man)". Nyro`s best-selling single was her recording of Carole King and Gerry Goffin`s "Up on the Roof."
Nyro was born in the Bronx, New York, the daughter of Gilda Mirsky Nigro, a bookkeeper, and Louis Nigro, a piano tuner and jazz trumpeter. Laura has a brother, Jan Nigro. As a child, she taught herself piano, read poetry, and listened to her mother`s records by Leontyne Price, Billie Holiday and classical composers such as Ravel and Debussy. She composed her first songs at the age of eight. With her family, she spent summers in the Catskill Mountains where her father played the trumpet at resorts. She credited the Sunday school at the New York Society for Ethical Culture with providing the basis of her education; she also attended Manhattan`s High School of Music and Art.
While in high school, she sang with a group of friends in subway stations and on street corners. She said :- "I would go out singing, as a teenager, to a party or out on the street, because there were harmony groups there, and that was one of the joys of my youth". Among her favorite musicians were John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Pete Seeger, Curtis Mayfield, Van Morrison, and girl groups such as Martha and the Vandellas and the Shirelles. She also commented : "I was always interested in the social consciousness of certain songs. My mother and grandfather were progressive thinkers, so I felt at home in the peace movement and the women`s movement, and that has influenced my music".
Her father’s work brought him into contact with record company executive Artie Mogull (1927-2004), who auditioned Laura in 1966 and became her first manager. As a teenager she experimented with using different names, and Nyro (which she pronounced "Nero") was the one she was using at the time. She sold her song, "And When I Die", to Peter, Paul and Mary for $5,000, and made her first extended professional appearance, at age 18, singing at the "hungry i" coffeehouse in San Francisco. Mogull negotiated her a recording contract, and she recorded her debut album, More Than a New Discovery, for the Verve Folkways label. The album provided material for other artists, notably the 5th Dimension.
In 1967, Nyro made only her second major live appearance, at the Monterey Pop Festival. Although some accounts described her performance as a fiasco that culminated in her being booed off the stage, recordings later made public contradict this view.
Soon afterwards, David Geffen approached Mogull about taking over as her agent. Nyro successfully sued to void her management and recording contracts on the grounds that she had entered into them while still a minor. Geffen became her manager, and the two established
Biography Credit: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Nyro
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