How is this for an American story: On the third day of February 1947, auspiciously under the sign of Aquarius, a child, Melanie Anne, was born in Queens, New York, to Freddie Safka, a Ukrainian-American, the son of immigrants, and his wife, Polly, née Altamore, an Italian-American jazz singer. Little Melanie Anne got her professional start at the age of 4 on the variety radio show Live Like a Millionaire, when she sang “Gimme a Little Kiss”:
Gimme a little kiss, will ya huh?
What are you gonna miss, will ya huh?
It went well enough that Melanie kept at it, eventually landing in Greenwich Village folk clubs with her guitar, then notching a No. 1 hit in France with her original “Bobo’s Party,” driven mostly by her unusual soprano vibrato, which Billboard naturally thought made her sound “wise beyond her years.” Like the work of the more contemporary folk singer Ani DiFranco, it does not age well, it can be like chalk on a blackboard; but Melanie kept at it. She notched another minor hit in 1969 with “Beautiful People” and performed that year at Woodstock, in the rain, which led to her composition that brings us here today, and the tour de force recording of “(Lay Down) Candles in The Rain,” released 50 years ago, in April 1970.
Three years before that, Edwin Hawkins, a gospel musician, co-founded the Northern California State Youth Choir of the Church of God in Christ. Renamed the Edwin Hawkins Singers, they scaled the pop charts in 1969 with “Oh Happy Day,” pure gospel pop helmed by the unearthly voice of Dorothy Morrison. It was a commercial breakthrough for black gospel that anyone with ears could hear – and Melanie had big ears. She got the Edwin Hawkins Singers to back her the next year on “Candles,” which is half of what makes it indelible. Melanie and her producer had tracked the gospel group down in Oakland, where they were rehearsing in a high school gym, she recalled:
“When we walked in, they were in the middle of a song. They trailed off and all looked at me: a white girl with a guitar and a wildly gesticulating man standing next to her ... I sang my heart out on a solo version of ‘Lay Down.’ When I got to the second chorus, the Edwin Hawkins Singers joined in.”
The recording opens with the choir, then Melanie’s voice coming to the fore with her zany lyric:
We were so close, there was no room
We bled inside each others wounds
We all had caught the same disease
And we all sang the songs of peace
Melanie said she wrote beyond her intellect. What’s so gripping in the recording has little to do with intellect and possibly everything to do with the catch-and-release tension of the hippie chick and the gospel choir, who keep lifting us in this anthem higher and higher. It’s rocket fuel.
And there was more. They recorded a much longer version in which the choir gets looser and, for those nine-plus minutes, there just cannot be too much of a good thing or too many sanctified soul claps. Melanie toured briefly with the Hawkins Singers and a recording survives of them on a Netherlands talk show performing “Lay Down” that is the greatest free thing you may get today.
Melanie is 73 now and still performing and touring as a solo act. Hawkins died two years ago. Neither ever scaled again the summit they reached on “Lay Down” and there’s no pity in that. We are not any of us given careers of all nougat, and even if we were, well – it would be too much to take.
