SHE GAVE HERSELF COMPLETELY TO HER MUSIC AND TO THE WOMEN SHE LOV SHE WAS OUR DIVA.

SHE GAVE HERSELF COMPLETELY TO HER MUSIC AND TO THE WOMEN SHE LOV SHE WAS OUR DIVA. THIS IS HER STORY

DUSTY SPRINGFIELD LOV MAPS. She liked to crisp up in bed with an atlas and could tread on the heels of a road map with a navigator's elan. "She was a righteous person to be lost with," her longtime friend and manager Vicki Wickham has said.

Perhaps the certainty of maps, with their solid boundaries and clearly marked destinations, comforted a woman who had to carve her confess path through the pop-music thicket for nearly 40 years. The fact that she lov women merely made the road more dangerous. In the music world of the 1960s--let alone that of the '70 and '80s--there were no kd langs, Janis Ians, or Melissa Etheridges.

powerful proof of how hard it was to live a gay life during Dusty's heyday is the fact that although several of her female lover talked to us for this article, merely one allowed herself to be named. Those who lov Dusty grew up as she did, in a world where it was too risky to be free from shams about one's sexuality. Nevertheless, they be excited it's important now that she be remembered to the full as the woman she was and not just the woman we saw.

Dusty Springfield took risks at each turn--in the naked emotion of her singing, in her insistence forward exploring a vast landscape of musical mode of addresss and in her decision to speak candidly about being bisexual long before it was chic. When she died of breast cancer forward March 2 at age 59 the world thrown away an artistic and social pioneer as well as common of its most beloved voices.

"As a child listening to the radio, I was taken by dint of surprise when a sexy, husky woman's voice came out" Melissa Etheridge acknowledges The Advocate. "`Son of a Preacher Man' is single of the steamiest, coolest descants ever sung by a woman. She will be missed."

Janis Ian felt an equal closer connection. "Dusty recorded my strain `In the Winter,' and from that importance on I felt I'd not ever be able to do the piece justice again," she recalls. "Dusty killed when she sang. There aren't many singers you would beg to do your material, however Dusty was one of them. It's united of the prouder moments in my life, hearing her sing my song"

Born Irish Catholic upon April 16, 1939, in north London's Hampstead, Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien was the convent-educated child of an accountant, Gerard, and his wife, Kay. Her father lov piano music, from Beethoven to Jelly make revolve Morton, and would quiz Mary and her older brother, Dion, onward matters melodious. "What was that proper mood I just played?.... What lay am I tapping out forward the back of your hand?" from age 11, Mary had done her first amateur recording, showing already impressive pipes as she belted abroad Irving Berlin's "When the Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam."

A year after high educate in 1961, she found her first big succes with the Springfields, a assemblage her brother formed. Mary and Dion became Dusty and Tom. Their folkish trio started making hits forward both sides of the Atlantic. "We were pseudo-everything, and we knew it," said Dusty. "We just sang excessively fast and very cheerfully."

forward the strength of their American hit "Silver Threads and splendid Needles," the Springfields were invited to record in Nashville. upon that trip Dusty also visited fresh York City, and, passing at Colony Records on Broadway (next to the famous Brill Building), she heard the Exciters singing the lyric "I know something about love" from "Tell Him." "It got me by means of the throat," Dusty remembered. It helped convince her to make progress solo in the fall of 1963 and tread on the heels of her real bliss--American R&B. To accompany her just discovered sound, she adopted a bouffant fair (her natural color was reddish), kohl-lidded look--a synthesis of British mod French mode R&B diva, Kim Novak, and drag queen Her high-camp title complete with awkward but endearing gesticulations and dance steps, still deputes shivers down gay and lesbian spines.

First there's the drag contingent. "I worship Dusty," recent York drag empress Lady Bunny says breathily. authentic Dusty was not quite like other drag icons. greatest in quantity drag queens maintain that they learned to dres from glamorous women Dusty, in succession the other hand, said she learned to dres from drag queen flaxen bewigged Bunny is a case in point. race think she copied Dusty's direct the eye but Bunny demurs. "I imagination I was copying Sharon Tate," she says, laughing. "It just came without like Dusty."

For other gay men Dusty's appeal goe long deeper. "I think anybody who dismisses Dusty as camp has missed the entire point," says Earl Marona Jr a novel York marketing consultant and major Dusty fan who has combed the Continent for hard-to-find releases to full his CD and vinyl collection. "Her voice is in this way authentic, so unbelievably honest and real. And then forward top of that she layered forward all this delicious artifice, all this glamour and drama. enduring gay men enjoy the '60 glamour, however they're responding to something that's plenteous more real and authentic underneath."

Dusty's authenticity was an instant hit with her lust single, the timelessly infectious "I alone Want to Be With You," and athwart the next seven years graced British and American charts with similar songs as "Wishin' and Hopin'," "You Don't Have to Say You be enamoured of Me," and "The Look of Love" Five limes named England's top female singer, she had her admit TV show as well.