100 Greatest Songs of the 60’s #2 Dusty Springfield – Son of a Preacher Man

Released: 1968

Ask a cross section of the British public now to name the greatest female British soul singer and the most popular answers would almost certainly be Adele or Amy Winehouse. This is understandable; Winehouse’s story in particular has a doomed fascination but unlike say the similar fate of the unfortunate Janis Joplin it occurred in an age where a camera or kiss and tell merchant were never far away.

The correct response would be Dusty Springfield, but in mitigation the London born singer passed away herself in 1999. Prior to that she’d endured almost two decades out of the spotlight before her collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys on What Have I Done To Deserve This provided a first hit since the beginning of the seventies.

Reduced to playing the cabaret circuit for fifty pounds a night, her former heyday seemed to have been and gone by the time she signed to the hip Atlantic label in 1968. A complicated, sometimes difficult personality and never one to toe the line, a brush with the Apartheid-era regime in South Africa had drawn headlines, whilst an innate lack of self confidence quartered itself with being gay in an era when coming out was widely considered to be career suicide.

Son of a Preacher Man was the showpiece of Dusty In Memphis, an album which had been meant to revive her fortunes but was fraught with tensions in the making. Intimidated rather than inspired by the surroundings and working with outside producers for the first time, the lack of alchemy meant that it was eventually completed in New York and on release proved to be a relative flop.

These struggles played no part in the finished article. Touching heights which only Aretha Franklin could otherwise reach, it was a song that felt old and familiar the first time it was heard, a sermon which cut right through to the rawest emotional instincts.

Later Springfield confessed that she hated her vocals on the song, describing it with almost ridiculous modesty as “A rather overrated classic”, going on to say that despite the underlying theme of forbidden intimacy she felt “It seemed to move people on a sexual level where it didn’t move me at all”. Sometimes it seems even the greats don’t understand their magic.