“Nobody knew the whole story until we started poking at it,” says music business veteran and weapons-grade music geek Geoffrey Weiss. He’s talking about the remarkable career chronicled on Words and Music, a new box set covering the work of singer-songwriter Margo Guryan, and he’s still audibly agog at what he helped to uncover.
In the ‘60s, the songs of Queens-born Guryan—who passed away in 2021—were recorded by a jaw-dropping array of artists, including Bobbie Gentry & Glen Campbell, Astrud Gilberto, Harry Belafonte, Miriam Makeba, Harry Nilsson, and more. But her lone album, 1968’s Take a Picture, was destined for the bargain bin despite Guryan’s sweetly subversive soft pop nuggets and invitingly whispery vocals. A 2000 reissue helped spark a belated wave of love for her music, and Guryan’s been a cult hero among ‘60s pop lovers ever since.
Together with Numero Group A&R man Douglas Mcgowan and the artist’s stepson, Jonathan Rosner, Weiss co-produced Words and Music, a three-LP collection that includes Guryan’s ‘68 stealth masterpiece and a pile of songwriter demos first issued in a 2001 collection. But the real abracadabra arrives in the form of 16 more demos seeing daylight for the first time ever. Each is revelatory in its way, but half of them hail from Guryan’s long-lost other life as a jazzer, a period entirely unrepresented on record until now.
Before a fateful encounter with a Beach Boys record drew her to pop, Guryan was all about jazz. Enmeshed in music studies at Boston University in the ‘50s, she took lessons from future jazz piano legend Jaki Byard. She led a trio that was good enough to earn an album offer from famed Newport Jazz Festival founder George Wein’s Storyville label. Guryan ended up signing to Atlantic as a songwriter at age 19.
In 1959, she entered a nationwide competition and earned a scholarship to The Lenox School of Jazz, a short-lived Massachusetts summer program run by progressive jazz pioneers John Lewis and Gunther Schuller. As a woman in the jazz world—and one of only two female Lenox students—Guryan navigated a mountain of sexism to win the respect of revered instructors like Max Roach and Bill Evans. She later wrote for Lewis and Schuller’s MJQ publishing company.
“People like Don Cherry and Ornette [Coleman] were her peers,” says Weiss, “and people like Bill Evans and Gunther Schuller were mentoring her. That’s pretty formidable.”
Vinyl Box Set, Compact Disc (CD)
In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, Guryan’s work was recorded by jazz greats like Chris Connor, Anita O’Day, and Dizzy Gillespie. Still, even Weiss, a friend to Guryan over the last couple of decades of her life, didn’t know any of her demos from those days existed.
“When Margo died,” recalls Weiss, “Jonathan [Rosner] asked me to come to the house and help him go through the books and records. And in the garage, there were these bags of reel-to-reel tapes that were very moth-eaten. They were in paper bags, and no one had opened these paper bags for a long time.” They contained a startling bounty: Guryan’s recordings of her ‘50s jazz material.
The voice heard on those demos is very different from the sotto voce style her admirers have come to adore. We hear a young woman who already sounds as self-possessed as she had to be to push through the gender barriers facing female jazz musicians in the 1950s. Instead of easing back on the mic, she leans into a full-bodied but mordant approach that maximizes her offbeat lyrical wit. Her words and delivery suggest a woman prepared to brook no BS from men—an attitude still revolutionary for women at the time. Imagine Guryan’s contemporary Elaine May as a jazz singer instead of a comic.
The furthest out of these songs (in more ways than one) turned out to be her most successful of the time. “Moon Ride,” heard in a 1956 demo, became her first tune to be released when jazz crooner Chris Connor covered it in ‘58. Guryan conjures up a cool-cat beatnik vibe in her trippy tale of a cosmic journey on which she relies on her ray gun to extricate her from some worryingly carnivorous moon men.
Vinyl Box Set, Compact Disc (CD)
On “More Understanding Than a Man,” Guryan finds solace in a river that offers her more than a male, with slinky riffs surrounding a vocal balanced between deadpan and sass. “That’s a good proto-feminist song whether that’s the way she intended it or not,” observes Weiss. “Her voice is kind of ahead of its time, it’s almost like an indie rock-jazz voice.” In retrospect, it’s possible to see Guryan as a sort of swinging, Eisenhower-era forebear of Kim Gordon or Patti Smith.
In Guryan lore, her exposure to The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” is the revelatory, road-to-Damascus moment that altered her life and put her on the path to pop. Sardonic jazz singer/songwriter Dave Frishberg turned her on to the song in 1966 and its seamless combination of musical complexity and instant accessibility tripped a trigger in Guryan’s head.
“After that, she heard The Beatles and The Mamas and The Papas and other things that she thought were good,” says Weiss. “I think Brian Wilson’s harmonic sophistication made it okay for her to listen to pop music.” But Guryan did more than just listen.
Vinyl Box Set, Compact Disc (CD)
On her way home from Frishberg’s place, she picked up Pet Sounds, containing the aforementioned tune. After listening, she sat down at her Wurlitzer electric piano and wrote “Think of Rain.” The song’s poetic melancholy and sugary-smart chamber pop beauty became the key ingredients for her post-jazz songwriting recipe.
The song was cut by Jackie DeShannon (no songwriting slouch herself), Claudine Longet, and others, helping to hurtle Guryan’s budding pop career forward. Spanky &Our Gang’s recording of the sleepy, sensual “Sunday Morning” gave Guryan her first Top 40 hit, and plenty of other artists lined up to cover it.
Publisher David Rosner entered Guryan’s life when she signed a songwriting deal with CBS’s April-Blackwood Music. The two Queens natives clicked on multiple levels and became partners in work and life for the rest of their days. Besides shopping her demos for others to record, Rosner eventually sold Bell Records on Guryan as a recording artist and helped oversee Take a Picture.
Guryan wasn’t a fan of her own singing, but when Rosner tried double-tracking her vocals, she found a whole new sound, her vocals softer and sweeter than before while also taking up more sonic space. The album’s ornate but tastefully orchestrated production was perfect for gently romantic tunes like “Think of Rain.” But Guryan was ultimately more of an intellectual than a romantic.
“She was very progressive and very angry at the retrograde elements in American culture,” says Weiss. “She was always trying to force you to be a little smarter… She was kind of cerebral.” Some of Guryan’s messages were delivered in experimental modes. But in keeping with her sugaring-the-pill approach, you wouldn’t realize it without paying close attention. “Thoughts” tells a story in two-word phrases. The lyrics to “Love,” the album’s only psychedelic rocker, consist entirely of five questions about love as an abstract concept.
The more intense “Four-Letter Words,” not included on Take a Picture but recorded by Miriam Makeba, offers an alternate perspective on obscenity via the title conceit, with bare, barbed lines like “Wars, kill, guns, hate, hurt, harm, dead.”
When the strong-willed Guryan, who never fancied herself a performer, refused to promote her album by touring, Bell effectively buried the record. “She says in the [Words and Music] booklet she’d had enough of ‘Daddy says’ by the time she was five,” observes Weiss. “So, I don’t think she was really good at doing what people told her. She doesn’t seem to have been interested [in performance].”
Vinyl Box Set, Compact Disc (CD)
Guryan likely viewed Take a Picture as a lark; she didn’t seem to lose much sleep over its initial fate. She and Rosner relocated from NYC to a big house in L.A.’s Hancock Park, where Guryan continued writing for the next decade and co-produced some other artists’ records alongside Rosner. Meanwhile, she landed tunes with everyone from Julie London to “Mama” Cass Elliott.
In the mid-‘70s Guryan crafted wickedly satirical songs like “The Hum,” surely the catchiest track ever written about Richard Nixon’s Watergate tapes, and the black-humored earthquake anthem “California Shake.” She even dipped a tentative toe into glittery disco with “Hold Me Dancin’.” But business was drying up for her, and by decade’s end, she was focusing on teaching piano instead—a vocation that occupied her up to her final years.
Guryan was reportedly quite content living her life with Rosner and stepson Jonathan, putting her musical past in storage. But in the wake of the Beach Boys’ hipster canonization in the ‘90s, collectors started panning deeper in the ‘60s soft pop stream. When they discovered Take a Picture, the album was reissued 32 years after its release and finally received its rightful acclaim.
A new generation of artists started cutting her tunes. Bemused by the attention but uninterested in picking up where she left off, Guryan mostly enjoyed the accolades from a distance.
Guryan passed away in 2021 at the age of 84. After Weiss discovered her ‘50s tapes, he brought Rosner and Numero’s Mcgowan together. The three of them undertook the passion project that became Words and Music, the most comprehensive portrait of Guryan’s artistry ever released.
Weiss recognizes the historical import of Guryan’s journey. “I think the story resonates,” he acknowledges, “a woman who really didn’t get her due for some reasons that have to do with the culture at the time.” But the lifelong music obsessive is quick to add, “To me, it really comes down to the fact that she was a truly great songwriter that I’d put on a level with anybody. I hope she takes her place in the firmament of great American artists—because she deserves it.”
