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Gale Garnett
Gale Garnett in 1964.
Born
Gale Zoë Garnett

(1942-07-17) 17 July 1942 (age 81)
Auckland, New Zealand
OccupationSinger

Gale Zoë Garnett (born 17 July 1942)[1] is a New Zealand–born Canadian singer best known in the United States for her self-penned, Grammy-winning folk hit "We'll Sing in the Sunshine". Garnett has since carved out a career as an author and actress.

Biography

Garnett with WWDC's Fred Fiske in 1964.

Garnett was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and moved to Canada with her family when she was 11.[1] She made her public singing debut in 1960, while at the same time pursuing an acting career, making guest appearances on television shows such as 77 Sunset Strip.[1]

She made her New York nightclub debut in 1963 at The Blue Angel Supper Club[2] and was signed by RCA Victor Records that same year.[3] In the fall of 1964, Garnett scored a number four pop hit,[4] with her original composition "We'll Sing in the Sunshine" (also No. 1 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary singles chart for seven weeks and a Top 50 country hit), and recorded her debut album, My Kind of Folk Songs, for RCA Victor.[1]

Riding the success of "We'll Sing in the Sunshine", which won a 1965 Grammy for Best Folk Recording, sold over one million copies thus gaining gold disc status,[5] Garnett continued to record through the rest of the 1960s with her backing band the Gentle Reign. Her follow-up to "We'll Sing in the Sunshine", "Lovin' Place", was her only other single to chart in America.[1] She appeared twice on ABC's Shindig! and The Lloyd Thaxton Show at the height of her singing fame in the mid-1960s.

Garnett delivered a notable performance in the Rankin-Bass feature Mad Monster Party in the late 1960s, with the memorable tunes "Our Time to Shine" and "Never Was a Love Like Mine." At this period she had begun to be more influenced by the counterculture, and had embraced psychedelic themes to some extent.[1][6] In the late 1960s she recorded two albums of psychedelic-inflected music with the Gentle Reign.

In 1975, Garnett participated in an Off-Off Broadway theater production of Starfollowers in an Ancient Land, written and directed by H. M. Koutoukas, at the La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in New York City's East Village. Garnett performed in the cast, and also co-wrote the music for the production with Tom O'Horgan.[7]

Later career

Although Garnett had retired from the music business by the 1980s,[1] she continued occasionally appearing in feature films (including the 2002 sleeper hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding) and on television shows, usually in supporting roles.[citation needed]

In subsequent years, she branched out into journalism, writing essays, columns, and book reviews for various newspapers and magazines. She also wrote and performed two one-person theater pieces, Gale Garnett & Company and Life After Latex.[8][9]

Garnett also did the voice of the "Mother KOIT" liners for KOIT-FM (93.3 FM) in San Francisco in the mid to late 1960s during its progressive rock formatted era (1968–1970).[10]

Books by Garnett

Garnett published her first novel, a romance titled Visible Amazement,[11] in 1999. She followed with Transient Dancing (2003), the novella Room Tone (2007), and Savage Adoration, her latest release (2009).

Discography

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Albums

Track listings:[citation needed]

Singles (partial list)

Filmography

Movies

Television

Soundtrack

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Colin Larkin, ed. (1992). The Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music (First ed.). Guinness Publishing. p. 945. ISBN 0-85112-939-0.
  2. ^ Billboard. Nielsen Business Media, Inc. 19 October 1963. pp. 1–16.
  3. ^ "New Gal in Town". Billboard. Nielsen Business Media, Inc. 19 October 1963. p. 16.
  4. ^ Bronson, Fred (2003). The Billboard book of number 1 hits. Billboard Books. p. 159. ISBN 0-8230-7677-6.
  5. ^ Murrells, Joseph (1978). The Book of Golden Discs (2nd ed.). London: Barrie and Jenkins Ltd. p. 175. ISBN 0-214-20512-6.
  6. ^ "Gale Garnett". Classicbands.com. 17 July 1942. Retrieved 18 August 2015.
  7. ^ La MaMa Archives Digital Collections. "Production: Starfollowers in an Ancient Land (1975)". Accessed January 16, 2019.
  8. ^ Steve Huey (17 July 1942). "Gale Garnett | Biography". AllMusic. Retrieved 18 August 2015.
  9. ^ [1] Archived August 29, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
  10. ^ The Dusty Street Interview, 9 September 2020, retrieved 4 October 2021
  11. ^ Garnett, Gayle Zoe (1999). Visible Amazement. Stoddart Publishing. ISBN 0-7737-6176-4.
  12. ^ Bowman, Manoah (11 October 2016). Natalie Wood: Reflections on a Legendary Life - Manoah Bowman - Google Books. Running Press. ISBN 9780762460526. Retrieved 23 April 2020.

External links

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