MARGO GURYAN
Words And Music NUMERO
Lost treasures from a reluctant performer.
By Alastair McKay
8/10
DURING thelast10orso years of her life, while Margo Guryan was working as a piano teacher, she was given several opportunities to reflect on a career in which her brilliance went unnoticed. There was no bitterness in Guryan’s responses; if anything, she evinced a sense of mild amusement that her demo recordings were being excavated decades after the release of her 1968 album Take A Picture (once obscure, now hailed as a baroque masterpiece).
If there was any blame to be attributed, it was Bob Dylan’s fault. Well, not Bob exactly, but his success. After Dylan, Guryan told one interviewer, the music industry changed from a model in which good singers could employ talented songwriters, to the situation in which the songwriter was supposed to be the singer too. This led to a glut of good singers with bad songs, and bad singers with good songs. For Guryan, a brilliant songwriter with limited confidence in the power of her voice, it was a recipe for obscurity.