Asif Kapadia’s Amy Winehouse Documentary and the Singers Who Left Us Too Soon Inline
Photo: Courtesy of Gilles Petard/Getty Images1/9Billie Holiday
Died: July 17, 1959
Age: 44
Cause of Death: Cirrhosis and congestion of the lungs complicated by heart failure
Probably the greatest jazz singer of all time—heck, Frank Sinatra learned about phrasing from her—Lady Day (born Eleanora Fagan) also had one of the hardest lives: By fourteen she had been forced into prostitution, and henceforth spent a life filled with drug abuse and men who treated her horribly. She was said to have died with less than a dollar in the bank. Although she lacked the pipes of, say, Ella Fitzgerald, no singer ever had a purer sense of a song’s emotional center, as she shows in “God Bless the Child.”
Photo: Courtesy of Keystone-France/Getty Images2/9Édith Piaf
Died: October 10, 1963
Age: 47
Cause of Death: Liver cancer
If France ever had a national voice, it belonged to this woman (née Édith Giovanna Gassion) known as La Môme Piaf, The Little Sparrow, who was adored for her self-dramatizing music and life. She, too, didn’t have it easy—she was raised in a brothel—and didn’t make it easy on herself either, from her erratic taste in men to her unseemly behavior during World War II that made many think her a collaborator. Singing out of her emotions, she created at least two songs that feel like anthems, “Non, je ne regrette rien,” and this one that became the title of the biopic that won Marion Cotillard her Oscar.
Photo: Courtesy of Eric Carpenter/Getty Images3/9Judy Garland
Died: June 22, 1969
Age: 47
Cause of Death: Barbiturate overdose
Born with the unhappy name of Frances Ethel Gumm, this gifted, unhappy performer was a prototype of how show business, especially Hollywood, chews up child stars. You can feel it in her singing. We all grew up watching her in The Wizard of Oz, where she sings “Over the Rainbow” with a crystalline purity tinged with both yearning and melancholy, and many know her version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which Garland transformed into the saddest of all holiday songs. Plied with amphetamines and barbiturates from an early age, she spent her life in all manner of pain, which she channels in this rare version of her most famous song.
Photo: Courtesy of David Gahr/Getty Images4/9Janis Joplin
Died: October 4, 1970
Age: 27
Cause of Death: Heroin overdose
The most galvanizing female rock star of her era—she was the only woman in the penthouse with Mick and Jimi and Dylan—the Texan belter sang as hard as she lived, or maybe the other way around. (Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel #2” is about his fling with her: “You told me again you preferred handsome men / But for me you would make an exception.”) Pearl, as she was sometimes known, dove into a song with such headlong passion that it was hard to know what was more surprising—that she died young or that she actually had a number one hit, “Me and Bobby McGee.” Still, the song that forever defines her was this one.
Photo: Courtesy of Corbis Images5/9Elis Regina
Died: January 19, 1982
Age: 36
Cause: Drug overdose
When she first appeared on the Brazilian scene in the early sixties, no less a figure than Tom Jobim—the presiding genius behind the creation of bossa nova—wrote her off as a “country bumpkin.” But this tiny, fiery singer—affectionately nicknamed Pimentinha, or “Little Pepper”—blew other performers off the stage, going on to become recognized as Brazils greatest singer. And her background—this was no child of the elite—only reinforced her popularity. Regina was such a beloved figure that, when she died, more than 100,000 followed her funeral procession down the street. Oh, yes, she made this song by Jobim famous.
Photo: Courtesy of RB/Getty Images6/9Karen Carpenter
Died: February 4, 1983
Age: 32
Cause of Death: Consequences of anorexia nervosa
It’s the infinite seductiveness of pop music that, beneath its sleek and often calculatedly commercial surfaces, you can still hear a world of deep feeling. A classic case is this daughter of the L.A. suburbs—her sad life brilliantly caught by Todd Haynes’s smart, touching cult film Superstar—whose silky voice is filled with the pain of one who will literally starve herself to death. Where so many other singers have died from too much, Carpenter died from too much of having too little. You can hear the yearning in her voice, as she sings those opening words, “Long ago, and oh so far away.”
Photo: Courtesy of George Gongora/AP7/9Selena
Died: March 31, 1995
Age: 23
Cause of death: Gunshot wound
The youngest of all the women on this list, Selena Quintanilla Perez—known by her first name, of course—she may have also had the strangest of deaths. The woman who murdered her was the president of her fan club. What made this Tejano singer famous wasn’t simply her performances or her racy outfits (her bustiers shocked conservative Latinos and got her compared to Madonna) but that she came to embody the nineties explosion in Mexican-American pride and self-confidence—she represented much more than herself. Then again, she did that by representing her own feelings, as in her signature song, “Como la Flor.”
Photo: Courtesy of Corbis Images8/9Teresa Teng
Died: May 8, 1995
Age: 42
Cause of death: Asthma attack
There are many levels of popularity, but China popular may be the biggest. No modern Chinese singer has been more beloved than the Taiwanese Teng, who, singing in Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and English, among other languages, was a huge star all over Asia, including Mainland China where people could only get her music on the black market. Like so many great pop singers, Teng had a sweet voice that inspired a strange kind of nostalgic melancholy. Never was this truer than in her greatest song, “The Moon Represents My Heart,” which became the emotional anchor of the touching Hong Kong film, Comrades: Almost a Love Story. Even today, if you play this song for a Chinese audience, listeners will have tears in their eyes.
Photo: Courtesy of David Corlo/Getty Images9/9Whitney Houston
Died: February 11, 2012
Age: 48
Cause of Death: Drowning and effects of heart disease and cocaine use
You know her story. Child soloist in the gospel choir. Modeling career. Grammy-winning records with record-breaking sales. Accusations of being “too white.” The Bodyguard with Kevin Costner. “I Will Always Love You”—number one for fourteen weeks. Marriage to Bobby Brown. Good girl gone bad. Struggling with drugs. Telling Diane Sawyer that “crack is whack.” Appearing on the reality series Being Bobby Brown. Admitting to drug use on Oprah. And on and on, until many people didn’t realize that she’d once been considered a pop goddess, as in this performance at the Grammys.
