Judee Sill: the mystic musician’s claims to be a “genderless angel”
Something you learn pretty quickly when immersed in music and music history is that beyond the stories and legends, these are all human beings we’re talking about. Despite the efforts of so many biopics to “humanise” our legends so often, it all seems to do the exact opposite. Reinforce these people as icons, first and foremost, whose suffering is just part of the story. Perhaps it’s learning about artists like the folk luminary Judee Sill, who had all of the hardship with none of the success that her peers had, that helps keep things in context.
Born in the heart of Los Angeles and raised in Oakland, Judith Sill had lived a tough life before she’d ever picked up a guitar. The child of a broken home where she would regularly get in physical fights with her parents, Sill was packed off to a private school in her teens, which sent things from bad to worse. As she detailed in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1972, this move introduced her to a set of people she would later get arrested with for a spate of armed robberies across Los Angeles.
This wouldn’t be the last time she dabbled in a life of crime. After marrying a jazz piano player in 1966, she developed a crippling heroin addiction. One that she fell back into old habits to support. Upon being released from prison again and finding out that her brother had succumbed to a liver infection, something changed. She decided to make something of her life with her own passion for music, beginning to compose songs and striking out on her own.
After tooling around the Los Angeles folk scene for a few years, Sill found two very famous, very influential fans, David Crosby and Graham Nash. Through them, Sill found a series of breaks. She toured with Crosby and Nash, sold her song ‘Lady-O’ to The Turtles and most importantly, struck up a friendship with David Geffen, who offered her a contract on his new label Asylum. The cherry on top of all this was an appearance on the cover of Rolling Stone, setting her up for greatness with her self-titled debut album.
However, Sill’s life was never far away from complication, and the album stalled on both sides of the Atlantic. The sensitive Sill took the poor reaction to her debut and sophomore albums badly, going so far as to camp out on Geffen’s lawn to protest him not promoting her albums correctly. Tragically, it wouldn’t be until decades after her death in 1979 that people would truly discover her music.
Perhaps, like kindred spirit Nick Drake, the macho, gung-ho 1970s were the worst possible time for a talent like Sill to come through. Her delicate, soul-stirring voice and literate folk-pop sounded much more at home in Elliot Smith and The Indigo Girls’ 1990s than in Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath’s ’70s. That, however, is the most depressing truth about artists ahead of their time. You can’t put them in with the people they inspired; they need to lay the groundwork first, no matter what fate consigns them to.
However, at the risk of falling into the same rock tragedy cliches I talked about earlier, she, at the very least, did secure her legacy eventually. Not only is this more than many musicians can say, but it also would probably have been enough for the deeply spiritual Sill, who never lost her faith no matter what hardship she went through. So, yes, hers is a deeply sad, deeply human story. However, it’s one that, like the “genderless angel” she would often describe herself as, Sill rose above one way or another.
