“She’s the King”: The female singer Jeff Buckley called the greatest
People love to complicate the legacy of Jeff Buckley and his relationship to music, all because of his paternity. The fact that his dad was Tim Buckley, meant that people seemed to ignore him when he stated his vision for himself and his work.
In an interview from when Jeff was hitting the big time with the release of Grace and growing word of his incredible live shows, a reporter asked him what he got from his father. Practically rolling his eyes to the back of his skull at the question he was sick and tired of hearing, he quipped, “People who remember my father”.
Obviously, the connection is more complex given that Jeff Buckley’s career was launched at his other father’s memorial, blowing the crowd away when he took to the stage for the first time. But overwhelmingly, the two are only tied by blood, not by music. Tim left long before Jeff got into music, meaning that it definitely wasn’t his father who gave him his musical education. Instead, it was his mother and her eclectic record collection.
That’s what raised Jeff to be the multi-faceted, multi-inspirational artist, as he began where French ballads were just important to him as rock bands. But while people still desperately want to tether him to the folk of his father, Jeff Buckley laid out exactly the artist he was in the first ever press bio he wrote himself, calling himself “the warped lovechild of Nina Simone and all four members of Led Zeppelin with the fertilized egg transplanted into the womb of [Édith] Piaf out of which he is borne and left on the street to be tortured by the Bad Brains”.
He led with the most important name, as there was truly no artist as important to Buckley as Nina Simone. To him, she was the peak and the pinnacle of so much, not just jazz or ballads or protest songs, but even of rock and roll, as the way Simone pushed her voice clearly inspired how he pushed his. He was a unique rock singer in that way, as the climaxes of his songs weren’t so much about volume, but were about range and emotion, clearly taking not from singers like Simone and their lessons in how to put feeling into music in a different way to the classic rock and rollers.
Buckley showed his love for Simone over and over. Somehow, that white man from California managed to be one of the only people to ever cover a Simone track and actually do it justice, as his versions of ‘If You Knew’ and ‘Lilac Wine’ he recorded for Grace, capture the essence of the songs.
However, when it comes to ‘Lilac Wine’ and the battle of the best version, he wouldn’t even dare put himself in the running. “I’ve only heard Nina Simone’s… And that’s the only one that matters,” he said, barely refusing to even acknowledge that it was actually an old Broadway tune.
“There’s one by Eartha Kitt. There’s one by Elkie Brooks, which I’ve never, ever heard. There’s another one,” he said, shrugging them all off to say, “They’ve done it, but Nina does it best.”
There’s no comparing, and so why would he even waste his time? Buckley knew Simone was the best, and would always be the best, stating clearly, “That’s the be-all end-all version. She’s the king”.
