Laura Nyro

Laura Nyro, born Laura Nigro in 1947 and hailing from the Bronx, wrote songs that other people turned into hits and sang them herself in a way nobody else could touch. At the piano, with a mezzo-soprano that ranged across three octaves, she mixed pop, soul and jazz into something restless and fervent, all sudden tempo changes and heart-on-fire crescendos, and Eli and the Thirteenth Confession in 1968 and New York Tendaberry in 1969 are the records that made the critics sit up.

The rest of the world mostly heard her through other voices. Between 1968 and 1970 the 5th Dimension had hits with "Stoned Soul Picnic", "Wedding Bell Blues", "Sweet Blindness" and "Save the Country", Blood, Sweat & Tears took "And When I Die" up the charts, Three Dog Night did "Eli's Comin'" and Barbra Streisand sang "Stoney End". Her own biggest-selling single, oddly enough, was somebody else's song: her take on Gerry Goffin and Carole King's "Up on the Roof", from Christmas and the Beads of Sweat. Smile, in 1976, brought its title track and "I Am the Blues".

Elton John idolized her, but the broader recognition mostly came after her death in 1997: the Songwriters Hall of Fame inducted her in 2010 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.