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Quick Facts
Best Known For
Laura Nyro is best known for her musical career as a singer-songwriter, which began in the 1960s.
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Play NowLaura Nyro. (2013). The Biography Channel website. Retrieved 01:47, May 20, 2013, from http://www.biography.com/people/laura-nyro-17178856.
Laura Nyro. [Internet]. 2013. The Biography Channel website. Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/laura-nyro-17178856 [Accessed 20 May 2013].
"Laura Nyro." 2013. The Biography Channel website. May 20 2013, 01:47 http://www.biography.com/people/laura-nyro-17178856.
"Laura Nyro," The Biography Channel website, 2013, http://www.biography.com/people/laura-nyro-17178856 [accessed May 20, 2013].
"Laura Nyro," The Biography Channel website, http://www.biography.com/people/laura-nyro-17178856 (accessed May 20, 2013).
Laura Nyro [Internet]. The Biography Channel website; 2013 [cited 2013 May 20] Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/laura-nyro-17178856.
Laura Nyro, http://www.biography.com/people/laura-nyro-17178856 (last visited May 20, 2013).
Laura Nyro. The Biography Channel website. 2013. Available at: http://www.biography.com/people/laura-nyro-17178856. Accessed May 20, 2013.
Synopsis
Laura Nyro was born on October 18, 1947 in the Bronx, New York. Nyro began singing as a teenager, in New York subways and streets. She would eventually receive a record contract that led to a performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. After a brief retirement, she returned to recording before her early death from ovarian cancer in 1997.
Quotes
"I don't think you should categorize yourself as an artist."
Early Songwriting Career
Laura Nyro was born as Laura Nigro on October 18, 1947 in the Bronx, New York. Nyro was the daughter of Gilda Mirsky Nigro, a bookkeeper with the American Psychoanalytic Association, and Louis Nigro, a piano tuner and jazz trumpeter. Nyro showed an early interest in music and started composing songs at the age of 8. She attended the High School of Music and Art in New York at the same time as fellow singer-songwriter Janis Ian.
As a teenager, Nyro often sang doo-wop in New York subway stations. As she later wrote, "I would go out singing, as a teenager, to a party or out on the street, because there were harmony groups there, and that was one of the joys of my youth. I mean you could just go out and sing. If I look back now, all these years later, I must have had a spiritual, holistic feeling from all of that."
At age 17, she wrote the song "And When I Die," which she sold to the famous folk group Peter, Paul and Mary for $5,000. In 1966, she won a record contract of her own after auditioning before record company executive Artie Mogull, who had earlier signed Bob Dylan to his first major-label contract. Having long experimented with various stage names, she released her 1967 debut album, More Than a New Discovery, under the name Laura Nyro, which stuck as her professional name. That same year, she performed at the famous Monterey Pop Festival. While Nyro believed that her performance at the festival had been a failure and, subsequently, rarely performed in large venues, documentary footage of the concert shows that the crowd actually responded quite enthusiastically to her set.
After her performance at Monterey, record producer David Geffen signed Nyro to a $4 million contract with Columbia Records. This gave her more creative control over her next albums, including the two widely regarded as her best, 1968's Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and 1969's New York Tendaberry. The Columbia contract also allowed for Nyro's songs to be covered by other, more established artists such as The Fifth Dimension and Barbra Streisand.
Retirement at Age 24
In 1971, a 24-year-old Laura Nyro announced her retirement from the music business. "When I was very young," she said in an interview about her decision, "everything happened so quickly for me. I hadn't really contemplated being famous. I was writing music, I was just involved in the art of it at that young age. Then, when it all happened, I didn't know how to handle it." Her father remembered, "Laura was always very sensitive. She didn't like collaboration. She didn't like compromise. She was an artist, and she didn't like—hated—the show-biz part." Nyro took a five-year hiatus from the music business, and during that time, she married and then divorced carpenter David Bianchini.
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Influential Female Musicians of the 1960s
View groupAmerican society experienced a revolution in the late 1960s and early 70s, especially for African-Americans and women. Janis Joplin was the finest white blues singer of her generation; female singer-songwriters like Carole King and Joni Mitchell shared their innermost thoughts and feelings; Aretha Franklin emerged as the Queen of Soul; and Bonnie Raitt established herself as both a strong vocalist and a brilliant guitarist. Through their music, the women of this era created the soundtrack of social progress.
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Folk Singers and Folk Revolutionaries
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