Phoebe Snow Dies

People.com :    Phoebe Snow, a songwriter and contralto singer of the ’70s hit “Poetry Man,” died Tuesday in Edison, N.J., where she lived, her rep told the Los Angeles Times. She was 60 and had suffered a brain hemorrhage in January 2010.

According to a 1976 PEOPLE profile, Snow picked up her initial interest in music at home, where her mother was a former Martha Graham dancer and her father was a big-band buff who worked for an exterminating company. (Her actual surname was Laub; “Phoebe Snow” was borrowed from an Erie Lackawanna train.)

Phoebe’s parents gave her the obligatory piano and guitar lessons, though her real inspiration came from jazz and blues records. School, according to the the artist, was an agonizing exercise in social maladjustment. “All I wanted was to wear knee socks, plaid skirts and bangs and be inconspicuous,” she told PEOPLE. “But I stuck out like a sore thumb. I used to walk around with my notebook in my face.”

She dropped out of Shimer College in northern Illinois and fled to Greenwich Village and the life of a quasi hippie, smoking dope and crashing on uppers and downers. An early boyfriend encouraged Phoebe to perform the stream-of-consciousness lyrics she’d been scrawling in her notebooks for years.