Melanie, the zephyr-voiced songstress who performed at the Woodstock musical festival in 1969 and topped the next decade’s charts with hits like “Brand New Key” and “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain),” died Tuesday, her family said. She was 76.
Her death was announced on Facebook by her children, Leilah, Jeordie, and Beau Jarred. The trio did not share a cause of death, but said that Melanie had “passed, peacefully, out of this world and into the next.”
“She was one of the most talented, strong and passionate women of the era and every word she wrote, every note she sang reflected that,” they said. “Our world is much dimmer, the colors of a dreary, rainy Tennessee pale with her absence today, but we know that she is still here, smiling down on all of us, on all of you, from the stars.”
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Born Melanie Safka in 1947, the singer-songwriter was just 22 years old when she graced the stage at Woodstock, one of only a handful of solo female performers. Though she had already accrued a considerable reputation by singing in Greenwich Village’s nightclubs and coffeehouses, “I went on as an unknown and I came off that stage as a celebrity,” she told American Songwriter in 2013.
Her first pop hit, 1970’s “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain),” which climbed to the No. 6 spot on that year’s Hot 100, was inspired by her Woodstock set. As Melanie told it, the tune came to her as she looked out over the darkened field, illuminated by audience members holding candles (or, more likely, matches).
“It started to rain right before I went on,” she recalled in a 2019 piece she wrote for Rolling Stone. “Ravi Shankar had just finished up his performance, and the announcer said that if you lit candles, it would help to keep the rain away.”
“It was this incredible flow of human power being directed toward me,” she added to American Songwriter. “And I got to see the hillside light up like so many fireflies.”
Melanie claimed that, for years afterwards, crowds at her shows would start lighting candles when she broke into the song. “It became so connected with my concerts that my shows were getting banned because fire departments wouldn’t approve them,” she wrote.
But it was 1971’s “Brand New Key” that cemented her reputation—and dogged her for the rest of her career. The first single for her newly-minted label, Neighborhood Records—the first female-owned independent label in rock history, her reps told The Hollywood Reporter—the poppy tune “was the bane of my existence for a few years,” she joked to The Guardian in 2021.
Responding to one reporter’s questions about fans reading between her almost childish lines about rollerskates and keys, Melanie explained she’d written the song “in about 15 minutes one night.”
“My idea about songs is that once you write them, you have very little say in their life afterward,” she continued. “It’s a lot like having a baby. You conceive a song, deliver it, and then give it as good a start as you can. After that, it’s on its own. People will take it any way they want to take it.”
However you interpreted it, “Brand New Key” was a certified hit, selling more than three million copies around the world and climbing to the Hot 100’s top spot in Dec. 1971. The following year, Billboard awarded her its prize for top female vocalist, and she was named an official spokesperson for UNICEF.
Among her other hits were “Peace Will Come” (1970), “What Have They Done to My Song Ma” (1970), a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” (1970), and “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (1973). She branched out further as an artist in the 1980s, penning the music and lyrics for a musical about Annie Oakley called Ace of Diamonds. (Though a full production was never mounted, a number of stage readings were held at Lincoln Center.)
In 1989, she also scored an Emmy Award for composing the lyrics to the theme song for a television adaptation of Beauty and the Beast.
Melanie cut more than two dozen albums between 1968 and 2010, the year Peter Schekeryk, her producer, manager, and husband of four decades, died. Weeks before her own death, according to her label, Cleopatra, Melanie had begun recording cover songs for a new record. Titled Second Hand Smoke, the album was to have featured versions of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” Radiohead’s “Creep,” and the Moody Blues’ “Nights In White Satin,” according to Variety. It was not immediately clear if Cleopatra would release it as a posthumous project.
Melanie’s kids asked on Facebook that friends, fans, and well-wishers light a candle in honor of their mother on Wednesday night. “Raise, raise them high, high up again,” they said. “Illuminate the darkness, and let us all be connected in remembrance of the extraordinary woman who was wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and friend to so very many people.”
