An Unknown Beauty

Margaret Mandolph

Margaret Mandolph, age 13

Margaret Mandolph was a teenage singer in the 1960s, a decade when many wonderful songs were recorded by teenage girls who rapidly went into obscurity. She appears to have only recorded two 45s during 1964-65 when she was just 13 years old. I only recently discovered her thanks to J. Blake Gordon (see Between Here and Away, posted September 9); her version of I Wanna Make You Happy (originally sung by Dusty Springfield) is so touchingly beautiful that I want to share it.

The song itself (by Cynthia Weil and Russ Titelman) is very pretty. But it is Mandolph’s voice that strikes me as exceptionally beautiful. A musician once remarked to me that a person’s voice is reflective of that person’s soul; I am more inclined to think that souls are too multifaceted to show up in such a reliable and straightforward way and besides, some people (like myself!) just can’t sing on key. But if there is any truth to what my musician friend said, Mandolph had an exquisite soul. The way she sings is so delicate, with a kind of stainless tenderness, soulful warmth and what I can only call understanding. (To my ear it is better than the Springfield version which, in comparison, sounds brassy and insensitive.) I especially love the way Mandolph says ‘oh’; lots of singers say that between lines, but the way she says it makes me picture her pressing her fingers against her lips, trying to hold back something she’s dying to speak. The phrasing and tone are excitingly romantic without being insipid or frilly.

I can find very little about Mandolph online. The two records she made were produced by David Gates, a remarkably canny arranger, songwriter, producer and singer who later became famous as the lead singer of 70s band Bread; Mandolph came and went so fast that she doesn’t even show up on his Wikipage. According to a gentleman named Anthony Reichardt, who lovingly posted her music on his YouTube channel, she eventually toured in Europe with a production of the musical Hair, worked with a jazz ensemble called Love Joy and was active in the Oakland, CA music scene. She died at the age of 50 in 2002.

With so little information I can’t tell if her obscurity is tragic or circumstantial or even a choice on her (or her family’s) part—a choice to withdraw from a brutal industry that chews up even the most talented people. Maybe she was wrongfully ignored or exploited more than usual, maybe she bloomed too early, maybe she preferred to share her gift in a gentler, more human environment with people she could trust, for example, her brother, Bobby Mandolph. In a business featuring a huge commercial apparatus devoted to the inflation of the most minimal talents, it must happen sometimes that the real thing lights up for a moment and is then snuffed out—or just goes to shine in some more hospitable, less visible place. I hope she made a good living wherever she landed.

I am not any kind of musical authority and I realize that my strong reaction to this song could be some light-weight subjective thing—the kind of sentimentality that anyone might have about the music of their youth. Or it could be that I’m correctly sensing that this young girl understood, or at least had access to, something at the age of 13 that I didn’t grasp until…now. Whatever it is, I’m just grateful that her voice still exists to remind us of the priceless tenderness it embodies.