Melanie Safka, who won sudden fame as a 22-year-old folk singer playing for hundreds of thousands of people on the first night of the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and followed it up with a string of heartfelt and sometimes quirky hits, died Jan. 23 at 76.
Ms. Safka, who often just used her first name during her entertainment career, summited the Top 100 charts in late 1971 and early 1972 with “Brand New Key.” Her other best-known songs from that era included “Peace Will Come (According to Plan),” “What Have They Done to My Song, Ma,” “Ring the Living Bell,” “The Nickel Song” and an idiosyncratic cover version of the Rolling Stones hit “Ruby Tuesday.”
But she may be best remembered for “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)” — a yearning, joyful, intensely felt collaboration with the Edwin Hawkins Singers, an urban gospel group. The song was inspired by her appearance at Woodstock. It had been raining most of the day, and some members of the audience had been holding up candles as though to fend it off by communal action.
She recalled herself as “a girl alone with the guitar never having sung for more than 500 people” as she stepped out into a night full of little lights. Still, as she told the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2016, she had the chorus of “Lay Down” already in her head as she left the field. “I would never perceive the world the same again.”
Wearing long hair and longer dresses, Ms. Safka became a sort of gentle hippie goddess to the counterculture, singing about peace and community in what sometimes sounded like a little girl’s voice — albeit one capable of enormous power.
Chicago Tribune rock critic Lynn Van Matre called her “one of those performers whom people seem to either adore or abhor, with her sugary sincerity repelling some while attracting others.”
Ms. Safka herself grew tired of “Brand New Key,” which she called “the song that doomed me to be cute the rest of my life.” But she was generally proud of her life’s work, and she never regretted giving up on stardom to concentrate on having a family.
“I think I did exactly what I was supposed to do. I get letters from people who said my music saved their lives,” she told the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch in 2018. “Not my dress, not my dancing, not my fishnet stockings, not my butt. It was my music, my music I protected my whole life.”
Melanie Anne Safka was born in Queens, on Feb. 3, 1947, to a father of Ukrainian heritage and a mother of Italian background who made jazz records as Polly Safka-Bertolo. Melanie made her first public appearance at 4 on the radio show “Live Like a Millionaire,” performing the song “Gimme a Little Kiss.”
She spent much of her childhood in suburban New Jersey and began performing at a coffeehouse in Long Branch, N.J. She took acting classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York and began to appear regularly at Greenwich Village folk clubs such as the Bitter End.
After Woodstock, Ms. Safka became the only well-known performer to appear at the ill-fated Powder Ridge Rock Festival in Middlefield, Conn. A last-minute injunction was served against the event, but some 30,000 people showed up anyway and the event devolved into a wild orgy of drug-taking, the example of which helped curtail such large rock festivals around the United States. Ever the trouper, Ms. Safka played for the crowd on a homemade stage powered by Mister Softee trucks.
She was always surprised by the success — and controversy — of “Brand New Key,” which was banned by some radio stations. She said she wrote the song in 15 minutes and thought it was “cute, a kind of old ’30s tune.” It featured the lines:
Well, I’ve got a brand-new pair of roller skates
You’ve got a brand-new key
I think that we should get together
And try them on to see
But as she later acknowledged, “I guess a key and a lock have always been Freudian symbols and pretty obvious ones at that.” Indeed, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson included “Brand New Key” in his 1997 porno industry film “Boogie Nights” for a seduction scene involving a character who never takes off her roller skates.
In 1983 Ms. Safka wrote music and lyrics for a musical, “Ace of Diamonds,” based on letters written by marksman Annie Oakley. It was never fully produced, but several staged readings were presented at Lincoln Center in Manhattan.
She won an Emmy Award in 1989 for writing the lyrics to “The First Time I Loved Forever,” a song composed by Lee Holdridge that was used in the live-action CBS series “Beauty and the Beast.” With one exception, her 30-odd albums were produced by her husband, Peter Schekeryk, whom she married in 1968 and who died in 2010.
Complete information about survivors was not immediately available.
She continued to make music occasionally throughout her life, working with the songwriter Stephin Merritt for his ad hoc group the 6ths. Many artists made their own versions of Ms. Safka’s songs, including Miley Cyrus, Nina Simone, the New Seekers, Mott the Hoople and Morrissey.
She gave an interview as the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival was being prepared in 2018 and attempted to sum up its legacy.
“It reminded a whole generation of what is valuable and true, and to me that never really went away,” she told the Arizona Daily Sun. “The media take on the whole sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll [aspect], I didn’t get that part of the show. I wasn’t a drug person, I was a vegetarian purist just wanting to be my authentic self, and there were hundreds and thousands of people like me who were searching for their authentic person.”
