Fred Neil

*To honor the great music of Fred Neil*



Fred Neil (March 16, 1936 – July 7, 2001) was an important blues and folk singer and songwriter in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, United States, and raised in St. Petersburg, Florida, Neil was one of the songwriters who for a time worked out of New York City's famous Brill Building. He has often been called a pioneer of the singer-songwriter musical genre; his most frequently cited disciples are Tim Buckley, Harry Nilsson, and Bob Dylan. His early compositions were recorded by the likes of Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison; he played as a session guitarist on hits by Bobby Darin and Paul Anka. In 1968, Nilsson recorded a cover version of Neil's song "Everybody's Talkin'," which became a huge hit a year later when it was featured in the film Midnight Cowboy.

Neil was an accomplished professional musician atypically inclined to a very modest frugality. His first of two Top-40-hit compositions having substantially introduced him to a sufficient income stream for life in his early 20s, he became increasingly disinclined to work if he didn't feel like it. Consequently his two fully realized albums (see next paragraph) are remarkable for their singularly unpretentious authenticity. His combination of baritone vocal and 12-string guitar remains unusual, and his combo recordings provide his shimmering melodies with muscular grooves; but his exemplarity is that of resolving the apparent apposition between aesthetic integrity and commercial value almost entirely in favor of aesthetic integrity, which gives all of his recordings a unique historical resonance.

He had debts to previous singer-songwriters such as Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry and Hank Williams (Senior); but his approach to melody was more in the manner of Cole Porter and to rhythm very much in the school of Ray Charles. His popularly acclaimed albums are Bleeker & MacDougal (also known as A Little Bit of Rain) without drums (1965) and Fred Neil (a.k.a. Everybody's Talkin') with (1967), made during his residences in the Greenwich Village section of lower Manhattan in New York City and in Coconut Grove, Florida, respectively.

After the early 1970s he ceased to maintain a residence in Woodstock, New York, and spent his remaining decades enjoying life on the shores of southern Florida. His last public performance was at a 1986 coffeehouse concert in Coconut Grove with vibraphone rather than a second guitar.

Fred Neil died of cancer in 2001.