✍The First Page: I Sang That by Sally Stevens

 

 I SANG THAT

by Sally Stevens

 

Memoir

This book is a personal journey behind the scenes into the world of music-makers who created the film scores, television music, sound recordings, commercials and concert evenings over the last sixty years.

 It’s about a long singing career that began in 1960 with concert tours – Ray Conniff, Nat King Cole, and later, solo work in concert with Burt Bacharach – to thirty years of vocals and main titles for The Simpsons, vocals for Family Guy…vocals on hundreds of film & television scores & sound recordings, plus twenty-two years as Choral Director for the Oscars. It’s also the personal story of growing up in a “his, hers and theirs” family in the forties and fifties, and how a shy little girl became a second-generation singer in the ever-evolving music business of Hollywood.

Release Date: October 25, 2022

Publisher: Atmosphere Press

Soft Cover: 978-1639885510; 390 pages

Amazon: https://amzn.to/3GmcBJD

 

It is early spring, 2016, and I am driving down the busy main street of Studio City, California, in pouring rain, the beginning of what was projected to become and in fact did become the most severe storm to hit Los Angeles in twenty years. I am on my way to meet a friend for lunch. The local NPR station is playing on the car radio, and I hear the wrap-up of an interview recorded a few years earlier with a woman jazz pianist and singer who has just passed away on this day at the age of ninety-two. Naturally, that catches my attention.

Hmmm. Ninety-two. I, myself, on the day of this broadcast, am seventy-seven. In fifteen years, if I am lucky, I will be ninety- two. And if the next fifteen years fly by as quickly as the last fifteen, they will be over in an instant. Fuck, I say to myself. (I can talk that way when I’m driving alone in my car.) And I say it because I think, wow. I can actually admit that there will be a time when I no longer exist.

It’s hard to think about death. It’s hard to even be realistic about time, about one’s age, about the appropriateness of one’s life at any particular age. What will I do with the gift of those next fifteen years? Age seems to dictate so much, especially in the business I’ve been part of all these years. Age has proven to be, in most cases, famously restrictive in our business.

 

Sally Stevens is a singer/lyricist/choral director who has worked in film, television, concert, commercials and sound recording in Hollywood since 1960. She sings the main titles for The Simpsons and Family Guy and her voice can be heard on hundreds of film and television scores.  She has put together choirs for John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, and many others for film scores, and was choral director for The Oscars for 22 years. In the earlier years she toured with Ray Conniff, Nat King Cole and Burt Bachrach, and she has also written lyrics for Burt Bacharach, Don Ellis, Dominic Frontiere, Dave Grusin, and others.

Her short fiction, poetry and essays have been included in Mockingheart Review, The OffBeat, Raven’s Perch, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, Los Angeles Press, The Voices Project, and Between the Lines Anthology: Fairy Tales & Folklore Re-imagined.

Along with singing and writing, her other passion is photography, and her black & white photographs of film composers have been included in exhibitions at the Association of Motion Picture & Television Producers headquarters in Los Angeles, and at Cite de la Musique in Paris, France.

Website:  https://www.sallystevenswriter.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/sallytwitshere

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/sally.stevens.14