Making a Mark

"The future of the song recital, if it is to have one," said one New York Times music reviewer, "lies largely in the hands of a few young singers like Lucy Shelton who go on exploring behind the words and notes of familiar music, and caring about the individual dramatic life of each short song."

Shelton '65--the only two-time winner of the prestigious Walter W. Naumburg Competition and a singer whom The Boston Globe recently called "a new music diva if there ever was one"--recalls that at her first performance audition as a graduate student at the New England Conservatory of Music, she performed one of Stravinsky's Russian Peasant Songs learned from Pomona's Professor Emeritus Karl Kohn. "It had a range of an octave," she laughs. "I wound up being cast--as the stage manager! I didn't know in an audition that I was supposed to show my range, that I was supposed to hold a high note for a long time." A perfectly timed beat, and then she offers a delicious, wicked laugh. "And I still don't."

Shelton photos courtesy of Da Camera of Houston

Nothing Left to Lose

It's been more than 30 years since Kris Kristofferson '58 wrote that "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," but after experiencing a downturn in his career lasting more than a decade, Pomona's Rhodes Scholar turned troubled troubador seems to have found his stride again.

When his star rose with the decade of the '70s--with a Songwriter of the Year Award in 1970 for his now-classic "Sunday Morning Coming Down"--Kristofferson's work seemed to become emblematic of all the anguish and bittersweet freedom of the decade. In the years that followed, songs such as "Help Me Make It Through the Night" and "Me and Bobby McGee" marched up the Billboard charts, and he clocked over a million miles on his tour bus as his river-bottom rasp became one of the most recognizable voices in America.

By 1975, he'd made films with Martin Scorsese and Sam Peckinpah, shared a stage with Jimi Hendrix and dated Barbra Streisand. He had four gold records, two Grammies and a lifestyle that some said was burning him out like a two-ended candle. The following year, his role in A Star Is Born seemed too close to life for comfort, as his own star seemed to be setting. In recent years, however, his screen charisma--or rather, an older, more grizzled version of it--seems to have reasserted itself with a new string of highly-regarded film roles.

Over the years, his songs have become increasingly political, but he is likely to be remembered as the writer of some of the best and saddest love songs of a generation.