Dottie Rambo, a singer and prolific songwriter who was one of the most successful women to write songs in gospel music, died early Sunday when her tour bus ran off a highway near Mount Vernon, Mo. She was 74 and lived in Nashville.
Dottie Rambo
Her death was announced by her daughter, Reba Rambo-McGuire, who is also a singer.
With songs recorded by Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Vince Gill and Whitney Houston, and a busy recording and touring career of her own, Ms. Rambo has been ubiquitous in gospel since the early 1960s. Many of her songs have become hymnal standards, including “I Go to the Rock,” “We Shall Behold Him,” “I Will Glory in the Cross” and “He Looked Beyond My Fault (and Saw My Need),” which uses the tune of “Danny Boy.”
The audience for Ms. Rambo’s style of Southern gospel is chiefly white. But she broke through the genre’s racial boundaries as one of the first white artists to use black backup singers. Her 1968 album of spirituals, “It’s the Soul of Me,” became one of her most successful solo projects, but it caused a stir in the gospel world when it won a Grammy Award for Best Soul Gospel Performance, a category whose winners were usually black.
Born Joyce Reba Luttrell in Anton, Ky., she left home at 12 and married Buck Rambo at 16. While still a teenager she made a publishing deal with Jimmie Davis, a two-time governor of Louisiana who was both composer and singer of “You Are My Sunshine” and other hits.
In her group with her husband, the Singing Rambos (later the Rambos), she sang inspirational lyrics in a folksy alto and helped develop a sound that had links to both country music and black gospel.
She toured widely on her own and with her groups — the Rambos played for soldiers in Vietnam in the late ’60s — until 1989, when a back injury temporarily halted her career. She returned in 2003, with a hit duet with Ms. Parton, “Stand by the River.” She resumed a brisk touring schedule, with about 150 concerts a year, said her agent, Beckie Simmons. Ms. Rambo was shuttling between engagements in Illinois and Texas when she died.
But it was as a songwriter that Ms. Rambo had her greatest influence. She wrote more than 2,500 songs, according to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, which inducted her into its ranks last year. While she never crossed over to pop as a performer, her songs found mainstream exposure through other artists; Ms. Houston recorded “I Go to the Rock” for the soundtrack to her film “The Preacher’s Wife” in 1996.
Ms. Rambo’s marriage to Buck Rambo ended in divorce.
In addition to her daughter, of Franklin, Tenn., who is married to the singer Dony McGuire, she is survived by a sister, Nellie Slaton, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa; two brothers, Jerry Luttrell of Madisonville, Ky., and Freddie Luttrell of Sturgis, Ky.; three grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.
No comments:
Post a Comment