Farewell Renée Geyer: ‘Jewish girl who sounded like a black man’

Blues and soul singer Renée Geyer has died aged 69. She is mourned as trailblazer and a self-confessed “difficult woman”.

American record companies which released Renée Geyer albums in the US were sometimes faced with an interesting dilemma. Should they show her face on the cover and in doing so possibly alienate black buyers who were absolutely convinced that such a voice could not conceivably be coming from somebody who was not African-American?

By her own admission, she was a white Jewish girl from Australia who sounded like a 65-year-old black man from Alabama.

Renée Rebecca Geyer was born in Melbourne to a Hungarian-Jewish father, Edward Geyer, and a Slovak-Jewish mother, a Holocaust survivor. She was named after a woman who assisted her mother in Auschwitz when Josef Mengele had consigned the rest of her family to death. 

She died in hospital in Geelong this week, following complications after hip surgery.

Geyer started singing as a teenager and her powerful, distinctive, husky voice saw her dubbed Australia’s queen of soul.

She was best known for songs such as Say I love you, Heading in the Right Direction and It’s a Man’s Man’s World. 

Geyer was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2005, was the first woman to be inducted into the Music Victoria Hall of Fame in 2013, and received the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award at the Australian Women in Music Awards in 2018.

Geyer’s autobiography, Confessions of a Difficult Woman, released in 2000, detailed the challenges she faced with drugs and alcohol, as well as forging a career in a male dominated music industry not accustomed to dealing with strong, independent women.

Singer Marcia Hines paid tribute to Geyer on Twitter, describing her as, “A game changer. A soul diva. My sister in song.”