Gale Garnett

Biography

Gale Zoë Garnett (born 17 July 1942) is a Canadian singer best known in the United States for her self-penned, Grammy-winning folk hit "We'll Sing in the Sunshine". Garnett is also an author and actress.

Biography

Garnett was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and moved to Canada with her family when she was 11. She made her public singing debut in 1960, while at the same time pursuing an acting career, making guest appearances on television shows such as 77 Sunset Strip.
She made her New York nightclub debut in 1963 at The Blue Angel Supper Club, and was signed by RCA Victor Records that same year. She recorded her debut album, My Kind of Folk Songs in 1964; that fall, she scored a number four pop hit with her original composition "We'll Sing in the Sunshine", which also hit number 1 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary singles chart for seven weeks and was a Top 50 country hit.
"We'll Sing in the Sunshine" won a 1965 Grammy for Best Folk Recording, and sold over one million copies, thus gaining gold disc status. Garnett was also nominated for Best Vocal Performance Female for that song. Riding its success, Garnett continued to record through the rest of the 1960s with her backing band the Gentle Reign. Her follow-up to "We'll Sing in the Sunshine", "Lovin' Place", was her only other single to chart in America.
Garnett appeared twice on ABC's Shindig! and The Lloyd Thaxton Show at the height of her singing fame in the mid-1960s. She also did the voice of the "Mother KOIT" liners for KOIT-FM (93.3 FM) in San Francisco in the mid to late 1960s during its era of progressive rock format (1968–1970).
Garnett voiced the character Francesca in the Rankin-Bass feature Mad Monster Party? in the late 1960s, singing the tunes "Our Time to Shine" and "Never Was a Love Like Mine". At this point, she had begun to be more influenced by the counterculture, and had embraced psychedelic themes to some extent. In the late 1960s, she recorded two albums of psychedelic-inflected music with the Gentle Reign.
In 1975, Garnett participated in an off-off-Broadway theater production of Starfollowers in an Ancient Land, written and directed by H.M. Koutoukas, at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York City's East Village. Garnett performed in the cast, and also co-wrote the music for the production with Tom O'Horgan.

Later career

Although Garnett had retired from the music business by the 1980s, she continued occasionally appearing in feature films (including the sleeper hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002)) and on television shows, usually in supporting roles.
In subsequent years, she branched out into journalism, writing essays, columns, and book reviews for various newspapers and magazines. She also wrote and performed two one-person theater pieces, Gale Garnett & Company and Life After Latex.

Books by Garnett

Garnett published her first novel, a romance titled Visible Amazement, in 1999. She followed with Transient Dancing (2003), the novella Room Tone (2007), and Savage Adoration, her latest release (2009).

Soundtrack

Penelope (1966 film) (words and music: "The Sun Is Gray")