Voice of unreleased 1970 soul demo from Blue Valentine soundtrack is 62-year-old Nannie Sharpe from Virginia
The mysterious singer of You and Me, the sleeper hit from 2010 film Blue Valentine, has been discovered in Virginia, four decades after she recorded the demo as Penny and the Quarters. "It's been 40 years since I've heard it," said Nannie Sharpe. "I'm shocked and elated."
You and Me plays an integral part in Blue Valentine, soundtracking the onscreen relationship of Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams with electric guitar and lo-fi soul. But the film-makers scarcely knew anything about it; they got the track from Numero Group, a Chicago reissue label that found it on cassette at a yard sale.
That tape, from the estate of studio owner Clem Price in Columbus, Ohio, had a cryptic note in pencil: You and Me was recorded by "Penny and the Quarters". But who were the Quarters? Who was Penny?
Her name is Nannie Sharpe, n�e Coulter, nicknamed Penny. She is 62. She lives in Woodbridge, Virginia. And in 1970, in a one-take rehearsal, she sang You and Me with her brothers at Price's Harmonic Sounds Studio. "I didn't even realise they were recording," Preston told the Other Paper (via TwentyFourBit), which broke the story. "We were just trying to get ourselves on record."
Sharpe and her brothers, Preston, Johnny and Donald, began singing at Harmonic after answering a newspaper advert. "We'd sing all the time, in church, in the house. We'd stand around, helping whoever's turn it was to wash dishes that week, singing together," she said. "[At Harmonic] they were auditioning singers, starting a label ... We would go over there every Saturday morning and stay all day, from 7am to 4pm. I remember thinking: 'Do we have to stay all day?'"
Mostly, they sang backup for other Harmonic artists. But one day Price asked songwriter Jay Robinson to work with them. "To polish us up," Sharpe said. "I remember he used to emphasise to us to enunciate those words, and he liked the phrase 'my, my, my, my' to illustrate."
Robinson wrote a song called You and Me ? which includes several "my my my mys" ? and gave it to the Sharpes to sing. Their rehearsal was recorded. The song was never released. One day it was found on a tape. And although the Columbus Dispatch traced the track to Robinson, he had died in 2009, and his widow didn't know who sang on the recording. "I remembered my husband told me he had went in the studio and redid a song he made ? with a young girl," she said. "That day ... he only had a penny and a quarter in his pocket, so that was how he named the group ... I didn't know who Penny was, and something in her voice arose some jealousy in me."
The mystery of Penny and the Quarters was finally solved in June, when Sharpe's daughter, Jayma, heard the story from some friends. She went online, researched the song, and knew it had to be her mum. The texts came flying. "It was all, 'OMG exclamation point, exclamation point'," Nannie Sharpe said. "Bringing the lost to light is a beautiful thing," said Numero Group's co-owner, Rob Sevier.
At the time of the interview, Sharpe's family had yet to see Blue Valentine.
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