ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that Dusty Springfield's look and sound must be considered in tandem, and emphasizes at the outset that her sound-both the characteristic "grain" of her voice and the rare musical imagination behind it-was and is the more significant of the two. Dusty borrowed elements of her look from blonde glamour queens of the 1950s and 1960s—Brigitte Bardot, Kim Novak, Monica Vitti, Catherine Deneuve—and pasted them together according to her own taste. When Dusty decided to pursue a solo career in 1963, the break with her musical past was dramatic. The story of Dusty's physical transformation—one the press seemed never to tire of telling—demonstrated that even "plain" girls could become glamorous and mod. African American musical traditions allowed Dusty to express herself in ways that white European musical traditions did not and her early affinity for this mode of self-expression also explains her relative lack of identification with the conventions and devices of musical whiteness.
