Rita Coolidge

Rita Coolidge (born May 1, 1945) is an American singer and recording artist. During the 1970s and 1980s, her songs were on Billboard magazine's pop, country, adult contemporary, and jazz charts, and she won two Grammy Awards with fellow musician and then-husband Kris Kristofferson. Her recordings include "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher", "We're All Alone", "I'd Rather Leave While I'm in Love" and the theme song for the 1983 James Bond film Octopussy: "All Time High".

Coolidge was born in Lafayette, Tennessee on May 1, 1945. She is the daughter of Dick and Charlotte Coolidge, a minister and schoolteacher, with sisters Linda and Priscilla, and brother Raymond. Coolidge's father was Cherokee, and her mother was half Cherokee and half Scottish. However, the Coolidge family was never enrolled in any Native American tribe. She attended Nashville's Maplewood High School and was graduated from Andrew Jackson Senior High School in Jacksonville, Florida. Coolidge is a graduate of Florida State University, and a member of Alpha Gamma Delta sorority.

After singing around Memphis (including a stint singing jingles), Coolidge was discovered by Delaney & Bonnie Bramlett, who worked with her in Los Angeles. There, she became a backing singer for artists including Leon Russell, Joe Cocker, Harry Chapin, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Dave Mason, Graham Nash, and Stephen Stills. She was featured in Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour and album, singing Russell's and Bonnie Bramlett's song "Superstar". Coolidge did not receive songwriting credits for "Superstar" which later became a hit for The Carpenters.

She became known as "The Delta Lady" and inspired Russell to write a song of the same name for her.

Coolidge also did not receive songwriting credits for the coda of the 1971 single "Layla" by Eric Clapton's band Derek and the Dominos. In 2016, Coolidge stated that she recorded a demo with her boyfriend, the band's drummer Jim Gordon, before they went to England to record with Clapton. Once they met with Clapton, Coolidge played the piece she composed for him and she gave him a cassette. Clapton, impressed by the piece, used it as part of the song in the ending section which she found out by hearing the song over a PA system a year later. She tried to contact Clapton, but was told by his manager Robert Stigwood, "What are you gonna do? You're a girl. You don't have money to fight this. Let it go." She has not heard from Clapton himself but believes he is aware of the situation.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.