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dame shirley bassey
muggle of the month
With a voice to rival Celestina Warbeck (and a resemblance that would suggest polyjuice were it not her status as a muggle), Dame Shirley Bassey stills stuns her audiences at 78 years old. Heralded as the “one of the most popular female vocalists in Britain during the last half of the 20th century,” Dame Bassey topped the muggle music charts with her most recent album Hello Like Before, released just 3 months ago. The album boasts her impressive vocal range while covering some of the most iconic songs by other artists such as The Beatles and Sting.
Dame Bassey strikes awe due to her inspiring story of rising into her staggering career. Born to a working-class English mother and a Nigerian father, Dame Bassey grew up in abject poverty. Even as a child, her teachers and classmates knew of her powerful voice but no one ever encouraged her to develop her talent. Dame Bassey remarked on their disdain for her and her mixed ethnicity: “Everyone told me to shut up. Even in the school choir the teacher kept telling me to back off ‘till I was singing in the corridor!'”
To help her mother after her father left, Dame Bassey dropped out of school at 14 to begin working in a factory. However, this change in environment did little to temper her love for singing as she still sang in nightclubs—which eventually led to her being noticed by an agent. Though it still took a few years for her career to take off, Dame Bassey rose to great heights through her tremendous talent and dedication to perfecting her craft and her claimed her first hit in 1957 with “Banana Boat Song.”
Dame Bassey’s influence extends even beyond Great Britain as she has spent significant time touring in Italy and Germany. One of her biggest hits originated in the United States when she recorded the theme song for the James Bond movie Goldfinger. Her performance was such a hit that she was requested to sing two other Bond movie themes, for Diamonds are Forever and Moonraker. At the muggle 2013 Academy Awards ceremony, she performed "Goldfinger" for the 50th anniversary of the movie.
The iconic idea of the “diva” stems largely from Dame Bassey’s signature look of sequined, low cut gowns and a commitment to perfection. In fact, though the world-recognized "Goldfinger" as a wonder (she held the final note for such an extensive time that she passed out in the studio on the final recording), she went back into the recording studio in 2014 to fix “two notes she was not quite happy with.”
In honour of her tremendous talent and her place among the history of arts in the UK, the Queen appointed Shirley Bassey as Dame Commander in 2000. The longevity of her discography, her ability to transform other genres into amazing new works and her perseverance to rise above the racial and class discrimination that she faced all are indicative of the important place she occupies in the muggle arts and music.
By: Elsbeth Riverspell