Libby titus biography

Biography:

Elizabeth Titus (nee Jurist; July 6, 1947 – October 13, 2024) was an American singer and songwriter.

Early life

Titus was born in Woodstock, New York, on July 6, 1947.

Titus and Fagen made headlines in New York in 2016 when police responded to a call and he was accused of pushing her into a window in their apartment during an argument.

One night it would be, say, Dr. John plus Carly Simon, and it was by invitation only. No cause of death was given.

Fagen announced her death on Steely Dan’s website. Another night I had Duke Ellington’s bass player, Aaron Bell, and that night Donald came, and he really loved it. Now in our 23rd year of marriage, we’re looking forward to many, many more.”

Titus also had a son, Ezra Titus, from her first marriage, who died in 2009.

Amy Helm has spoken in interviews of her mother’s impact as well as her father Levon’s.

“She made sure to round out my musical education by turning me on to Laura Nyro and Brenda Russell and Joni Mitchell, the singer-songwriters whose poetry was so fierce and whose singing was so different from the soul music I had been listening to. “I was wearing a fur coat and had a short, short skirt and was all done up, and he said he thought I looked like bohemian royalty,” she said.

In May of 1989 he did a show for me with Dr. John at Elaine’s, of all places, and it was the first time he had performed in years.” 

While Fagen took some persuading — “Donald didn’t want to perform, but I said, ‘You have to or no one’s going to come,’” Titus quipped — the pair soon started hosting regular shows together, and the series eventually morphed into the New York Rock and Soul Revue.

The group also rekindled Fagen’s love of performing, which led to him and Walter Becker reviving Steely Dan a few years later. 

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In 1993, Fagen and Titus married, while Fagen also released a new solo album, Kamakiriad, which contained one song, “Florida Room,” which he and Titus co-wrote.

She made the LP with an all-star list of collaborators — Carly Simon, Paul Simon, Robbie Robertson, James Taylor, Garth Hudson, and Phil Ramone among them —  speaking to the deep affection and admiration she engendered in the music world. It was through these concerts that she eventually met Fagen. That sentiment was reflected further in the various songs written in her honor, like Carly Simon’s “Libby” (on which Titus also sang) and Dr.

John’s “Pretty Libby.”

In the late Eighties, Titus became a concert promoter and impresario, enlisting her myriad friends and collaborators for special concerts in low-key restaurants and clubs around New York City.

The couple said in a short statement subsequently given to the Post, “Despite misleading reports in the press, we’re happily married. In 1996, Pony Canyon Records anthologised three previously unissued songs that Titus recorded for Bearsville in 1971, two by Eric Kaz and one by Kaz and Titus. “One night it would be, say, Dr.

John plus Carly Simon, and it was by invitation only. (Or, technically, re-met: Titus had briefly attended Bard College but left school to get married; she returned once for a party, after Fagen had enrolled, and the two briefly crossed paths.) 

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Recalling the unofficial concert series in a 2000 interview with Rolling Stone, Titus said, “I had been producing these little shows hosted by Tom Schiller, a terrific writer and filmmaker and comedian, at this little Italian restaurant on 39th Street that had room for 30 people.

The first, on the independent Hot Biscuit Disc Company label in 1968, included covers of songs like “The Fool on the Hill” and “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice” and did not draw much attention.  

Titus cut her own version of “Love Has No Pride” for her second self-titled album, and she performed the album’s opening song, a version of “Fool That I Am,” on Saturday Night Live.

She is the subject of Carly Simon’s song “Libby” from the album Another Passenger (1976), to which Titus also contributed vocals.[29] She inspired Dr. John’s piano composition “Pretty Libby” from the 1983 album The Brightest Smile in Town.[30] Singer-songwriter Wendy Waldman wrote about their friendship in “Long Hot Summer Nights” on the album Strange Company (1978).[31] “The Great Pagoda of Funn”, from Donald Fagen’s 2006 Morph the Cat album, “rhapsodizes on Fagen’s marriage to songwriter Libby Titus”.[32]

Personal life

Titus’s mother, Julia Irene Jurist née Mooney (December 29, 1911 – January 27, 1989), was an Earl Carroll dancer.[33][34] In 1966, Titus married novelist Barry Titus (born 1938), grandson of Helena Rubinstein (1870–1965); they separated in 1968.[35] The couple had a son, the writer Ezra Titus (July 23, 1966 – July 30, 2009).[36]

From 1969 and through much of the 1970s, Titus’s partner was musician Levon Helm (1940–2012).

They had a daughter, the singer Amy Helm (born December 3, 1970).

In 1987, Titus met musician Donald Fagen (born 1948), who was a contemporary at Bard College, and who still remembered his one sighting of her “from a distance” on campus two decades earlier.[37] They married in 1993.[38]

On January 4, 2016, Titus sustained injuries after Fagen allegedly shoved her against a marble window frame at their Upper East Side apartment.[39] Titus informed the New York Post that she was divorcing her husband.[40] The two later reconciled.[citation needed]

Titus died on October 13, 2024, at the age of 77.[41]

Credits:

Libby Titus, a singer who recorded two albums in the late 1960s and ’70s before retiring from the music scene, later becoming the wife of Steely Dan‘s Donald Fagen, died Sunday at age 77.

The album was released by Columbia Records in 1977.[5][6] It contained four songs co-written by Titus, including the one for which she is best known, “Love Has No Pride”, which she wrote with Eric Kaz.[7] It had already been recorded several times – most notably by Bonnie Raitt on Give It Up (1972) and Linda Ronstadt on Don’t Cry Now (1973), as well as by Daryl Braithwaite whose version was a top 5 hit in Australia in early 1977.

In the late 1970s, Titus collaborated with Burt Bacharach.

She was quoting as telling a New York Post reporter over the phone that she was “tired and divorcing my husband,” but any such impulse was apparently short-lived, and police dismissed the case before the month was up.