Caroline Peyton

Born in Mississippi and raised in West Virginia, Caroline Peyton made her recording debut in 1972 on "Mock Up," an album made in Bloomington, Ind. Peyton had grown up with an interest in musical theater and folk music, and had been accepted to the Boston Conservatory of Music as a vocal student. As a student at Chicago's Northwestern University in 1970, she played dates with guitarist John Guth before moving to Bloomington to collaborate with songwriter and producer Mark Bingham, who wrote the songs that would appear on "Mock Up.

Born in Mississippi and raised in West Virginia, Caroline Peyton made her recording debut in 1972 on "Mock Up," an album made in Bloomington, Ind. Peyton had grown up with an interest in musical theater and folk music, and had been accepted to the Boston Conservatory of Music as a vocal student. As a student at Chicago's Northwestern University in 1970, she played dates with guitarist John Guth before moving to Bloomington to collaborate with songwriter and producer Mark Bingham, who wrote the songs that would appear on "Mock Up." A combination of West Coast singer-songwriter pop and avant-garde musicianship (Mark Gray's piano combined the styles of Leon Russell and Cecil Taylor, while Peyton's trained voice deftly negotiated the often tricky intervals of Bingham's songs), the record received little recognition at the time, although Peyton, Gray and Bingham did audition for Clive Davis' Columbia label in late 1972. Bingham and Peyton worked together on one more project, 1977's "Intuition," which found Peyton moving away from the Joni Mitchell-inspired vocal technique she had perfected on "Mock Up" and toward a smoother style. "Just as We" was prime '70s pop with affinities to Steely Dan, while "Call of the Wild" and "Light-Years" were first-rate, accessible songs.

(During this period, Peyton also sang with Bingham's Bloomington band, the Screaming Gypsy Bandits, who played jazzy, r&b-influenced pop in the manner of Frank Zappa or Little Feat, and who opened shows for the likes of Captain Beefheart, Zappa and Sly Stone.) Peyton moved to Los Angeles in 1977, where she attempted to start a solo career. However, she returned to her first love--theater--when she was tapped to appear in the L.A. cast of "The Pirates of Penzance." This led to other roles, including a slot on Broadway in Galt MacDermot's "The Human Comedy." In the '90s she moved to Nashville and did voiceover work for Disney cartoons and recorded a Celtic Christmas album. Chicago's Numero Group reissued one of her tracks, "Engram," on their 2006 "Ladies from the Canyon" compilation, while English DJ Gilles Peterson included "Just as We" on his "Digs the USA" collection the previous year. Two thousand nine saw Numero's Asterisk imprint reissue both "Mock Up" and "Intuition" in expanded editions that included some Screaming Gypsy Bandits tracks and demos--many of which sounded like great lost Mitchell or Jackie DeShannon tunes--along with extensive liner notes and photos.

Clearly, Peyton was one of the era's great vocalists, and only lack of distribution and money prevented her from becoming a star. (Bingham continued to write and produce. He arranged horns and strings for REM in the '90s and currently works in New Orleans with artists such as John Scofield and James Blood Ulmer.) In early 2009, Peyton performed songs from her two '70s records in Nashville, and at last report has resumed writing songs. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL..