Dusty memories

Dusty Springfield (left), the diva of blue-eyed soul, is the subject of a new biography by Annie J. Randall, an associate professor of musicology at Bucknell University.

Like her silken voice and towering beehive, Dusty Springfield remains larger than life nine years after her death from breast cancer. The iconic British pop star fashioned what we now call blue-eyed soul, a genre alive and well in the music of Amy Winehouse, Duffy, and Jamie Lidell.

Annie J. Randall, an associate professor of musicology at Bucknell University, has just written a probing new biography of Springfield called "Dusty! Queen of the Postmods." More discourse than dish, the book takes an analytical look at Springfield's persona (chapter 3: "Soul + Melodrama = The 1960s Pop Aria") and what we can learn from it. We caught up with Randall by phone recently to talk about Dusty.

Q. Why is she still relevant to us?

A. I think we're finally realizing what it was that she did. I think people who have listened to Dusty's music for years kind of intuitively knew what she was doing. They could hear the quality; they could hear the complexity. But I think only now, with the passage of time, we're able to look back on the '60s and actually see it with some perspective.

Q. You talk about the reception Dusty received by the black press and how they didn't really pay her a lot of attention at the time. Did you get a sense that she was aware of or bothered by that?

A. She was aware that black audiences were kind of keeping her at arm's length, and I think that's why she wanted to record "Dusty in Memphis." She really wanted to say, "I have something to contribute to the soul style."

Q. You also talk about the importance of Dusty's privacy and the mystery surrounding her. Would she have been able to maintain her private life and career in our tabloid-journalism-obsessed modern society?

A. I think it was much worse for her in the '60s and '70s. In the '60s it was an open secret that Dusty was - well, she called herself bisexual. No one wrote about it. But in the late '60s and early '70s, something really changed in the press, and they started to hound her about her sexual orientation. Every time she was asked about it, I think she was seized with terrible anxiety that her career would just be over if she answered the question in the wrong way.

For Annie Randall's list of her five favorite Dusty things, visit the Sound Effects blog at www.boston.com/ae/music/blog.