News

Linda Lewis, the British singer who scored a string of UK solo hits in the 1970s but is most widely known as one of the era’s most in-demand backup singers who recorded with Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens, David Bowie, T. Rex and Rod Stewart, died May 3 at her home. She was 72.

Her death was announced by her sister, singer Dee Lewis Clay. A cause of death was not specified, but Clay noted that her sister died peacefully.

Born Linda Ann Fredericks in West Ham, London, Lewis experienced her first brush with show business with a non-speaking acting role in the 1961 film A Taste of Honey and, in 1964, as a screaming fan of the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night.

Making her most notable early appearance as a singer at the first Glastonbury Festival in 1970, Lewis would go on to have a lengthy, decades-long recording and performing career, with four...

There are 19 white stickers arranged across Jenny Lewis’ fridge. Each one carries a stamped date, the logo of Providence Holy Cross Medical Center, the word Visitor and, in Lewis’ handwriting, a different beguiling little phrase: I taught him how to 2-step; Rosey posey put your snake finger on; You are a sunshine in a fruit. “Every day that I visited my mom in the hospital,” Lewis says, “I’d get one of these and write down something she’d say to me. She got more and more psychedelic as we kept upping the meds,...