FEATURE STORY

Remembering Sheryl Crow's Mizzou Days

Note: This story was published originally in the fall 2003 issue of MIZZOU, the magazine of the MU Alumni Association.

By Dale Smith

In her family’s lore, Sheryl Crow started taking baby steps toward pop music stardom while she was still young enough to need an afternoon nap. One day in the family station wagon, she surprised everyone with a taste of how well she could sell a tune, sticky fingers and all. All of a sudden, says father Wendell Crow, BA ’54, JD ’59, she started singing Petula Clark’s “Downtown” with every note, word and British-accented syllable in place. “She’s always sung,” he says. Her mother, Bernice, remembers that by age 10 Sheryl could imitate pop singers such as David Gates and Carole King.

Now a decade into her Grammy-winning career as a singer-songwriter, Crow, BS Ed ’84, is slated to perform the role of grand marshal at Homecoming this year. “I have really great memories of being at Mizzou,” says Crow, who credits the life experiences she gained during college as much as her course work as key to shaping the person she has become. In addition to presiding over Homecoming as grand marshal, she is looking forward to meeting family and old friends in Columbia and taking in the football game.

Had Crow not become famous, her college contemporaries would likely remember her as academically strong, socially popular and perennially involved in extracurriculars. But she’s more than famous. She’s wildly popular, having sold millions of the five CDs she has released since 1993, thanks to infectious tunes such as “All I Wanna Do,” “If It Makes You Happy,” “Everyday Is a Winding Road” and “Steve McQueen.” All but one of the albums peaked at No. 6 or better in the charts.

Crow was born in the Missouri Bootheel town of Kennett into a family with musical DNA. Her parents regularly treated the family and neighbors within earshot to big band rehearsals and jam sessions at the Crow home. Bernice sings and plays the piano. Wendell plays trumpet and is learning to play the guitars Sheryl has sent him. The Crow household had four pianos, and there were times when Bernice monitored the musical chaos as the four Crow children practiced at once.

“Sheryl has always performed,” Wendell remembers. “I had a just-for-kicks band with 13 members when Sheryl was little. We played Les Brown and other big band tunes. One night we met to rehearse at our house, and Sheryl came down and sat at the piano. The guy who played keyboards said to her, ‘Can you play “Traces?” ’ I’ll never forget seeing her there with her little feet hanging a foot up off the floor. She said, ‘Sure, what key do you want it in?’ ”

In 1980, she took those precocious talents to MU, where she studied voice, piano and music education. Thomas McKenney, a professor of music theory and composition, remembers the Crow of 1980 as an excellent student in the required theory course he taught. He saw her talent in homework assignments and compositions. Although McKenney says pop music is not as complex as some other styles, he singles out the Beatles as very creative people. “What they did has become classic. What separates the people who have longer careers from others is creativity, and that’s what I hear when I listen to Sheryl’s stuff.”

That requires versatility, which has long been a Crow hallmark. For instance, on her most recent album, she wrote or co-wrote the songs, sang and played various guitars, basses, percussion and keyboards. She has performed with the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Eric Clapton, Johnny Mathis, Taj Mahal, Willie Nelson, Stevie Nicks, Dwight Yoakam and Kid Rock. “She can sing them all,” says sister Karen Bowles, BS Ed ’82, M Ed ’86. “Classical. Rock. Country. She’s got a great voice that she can use in any genre.” And for any purpose.

Crow performs regularly for charities, including those for scleroderma, breast cancer and landmine removal. “My motivations are purely selfish,” Crow says. “It makes me feel good. It’s a way of giving back. My mother and father are very involved in their community, and we were always encouraged that way.” At a charity event, Crow sang the Mozart aria “La Ci Darem La Mano” with Luciano Pavarotti, whom she calls the greatest opera singer in the world. “I think he definitely was nervous, and I know I was nervous,” Crow says. “That was the one experience where I got to use the legitimate voice training I had in college. It all comes back. That part of your voice, even though it’s lying dormant, is definitely in there.”

Crow’s music education course work at MU included four years of weekly piano lessons from Ray Herbert and four years of voice lessons, two of them with Ira “Rocky” Powell. Crow says Herbert, who also taught her older sister, was one of the main reasons she came to Mizzou. “He was an incredibly nurturing person, a wonderful teacher. All through those four years he was really encouraging.”

Her teacher remembers Crow’s musicality. “Some people can sit down and play more notes per 10 seconds than almost anyone else, but what you need as a performer goes beyond that,” Herbert says in Sheryl Crow, No Fool to This Game (Billboard Books, 2002), by Richard Buskin. “It goes into communication, and that was a strong aspect of Sheryl’s musicality. It wasn’t necessarily about virtuosic speed and power — that’s not what she was all about — but as far as being able to communicate a piece of music effectively, she was really as good as it gets.”

Crow could rise to an occasion, Herbert says. “When she had a responsibility to perform, she prepared and did whatever it took to make it happen.” A pivotal point was an examination at the end of her sophomore year in which she had to perform for a “jury” of faculty members to prove that her skills were good enough to move to the next level. “She had a lot of miles to cover in level of advancement to get there. She did it, and she did it very well. Piano playing didn’t come to her as easily as her expertise in vocal jazz. She passed with high grades, and I was proud of her for that.”

Crow’s voice teacher recalls her as a terrific musician, but he also glimpsed other personality traits. For starters, “She could stay with the best of them when it came to banter,” Powell says. Crow liked studying with him in part because he was unconventional enough to work in some pop tunes on top of the required “legit” repertoire.

Powell directed Singsation, MU’s vocal jazz ensemble that toured Romania and Bulgaria in 1982 before the fall of the Iron Curtain. Crow accompanied the group on piano, a task handed down by her sister Karen, a gifted pianist who teaches music in Kennett’s public schools. Crow also sang some solos in what Powell’s wife, Elinor, BSN ’60, BS Ed ’73, M Ed ’78, remembers as a flexible and light mezzo-soprano voice with a large range.

The choral programs often included a specialty number or two that the singers and accompanists worked out on their own. “With that setup, you never know what’s going to happen,” Ira says. Sure enough, Crow was packing a surprise.

She sang the rock tune “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” says Elinor, who went on the trip as an assistant. “That’s the first time I really saw her putting her all into a performance, and the audience really loved it. She was a natural performer. It was my first inkling that she had other goals in mind than teaching music, and this trip was an avenue to perform in different places every night.” Singsation won a gold medal at the International Youth Festival in Primorsko, Bulgaria.

Crow says experiences such as the Singsation trip are as important to her now as her traditional course work. On top of her studies at MU, Crow was always involved in activities. Extracurriculars included serving as a Summer Welcome leader, participating in Homecoming skits and directing the Greek Sing. “There were a lot of great experiences that I still reflect on,” Crow says. One of them was being a Tiger hostess for the football team. “That was a source of pride. We got to watch these young players come into their own. I got to meet their families. It was a great experience on those Saturdays when there were football games.”

She also performed as a lead singer in Cashmere, a six-piece band that played private parties and often filled a Columbia bar called Bullwinkle’s (now called The Field House at 1105 E. Broadway) to its capacity of about 800. “I think that where I got my training, to be honest, was at Bullwinkle’s doing cover tunes,” Crow says. She learned to use a microphone, work with a band and communicate with an audience. Cashmere covered tunes by Heart, Huey Lewis and the News, Sheena Easton and many more. “Whatever was on the radio, we did. It’s too bad these days that kids don’t grow up in cover bands, because it really helps you get your chops together. Learning different styles of music really forces you to get some kind of technique and trains your ear. It’s like learning anything; you learn to mimic, and from there you develop your own style.”

She also helped at least one fellow student and friend, Mark Fauser, develop his musical abilities. “I could tell she was magical back then,” says Fauser, BGS ’84, now an actor and screenwriter. Crow coached him in singing. Fauser, a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity, met Crow, a Kappa Alpha Theta, through Greek social activities.

Although Fauser says he knows how to “sell” a song, he confesses that he’s “not very musical.” So, when preparing to audition for the musical Grease, he turned to Crow for help rehearsing the song “Summer Nights.” “I’d go to her sorority house and sing in the main room where the piano was. She’d play and coach my singing. She was very encouraging and a really good teacher.”

Crow and Fauser met twice by chance after graduation. The first time was in
St. Louis, where Crow taught music for two years in the Rockwood school district.
“I ran into her at a mall and told her that I’d just gotten a scholarship to the Burt Reynolds acting school,” Fauser remembers. “And she said, ‘It’s so neat that you are following your dream.’” I said ‘Why don’t you do it, too?’ She said, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’”

If she didn’t know then, she knew soon. The summer between those school years she performed as a backup singer in a St. Louis band called PM. Music producer Jay Oliver noticed Crow and invited her to sing a jingle for a regional McDonald’s commercial. The jingle worked so well that it went on to become a national spot. During that next year of teaching, royalties came in from the commercial, and she thought more and more about her dream of making it as a rock singer. “You can come away from college having learned a lot from books, but a lot of what you take into the world comes from your enthusiasm,” Crow says. “I realized that the only time I would have in my life to pursue a dream of that magnitude was at that point when I was single and young and didn’t have much to leave behind.” She headed to Los Angeles and worked diligently on a career in music. Sometimes she worked as a waitress to support herself as she wrote songs and performed in bands.

By the late 1980s, Fauser also had found his way to the West Coast. “The next time I saw her was at a 7-Eleven in Los Angeles,” he says. “It turned out we lived just a few blocks apart. She had just finished singing backup on a Michael Jackson tour, which was a big break.”

Big break indeed. By the time Jackson’s Bad tour ended in 1989, Crow had performed all over the world for more than 4 million fans. By 1993, she had a hit album in Tuesday Night Music Club, and the rest, as they say, is history.

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Last Update: November 15, 2007