Mary Martin, a determined advocate for the artists she believed in with an informed passion for music and a sailor’s earthy vocabulary, died on July 4 in Nashville. She was 85.Mikayla Lewis/ Mary Martin: Music Maven
Early in her career, music manager, talent scout and record company executive Mary Martin received the advice to surround herself with genius. The Toronto-born dynamo, who landed in New York in 1962 with $60 in her back pocket, did something more than surround herself with genius – she cultivated it.
Two stints working in the offices of New York folk music impresario Albert Grossman would serve as an apprenticeship. Breaking out on her own in 1966, one of her first management clients was the successful Canadian poet Leonard Cohen.
It was Ms. Martin’s idea to have the unproven songwriter audition his earliest songs to Judy Collins in 1966. When the sexy poet showed up at the folk star’s door, she took one look at him and thought, as she later recounted, “I don’t care if he can’t write songs, we’ll think of something to do.”
In fact, he could write songs – exquisite ones including Suzanne and Dress Rehearsal Rag, which Ms. Collins quickly recorded. Ms. Martin then secured a publishing deal for Mr. Cohen and had him tape demo versions of his material in her bathroom. The demos earned Mr. Cohen a record contract with the legendary John Hammond at Columbia Records.
Ms. Martin was brash. She later sent Joan Baez a curt letter after the folk singer amended the lyrics to Mr. Cohen’s Suzanne for her version. The missive contained an unambiguous request: “Do not alter Leonard Cohen’s poetry.”
Ms. Martin, a determined advocate for the artists she believed in and a plain-dealing pepper pot with an informed passion for music and a sailor’s earthy vocabulary, died on July 4, in Nashville. She was 85.
She died in a hospice, according to her family. Ms. Martin had cancer and had recently fractured a hip.
First based in New York and later a brassy grand dame working for decades in the country-music hub of Nashville, the chain-smoking Ms. Martin was a catalyst who routinely arranged record contracts for nascent artists or managed them in the crucial stages of their careers. The noted musical matchmaker was instrumental in introducing Bob Dylan to Levon Helm and the Hawks (later to become ground-breaking Canadian-American roots-rockers the Band).
As a manager, Ms. Martin helped catapult Van Morrison and Rodney Crowell to fame. As an artists and repertoire person, she hitched Emmylou Harris to Warner Bros. Records in the 1970s. “If you take Mary out of the equation, my life would be very, very different,” Ms. Harris said recently. Ms. Martin was also a future country superstar’s first manager.
Mary Martin, in the 1970s.Mikayla Lewis/ Mary Martin: Music Maven
“When Mary came across Vince Gill, he was a chubby guy with a long, silky mullet in a second-tier pop-country band, Pure Prairie League,” Nashville-based author and music journalist Holly Gleason told The Globe. “But she realized how talented he was.”
Mr. Gill, interviewed for the yet-to-be-released documentary Mary Martin: Music Maven, recalled his manager’s brutal frankness – “She was honest with me when I wasn’t very good” – and remarked that she was the “greatest female cusser” he’d ever encountered. “Some of the language was pretty fresh, I guarantee you.”
She not only worked with legends, she hung with them. In Toronto as a young woman, she got to know Mr. Helm, Robbie Robertson and the other Hawks. With her girlfriends, Ms. Martin took in their performances at Le Coq d’Or Tavern.
“We were groupies,” she admitted in a 2009 interview conducted by the Country Music Hall of Fame’s Jay Orr in front of live audience. “I mean, it’s the truth. I would swoon when Richard Manuel would sing a Ray Charles song.”
In New York, she was hired as a receptionist in the office of Mr. Grossman, who in his time managed some of the folk revival’s best talent, including Odetta, Peter, Paul and Mary, Ian and Sylvia, Gordon Lightfoot and, most famously, Mr. Dylan.
Ms. Martin returned to Toronto to study shorthand and typing at Shaw Business College. Trained in the secretarial arts, she was back in New York by 1965, this time as Mr. Grossman’s go-getter executive assistant.
Spending time with Mr. Grossman and his wife, Sally, at the couple’s retreat in Woodstock, N.Y., she would lose swimming pool races to Mr. Dylan. “He was scrawny,” Ms. Martin said many years later. “What did I know? Scrawny people from Minnesota I guess are good athletes.”
Ms. Martin ended up in possession of the Grossmans’ Persian cat, named Lord Growing, famous for its appearance on the cover of Mr. Dylan’s 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home. “That cat went with me everywhere,” she said. The pet eventually died in Toronto in the care of Ms. Martin’s mother.
Ms. Martin championed the unsigned Hawks. But after she played the band’s demo tapes to her boss’s partner, John Court, she was dismissively told there was no interest in “talent of that calibre.”
Undeterred, she suggested the Hawks to Mr. Dylan, who was on the hunt for an electric band at the time. She told him, “You gotta see these guys.” He did.
It was in the summer of 1965 when the Hawks’ Mr. Robertson was summoned to meet Mr. Dylan at Mr. Grossman’s offices. There the Canadian guitarist spotted a familiar face. “It was comforting to see our old friend, Mary Martin, who’d been raising the Hawks’ flag around the office for a while now,” Mr. Robertson wrote in his memoir, Testimony.
On Sept. 16, Mr. Dylan travelled to Toronto to rehearse with the Hawks at the Friar’s Tavern. Two weeks later, on Oct. 1, he introduced the Hawks as his new electric band at New York’s Carnegie Hall. The performance earned a standing ovation. Afterward, Ms. Martin offered her personal congratulations.
“I remember going to Dylan and saying, ‘Well done’ and ‘Hurray for you,’ because all he really wanted to do was continue to get his music out in a new form, because that’s what artists do,” she later recalled. “But he had this wonderful smile. I’ve never seen him smile like this before. There were crinkles by his eyes that were crinkles of joy. It was fabulous.”
Mr. Dylan with the Hawks would go on to play his landmark debut rock ‘n’ roll tour in 1966. Time magazine later called their Toronto meeting “the most decisive moment in rock history.’’
For his part, Mr. Dylan described Ms. Martin in a 1969 Rolling Stone interview as “a rather persevering soul” who “knew all the bands and all the singers from Canada.”
Many of Ms. Martin’s professional relationships with musicians and songwriters were not long-lasting, though the positive repercussions on the artists’ careers often were. She said the most important lesson she learned from Mr. Grossman was that the manager’s mission was to connect clients to the people in the industry who could help them and to put the artists in the best possible position to be recognized.
“In truth, I think that I did that, as passionately and honestly as I could,” she said. “And then one has to let go.”
On the personal side, the never-married Ms. Martin led an independent life. “She liked her space,” said Mikayla Lewis, a close friend and director of Music Maven. “She had relationships, but I think she was focused on the music and the artists.”
She was a devoted National Football League fan who would watch games on television while listening to artist audition tapes on her headphones. She favoured Marlboro Ultra Lights and sipped black coffee long after it had ceased to be warm.
She held a life-long love for her family’s cottage in Go Home Bay on Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay: “It was a place I went to renew my spirit and to renew my soul for whatever was the next journey.”
She was born Mary Alida Martin on June 15, 1939, in Toronto, the only daughter of insurance lawyer Craufurd Martin and homemaker Mary Alida Eleanor Martin (née Starr), who went by Alida. She had two brothers, Anthony and Richard, who would “hang my dolls,” she said.
At Havergal College, a Toronto boarding school for young women, she wore a conservative green uniform. “Sometimes, to be a hussy, we’d hike our tunics above the knee,” she recalled. “But it didn’t matter because they were all girls.”
At the University of British Columbia, the self-described “bad student” was destined to fail French and biology but did learn to play bridge. She later enrolled at Ryerson Institute of Technology (now Toronto Metropolitan University), where her academic endeavours were just as unsuccessful.
In 1962, her heart broken by a Toronto folk guitarist and unsatisfied as a stockbroker clerk, she hopped on a bus to New York’s Greenwich Village in hope of a career in the music industry.
Mary Martin in the 1960s.Mikayla Lewis/ Mary Martin: Music Maven
By 1966, she had been profiled by Susan Dexter for Maclean’s magazine as a scene-making New Yorker whose job at Albert Grossman Management Incorporated was to bring a semblance of order into the hectic lives of the artists on the company’s roster.
Ms. Dexter wrote that the 26-year-old mousy-looking firebrand was “up to the top of her bell-bottom pants in the swinging big-time show business of New York.”
After breaking with Mr. Cohen in 1969, she managed Mr. Morrison and hired the elite entrainment lawyer Freddie Gershon to extricate the singer-songwriter from an unfavourable publishing contract she described as “ruthless and rude and mean.”
Her management of Mr. Morrison lasted just two years, ending when the complicated Moondance star complained that he could not afford her commission. She resigned with a telegram that read, “I quit.”
She came back briefly to Canada, but returned to the United States in 1972 as the director of artists and repertoire at Warner’s New York office. She moved to Nashville in 1985 to work for RCA.
Tragedy struck on April 9, 1992, when Ms. Martin was robbed, tied up and repeatedly raped by an intruder in her Nashville house. “For the first time in my life, I experienced absolute powerlessness, the sheer terror of being killed and the shocking realization that the security of my home had been violated,” she said.
The assailant, who taunted his victim with phone calls after the assault, was convicted. Ms. Martin became active in You Have the Power, a Nashville-based organization dedicated to the support of those touched by violent crime.
In 2001, she and Bonnie Garner co-produced the Hank Williams tribute album Timeless, which won a Grammy Award for Best Country Album and capped an illustrious career.
In 2015, Toronto singer-songwriter Lily Frost visited Ms. Martin, her septuagenarian second cousin, in Nashville. “She was a full-on character with a loud, shameless voice,” Ms. Frost said. “She had a beautiful house, but books were everywhere. She said to me, ‘I told Dylan to read, read, read, and I’m telling you that now too. Start with Hemingway.’”
Ms. Martin spent time attending to her backyard plants and flowers. “I like the fact that if I paid attention to the garden that it would grow,” she said in 2009. “Now, you think, ‘well, maybe you’ll grow too, Mary.’ I don’t know whether I’ve grown. What I know is I’ve survived.”
Ms. Martin leaves her brother Tony Martin, three nieces, and six grandnieces and grandnephews.
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