Amy Jade Winehouse was born on September 14, 1983, in Southgate, North London, to Mitchell Winehouse, a taxi driver and amateur singer, and Janis Winehouse, a pharmacist. Her family was Jewish, musically inclined, and deeply loving, though her parents divorced when she was nine — a disruption she described as formative. She attended Sylvia Young Theatre School on a partial scholarship from age twelve until her expulsion at fourteen, then studied at the BRIT School, the London performing arts school that also produced Adele and Kate Nash. Her early musical influences were the jazz and soul recordings her father played at home — Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra — which gave her an aesthetic formation completely unlike her contemporaries.
Amy's 2003 debut album Frank was a critical success that established her as a significant new voice in jazz-influenced soul, drawing favorable comparisons to Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday while demonstrating that her vocal persona was entirely her own. The album's directness — she wrote or co-wrote all the tracks, speaking about her own experience with a candor unusual in a twenty-year-old debut — attracted the attention that her talent clearly warranted. But the album's commercial performance was modest by the standards her label expected, and it was the follow-up that would produce her legend.
Back to Black (2006) is one of the most fully realized albums of its decade. Produced by Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi, it contained writing of remarkable emotional precision — 'Rehab,' 'You Know I'm No Good,' 'Tears Dry on Their Own,' the title track — that processed the end of her relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil with a combination of pain, humor, and an absolute refusal of self-pity that was simultaneously devastating and exhilarating. Her vocal performance across the album drew on the jazz tradition she had absorbed without being derivative: it was entirely contemporary while being formed by something much older. The album sold over twenty million copies worldwide and became one of the best-selling albums in British history.
Amy Winehouse died on July 23, 2011, at age twenty-seven, of accidental alcohol poisoning. The years between Back to Black's release and her death were characterized by the simultaneous recognition of her extraordinary talent and the collapse of her ability to manage the fame and personal difficulties that accompanied it. Her relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil, which she described as the central relationship of her adult life, was destructive in ways that became public in painful detail. Her struggles with addiction were extensively documented by a tabloid culture that found her self-destruction entertaining. The recognition that came too late — and came anyway, in her posthumous reputation — was that she was one of the greatest vocalists of her generation, whose death removed from the world something genuinely irreplaceable.
