Amy Winehouse

Amy Jade Winehouse, born September 14, 1983, in Southgate, North London, and raised in East Finchley, was a British singer and songwriter of extraordinary gifts — a deep, blues-soaked contralto of uncommon emotional range, a wit and directness in her lyric-writing that recalled the great confessional singer-songwriters of the 1960s and 1970s, and a stage presence of feline charisma and fragile intensity — who produced one of the most acclaimed debut decades in pop music history before her death from accidental alcohol poisoning on July 23, 2011, at the age of twenty-seven. Raised in a Jewish working-class family in North London, she was entranced by jazz and soul from early childhood — Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Dinah Washington, Thelonious Monk — and was singing Dinah Washington songs for school friends at age fourteen with a sophistication of phrasing that astonished teachers. She attended the Sylvia Young Theatre School on a scholarship, was eventually expelled for piercing her nose and refusing to focus, and then attended the BRIT School for Performing Arts and Technology in Croydon, the same institution that produced Adele, Leona Lewis, and others. Her debut album Frank (2003), produced by Salaam Remi, was a critically acclaimed jazz-influenced pop record that won her two Ivor Novello Awards. Her second and final studio album Back to Black (2006), produced by Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi, became one of the best-selling albums of the decade and won five Grammy Awards, making her the first British female artist to win five Grammys in a single evening. It produced Rehab, Back to Black, Valerie, and Tears Dry on Their Own, songs that are now recognized as modern standards. She was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2024.