Long-Lost Singer of ‘Blue Valentine’ Song Finally Found
We haven't seen "Blue Valentine" since Sundance 2010, but it's a movie that's stayed with us, its tale of a loving couple (Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams) going down the tubes haunting, painful and poignant. Some of the plot specifics have faded from our memory, though: We had forgotten about a scene in which Gosling's character presents Williams with a song he's decided should be "their song." And we certainly didn't know the whole drama behind the mysterious origins of that song, called "You and Me." For quite a while, nobody knew who even had sung the soul ballad. But at long last, the identity of the artist has been uncovered. It's kind of a crazy story.
The track, credited to Penny & the Quarters, was hand-picked by Gosling for the film. But how did he hear the song in the first place? A label called Numero Group owned the rights to "You and Me" and had included it on a recent compilation that Gosling heard. But even after the film was released late last year, Numero still was searching for who Penny & the Quarters were. The label weren't even exactly sure when the song had been recorded by the Columbus, Ohio group.
Weirdly enough, the mystery was recently solved in Italy. The Other Paper, a Columbus alt-weekly, reports (via In Contention) that the singer's daughter was studying in Italy and had met a record collector there who told her about the mystery surrounding "You and Me." The daughter called her mother, knowing that she'd once done some singing and, sure enough, she was the Penny. Her real name is Nannie Sharpe; Penny was a nickname her father gave her. ("I was kind of a tomboy," she told The Other Paper. "I used to race my brothers. He'd say, 'If you beat them, I'll give you a penny.")
As huge fans of behind-the-scenes stories of how songs come together, we loved reading The Other Paper's interview with Sharpe about the origins of "You and Me" -- for instance, she didn't even know they were recording at the moment she sang the vocal -- but suffice it to say that Sharpe, just out of high school when the track was laid down in 1970, didn't end up becoming a pop star. She went on to work for the post office for 30 years. The whole story is this great underdog tale that's sort of perfect for "Blue Valentine," a movie whose writer-director, Derek Cianfrance, spent over a decade trying to get it made. Nothing came easy for this movie -- not even finding the woman who sang its signature song.
Penny & the Quarters find fame wasn't so fleeting [The Other Paper]
