The Heart and Soul of an Artist

The back cover of David Cassidy’s Greatest Hits, showing the songwriting credit for “Daydreamer”

On the morning that a press release arrived in my inbox announcing the death of Terry Dempsey, my 14-year-old daughter had selected David Cassidy’s “Daydreamer” for her school-run playlist.It’s not the first time that the number one hit off Cassidy’s 1973 album Dreams are Nuthin' More than Wishes had been played on the 7am drive between Hyde Park and Braamfontein where Emmylou attends the National School of the Arts. It turns up frequently on her throwback playlists, usually sandwiched between Paul Anka’s “Puppy Love” (try as I might, she won’t switch to the Donny Osmond version) and the Beatles’ “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” (the lyrics of which are somehow a fitting soundtrack for a drive that skirts the edge of Hillbrow).

 I’d introduced Emmylou to “Daydreamer” when David Cassidy had died in 2017, describing it as a signature song of my youth by a singer who my sister, Catherine, and I had deemed “so, so  dreamy” and worthy of a poster on our shared bedroom wall. 

Not everything I suggest to Emmylou makes it onto her playlist: she’s got very specific taste, and won’t add in a song just for the sake of nostalgia. But when her dad, Jay, told her he knew the man who had written “Daydreamer” she was intrigued and soon enough, David’s sweet song of love lost and autumnal yearning was blaring out of her bedroom.

“But now you're gone I'm just a daydreamer

I'm walking in the rain

Chasing after rainbows I may never find again

Life is much too beautiful to live it all alone

Oh how much I need someone to call my very own.”

 My dad, Owen, was a music journalist and so I actually knew that the song we swooned to had been written by Terry Dempsey – an Englishman who’d moved to South Africa in the late 1960s. What we didn’t know was that “Daydreamer” had been picked up by music business veteran, Artie Wayne, at the 1973 Tokyo Music Festival. In a 2006 interview with Jean Emmanuel Dubois that he captured on his blog, Artie Wayne on the Web, Artie recalls his encounter with Terry:

 “AW- In 1973, I was at the Tokyo music festival for Warner Brothers music and picked up a song from a white South African writer, who the music people were avoiding because of his country’s stand on apartheid!

 JE- You’re an African- American, why didn’t you ignore him also?

 Aw-After talking to him, I felt he had the heart and soul of an artist that transcended the archaic practice of his country. It only took a few minutes to listen to the song that nobody wanted to hear…but I knew right away it was a hit! Terry Dempsey gave me the sub-publishing rights for no advance, if I could get his song, “Daydreamer”, covered by a major US artist. Within days of my returning to Hollywood, Stephen Craig Aristei, one of my “Warner Raiders” gave it to David Cassidy. He was fresh from the Partridge Family, and it became his biggest solo hit, selling 5 million records.”

Jay had met Terry when they were both working as music publishers in Johannesburg and so when he saw him at an Illovo coffee shop in November last year, he introduced Emmylou to the writer behind the song she loves. Terry told them how “Daydreamer” remained an active part of his catalogue and they’d spoken for a while about his life as a songwriter: alongside “Daydreamer”, Terry had written the Dave Mills’ (South African, Canadian and Australian) hit, “Love Is A Beautiful Song”, and “Le Mal Aimé” by Claude François, which reached number 1 in France. 

Terry’s songs have also been recorded by Cliff Richard, Tina Turner, Cilla Black, Tom Jones, The New Seekers, Engelbert Humperdinck, Petula Clark and Demis Roussos, making the transplanted Englishman one of South Africa’s most impactful songwriters globally. So it was with sadness that I read that Terry had died that Tuesday morning.  “Terry Dempsey was a professional songwriter, record producer, musician, music publisher, manager, agent, digital artist, film and television producer, and painter for more than 50 years,” said the statement. 

Tragically, Terry had died two days earlier, on February 10th, when he was struck by a gyrocopter making an emergency landing in a village on the shores of the Vaal Dam. It was just over a week later, on February 19th, that Artie died in Palm Springs – the man who wrote David Cassidy’s enduring hit and the man who got it to the American singer gone, just days apart.

 Rest with the music, Terry and Artie.

© Diane Coetzer