This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
She was a devoted wife, a charming hostess and a doting parent to two children who had established themselves as public figures — the musician Nick Drake and the actress Gabrielle Drake.
That’s essentially all people knew about Molly Drake at her death in 1993. What many did not know was that she was a remarkable artist in her own right — a poet, singer, composer and pianist whose posthumously released home recordings represent a new reference point in 20th-century song.
Most of Drake’s quiet, melancholic tunes like “Set Me Free” were written in the 1950s and hit on universal themes of despair, heartbreak, longing and loss.
“I Remember,” one of her most indelible compositions, is a physical and emotional travelogue through the history of a doomed romance. The songwriter Anaïs Mitchell described it in an interview as “absolutely perfect, a whole world, novella, philosophy encapsulated in three verses and a coda.” The song’s lines read, in part:
The autumn leaves are tumbling down and winter’s almost here
But through the spring and summertime we laughed away the year
And now we can be grateful for the gift of memory
For I remember having fun
Two happy hearts that beat as one
When I had thought that we were we
But we were you and me.
Upon hearing the song for the first time, the filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn was rendered nearly speechless. “It’s every lover’s story,” he said in an interview. “It’s everything.”
It’s no wonder Drake’s songs brim with feeling: Her life was marked by debilitating anxiety in early adulthood; a wartime separation from her husband; and the devastating loss of her son in 1974, when he was 26. (Nick Drake’s own work has received renewed interest with the release last month of the boxed set “The Making of Five Leaves Left.”)
Yet for all her struggles, she guarded her inner life.
“You never really felt that you knew her entirely,” her daughter, Gabrielle, said in an interview. “She made her mystery available to us, without revealing what it was.”
She added: “She was a bit of an enigma.”
Molly Drake’s wry humor and poetic flavor are evident in original compositions like “Night Is My Friend” that reveal her to be a forerunner of the confessional singer-songwriter movement that emerged in the 1960s and ’70s.
That she was a rare female songwriter at the time makes her historically significant. “She wasn’t writing funny little ditties derived from stage musicals for a hobby,” Richard Morton Jack, the author of “Nick Drake: The Life” (2023), said in an interview. “This was an existential songwriter, and a profound philosophical mind.”
Drake was born Mary Lloyd on Nov. 5, 1915, in British-occupied Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar). Her given name never took; she was always called Molly. Her parents, Idwal and Georgie (Drake) Lloyd, were civil servants (and, as members of the English peerage, Sir Idwal and Lady Georgie). Because of the region’s political and social instability, Molly and her sisters Gwladys and Nancy were sent to England at an early age to live with family friends.
The girls attended boarding school at Wycombe Abbey, and saw their parents only “once every two or three years,” Molly Drake’s niece Lois Fletcher said. On graduation, Molly moved back to Yangon, where she met Rodney Drake, an engineer and fellow British expatriate. The two were married in 1937.
But Molly “struggled to adjust to married life,” Morton Jack said, and “suffered a breakdown.” She fled to England, alone, where “for a time she was unable to face the outside world.” While it’s impossible to know whether those experiences directly shaped her work, songs like “Some Other Spring” are imbued with a sorrow that hints at personal turmoil: “Now that the world seems so bereft of everything/Let me remember there will be some other spring.”
After a short separation, Drake returned to Burma, only to be dislocated from Rodney again when World War II broke out. With the Japanese invasion of Burma, Rodney enlisted in the British Army, while Molly and Nancy evacuated with a group of women and children, traversing some 2,000 miles through jungle terrain to an aunt and uncle’s home in New Delhi.
There, Drake founded the local branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and put her music-making skills to their only known public use: She and Nancy formed a duo called “The Lloyd Sisters” and co-hosted a program on All India Radio, the state-owned station, spinning records and singing pop and folk songs. No recordings of these broadcasts have surfaced.
Molly and Rodney reunited in Rangoon in 1943. She gave birth to Gabrielle the next year, and to Nick in 1948. The family moved to England in 1951, settling in Tanworth-in-Arden in Warwickshire, south of Birmingham. There, in a home they referred to as “Far Leys” (a name evoking remote pastures), Molly Drake composed the bulk of her extant poetry and music.
Although she had no formal classical training, “it was an era when every British young lady knew how to sing at the piano,” the music critic Tim Page said in an interview. She appeared to have been self-taught, both as a composer and as a performer. Her daughter has childhood memories of Drake singing and playing piano in the 1940s and ’50s, when her delicately crafted and emotionally vulnerable songs, like “Love Isn’t a Right,” were out of step with the popular, easy-listening music of that era.
“She would have been as hard to categorize in the ’40s as Nick was in the ’60s,” Joe Boyd, who produced Nick Drake’s first two albums, for Island Records, said in an interview. “She had the intimacy of a jazz singer or pop crooner without any jazz or pop influence in her music,” a quality heard in songs like “A Sound” and “What Can a Song Do for You.”
Rodney, who also dabbled in composing, encouraged Molly to document her songs on a reel-to-reel tape recorder he had acquired, then left her to record them alone. Sometimes, “in the early evening, she would perform her songs,” but these were not in any way formal concerts, her niece Virginia Feeny said in an interview. “She was quite reluctant in that way.”
Drake’s more brooding songs, like “How Wild the Wind Blows” — which considers the fragile balance between joy and sorrow, potential and loss — were recorded but never performed, not even for family members.
In the 1960s, Gabrielle Drake embarked on a professional acting career — appearing onstage, in film and on TV — while Nick Drake turned to songwriting. He and his mother apparently kept their creative lives separate. “They did not meet, as artists,” Morton Jack said in an interview — neither in practice, nor even, it seems, in conversation.
“You would think that with two songwriters in the house,” he added, “one might look to the other for advice with a chord or a structural idea. But no.”
In fact, Nick was dismissive of his mother’s music. “Nick died too young to recognize the quality of his mother’s work,” Gabrielle said. “He once accused her. He said, ‘Your songs are so naïve.’ And she replied, ‘Yes, but they are my own.’”
But Boyd, the producer, suggested that Nick was influenced by his mother, consciously or otherwise. The piano demo of Nick’s “Saturday Sun” (1969) is a prime example. “The complicated guitar tunings he used seem to me to be his way of invoking the piano chords he heard his mother play all his life,” Boyd said.
Though Molly and Rodney expressed reservations about Nick suspending his studies to pursue a music career, they became fans of his songs, and of the three albums on which his legacy mainly rests. But his struggles to find an audience, his reluctance to tour, a deepening depression and a nervous breakdown all contributed to his return to his parents in Warwickshire. There, Molly and Rodney got him professional help, but nothing worked. On a late-November morning in 1974, Molly entered his bedroom to discover her son unresponsive.
In subsequent years, the home became a shrine to Nick Drake fans, who were welcomed by the family. Gabrielle believes that her mother’s grief put an end to her creative output.
Rodney died in 1988, and it wasn’t until well after Molly’s own death — on June 4, 1993, at age 77 — that her music received its first commercial exposure. Two of her recordings were included on the 2007 release of the Nick Drake compilation album “Family Tree” — “Do You Ever Remember?” and “Poor Mum” (in which the narrator addresses herself to say “nothing worked out in the way that you planned”), a song with parallels to Nick’s “Poor Boy.” Her debut album titled simply “Molly Drake,” was released in 2013 by Squirrel Thing Recordings.
Molly Drake has lately begun to be understood as a pioneering artist whose music demands to be considered on its own, out from under the shadows of her more well-known children. Her daughter believes that would have delighted her.
Once, during Drake’s final years, Gabrielle found her “in great distress,” fearing that she had accidentally erased the only tape she had of her songs. After her daughter showed her that the songs were still there, Molly burst into tears. As Gabrielle recalled, “She said, ‘You know, they’re my children.’”
Howard Fishman is a musician and composer and the author of “To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse.”
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