Wishing a very happy birthday and sending out much love to the great singer-songwriter Phoebe Snow!

It was not until doing research for her 58th birthday post did I realize that the great singer Phoebe Snow is recovering from a brain hemorrhage suffered in late January.

She is facing a long recovery from the stroke but doctors are optimistic, according to a note on her website posted by her manager.

I hope that Phoebe knows how many fans are praying for her.

When the stroke hit, the legendary singer – best known for the 1975 classic Poetry Man – was still dealing with immense grief following the death of her only child, Valerie, in 2007 at the age of 31.

She was recording again and planning to kick off a tour in March.

In 1975, shortly after releasing one of the most acclaimed debut albums of the era, Snow gave birth to Valerie who was born severely brain injured. She was told her child would not live very long, be extremely disabled and should be placed in a residential facility.
“She came home with me and that’s where she lived for 31 years,” Phoebe told me when we spoke in late 2008. “Back then, the music industry saw that as a liability. But my daughter was the most amazing person.”

Snow had been nominated for a Grammy, been on the cover of Rolling Stone and continued to release an average of one album a year through the 1970s. She cut back to put motherhood first and recorded only sporadically.

But Snow, who uniquely combines elements of jazz, blues, folk, and rock music into her songs, has always managed to retain legions of fans including Bill Clinton who asked her to perform at Camp David during his presidency and Howard Stern whom she serenaded earlier this month at his wedding to Beth Ostrosky.

During her darkest times, Snow found surprising solace in a television show she happened upon one day: “Noah’s Arc,” a drama on MTV’s Logo Channel about a group of gay African-American men navigating life and love in Los Angeles.

“It was kind of a fluke that I even found it,” she said. “About 2-3 months after my daughter’s passing, I was in a vegetative state when I happened to see some of the season two episodes. It sort of brought me out of my abyss and gave me something else to focus on. I became a little emotionally involved with the characters and found them very endearing and charming.”

But the Logo series ended after two seasons – in a cliffhanger!

“I wanted to know what happened!” Snow said.
She asked a publicist friend of hers to find her series creator Patrik-Ian Polk An hour later, the friend called back and said Polk was having a private party in Manhattan that night. Could Snow, who lives in New Jersey, be at the Splash Club on 17th Street at midnight?

“It had been quite awhile since I’d been somewhere like that,” she recalled. “They put me in a little room, Patrik came in, we met, and I loved him. I said, ‘Your series has been virtually kind of saving my life here and I have to know, what happened to the characters?’”

The two kept in touch and Polk kept the singer updated on the progress of a feature film, based on the series, that was being planned and included the wedding of title character Noah (Darryl Stephens) and his longtime love Wade (Jensen Atwood).

She volunteered to do a song for the soundtrack of the feature film Noah’s Arc: Jumping the Broom then something else happened.

“He said, ‘Do you want to be in it?’ I said, ‘You’re kidding!’ and the world stopped rotating for a minute. I freaked! I’ve never been in a film before.”

Snow soon found herself in Nova Scotia where the movie was filmed. She played a singer who performs in the climactic wedding scene.

“It was unbelievably cold and I’m just not a cold person. But it was one of the greatest moments of my life.”

But being surrounded by members of the cast that had gotten her through some tough times suddenly made her very emotional.

“I was like a weeping bag of crap,” she said. “I was hysterical crying.”

“They put 18 pounds of eyelashes on me, I got glue in my eyes. I was trying to pull myself together and (while on the set) I had a grieving moment. I was trying to hold myself together, lost it, and the lashes were melting off. (Jensen Atwood) just came over and gave me a big hug.”

We all want to give Phoebe a hug and wish her the very best always.

Let’s enjoy some Phoebe: