Melanie signing autographs at a Red Bank food festival in 2018. (Photo by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge.)
Melanie Safka, the famous Woodstock-era singer songwriter and a member of the Red Bank Regional High School Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame, died Wednesday.
Melanie at RBR in 2015. (Photo by Susan Ericson. Click to enlarge)
Her death at the age of 76 was announced in a social media post by her family, who said she died peacefully.
Known worldwide simply by her first name, Melanie had several hits in the late 60’s and 70’s, including “Beautiful People,” “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)” and “Brand New Key,” which hit No. 1 in 1971.
She was a mainstay in the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene when she played the Woodstock festival in 1969, taking the stage “petrified” and leaving it a star.
Safka’s family moved to Long Branch from New York City during her rocky teen years.
After a stint at Long Branch High School and an attempt to run away to California, she attended RBR’s predecessor, Red Bank High School, an experience she described as “miserable” for an artsy outcast kid like herself.
She graduated in 1964 but was not allowed to walk in the ceremony due to what she called the trumped-up offense of having an overdue library book.
But in 2015, she reconciled those memories and returned to RBR to accept induction into the alumni hall of fame.
During her visit to RBR she praised the school’s arts programs, describing it as very different place than the one at which she had been treated as an outcast.
“She was one of the most talented, strong and passionate women of the era,’’ her family members wrote in the statement announcing her death. “And every word she wrote, every note she sang reflected that.”
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