S2 Episode 7: The Divine Ecstasy of Judee Sill wsg Jason P. Woodbury

She was born Judith Lynn Sill on October 7th, 1944 in Studio City, Los Angeles, California.

Her dad was a sound tech at Paramount.

But then they relocated when she was a child to Oakland with her parents and her brother Dennis.

Her dad owned a bar called Bud's.

And it was at Bud's that Judy learned to play piano and sing.

She actually she talks a little bit about this in her kind of A Magnum interview for Rolling Stone in the 70s.

She says, I remember trying to numb myself when I was a real little kid.

My father owned a bar in Oakland and I used to hang out there when I was, oh, about three.

That's where I started playing piano and found out I could harmonize with myself.

But even back then I knew something was wrong.

I knew I was missing out on having a normal life.

It was so seedy in the bar, you know, people were always fighting and punking.

There was illegal gambling and my parents drank a lot too.

They always managed to take care of business, though, in those days.

So you can tell from the way that she's thinking about her life when she's a little kid, as well as like kind of the birth of her creative process, that her childhood kind of takes a turn when she's young.

Her father dies of a heart attack when she's eight.

Her mother, Onetta, moves the family back to L.A., where she works on Betty Boop and marries an animator from Tom and Jerry named Ken Muse.

who's physically and verbally abusive.

And according to her niece, who she was really close with, also sexually abusive.

Dennis, her brother, who she really loves, gets married and joins the army.

So she's kind of left to fend for herself.

And she becomes rebellious.

She gets kicked out of high school and sent to private school.

And that's where she calls herself the student body president of the rejects.

She finds herself kind of like, in this in-between place and starts to sort of creatively refashion herself based on her context.