Olivia performing well
When Olivia (or Liv, as she is called by her friends) was 5, her father accepted a position as master of a university college in Melbourne, Australia. Olivia was there for 11 years before returning to Britain as the winner of a Hayley Mills lookalike contest. She’d already been singing with friends for several years, and had no trouble finding appreciative audiences in Britain, first as a singer with a group called Toomorrow, then on tour with Cliff Richard. Her first European hit was a recording of Bob Dylan’s If Not for You.
While in Britain, she met shoe importer Lee Kramer, who became her boyfriend and eventually her manager in the U.S.
During the last several years, the singer has spent much of her time on this side of the Atlantic, although she still hasn’t performed at Nashville’s new opry house, which is Mecca for country performers everywhere.
She has, however, toured the South extensively, playing to sellout crowds at grandstand shows, and this summer she came north to sing at both the Central Canada Exhibition in Ottawa and the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto. When she played Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe, Nev. recently, the management provided her with her own swimming pool, tennis court and horse. She’s obviously doing something right.
It may have something to do with the fact that she’s already had two gold albums, one platinum (even better), and two Grammy awards, and she was named the top female vocalist of 1974 by the Country Music Association.
There comes the country-music tag again is she positive she’s not a country singer? Says Olivia, “To call yourself that, you’d have to be born in the background…. When I record an album, I have a little of every kind of music on it. I only think of myself as a singer, not a particular kind of singer. So I’m surprised when I find myself being called a country singer.”