By Chris Willman, Variety | Tzruya “Suki” Lahav, an Israeli songwriter and poet who is best remembered by American music fans as a violinist who recorded and toured with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in the mid-’70s, died in Jerusalem Wednesday at age 74. Her son, musician Yonatan Lahav, wrote in a Facebook post that she died after a battle with cancer.
It is Lahav’s violin part that is heard at the beginning of one of Springsteen’s most cherished recordings, “Jungleland,” which closed out the “Born to Run” album.
Lahav also sang, uncredited, on two earlier Springsteen tracks from “The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle”: “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” and “Incident on 57th Street.” She was reprtedly first drafted to overdub herself and serve as a one-woman choir on “4th of July” when a church children’s choir failed to show up for the session.
Lahav played violin with Springsteen in concert for 38 shows prior to the “Born to Run” album coming out, beginning with an October 1974 gig at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall and ending with two nights at Washington, D.C.’s DAR Constitution Hall in March 1975, according to a log kept at the Brucebase website. Besides performing on several Springsteen compositions during those shows, she contributed a prominent part to a cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Want You” that has been a bootlegged fan favorite for decades.
In Israel, Lahav’s time with Springsteen is more of a footnote to her later career there. Her i24News obituary describes her as “one of Israel’s most influential songwriters and poets” and “a central figure in Israeli music for decades.”
Lahav was a winner of the ACUM Lifetime Achievement Award and the Erik Einstein Prize. She wrote lyrics for such Israeli artists as Tamouz, Rita, Yehudit Ravitz, Rami Kleinstein and Yehuda Poliker. Lahav also wrote screenplays (“Kesher Dam”) and novels (“Andre’s Wooden Clogs,” “The Swamp Queen Does the Tango”).
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Several videos and photos in the article:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/tzruya-suki-lahav-dead-original-bruce-springsteen-violinist-was-74/
