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Libby Titus, a singer-songwriter known for her wistful ballad “Love Has No Pride,” covered by Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Raitt, and for her collaborations with Burt Bacharach, Dr. John and her husband, Donald Fagen, of Steely Dan, died on Oct. 13. She was 77.
Mr. Fagen announced her death on the Steely Dan website, but he did not cite a cause or say where she died.
A highly regarded songwriter and backup vocalist in the 1970s, Ms. Titus never scaled the commercial heights as a solo artist. Still, she garnered critical praise for her first and only major-label album, called simply “Libby Titus” and released by Columbia Records in 1977, on which she was backed by an all-star cast of friends, including Paul Simon, Robbie Robertson of the Band, James Taylor and Carly Simon. Ms. Simon wrote or co-wrote four of the tracks.
A showcase for Ms. Titus’s jazz leanings and her taste for torch songs, the album “immediately distinguishes her from the Hollywood cowgirls of the Ronstadt regiment,” the rock critic Dave Marsh wrote in a review for Rolling Stone. She is “a sophisticated pop singer,” he added, “closer to Bette Midler than anyone else.”
The album included her version of “Love Has No Pride,” a heart-rending song about lost love and longing, written with her childhood friend Eric Kaz. Stephen Holden, reviewing a performance by Ms Titus for The New York Times in 1983, called it “one of the finest ballads of the rock era.”
By the time Ms. Titus recorded the song, it was already familiar to the public. Ms. Raitt gave it a country twang on her 1972 album, “Give It Up.” Ms. Ronstadt included a more robust version, which peaked at No. 51 on the Billboard Hot 100, on her 1973 album, “Don’t Cry Now.” Rod Stewart, Billy Bragg and Rita Wilson later put their own stamps on the song.
Ms. Titus wrote several songs with Mr. Bacharach in the 1970s, including two (“Riverboat” and “I Live in the Woods,” which Ms. Simon also helped write) that were included on his 1979 album, “Woman.”
She collaborated with Dr. John on the music for “Energy and How to Get It,” a short 1981 film by the acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank. Six years later, she was hanging out with Dr. John backstage at a show when she met Mr. Fagen.
“We went to dinner,” Ms. Titus said in a Rolling Stone interview in 2000, “and got into this conversation that never ended.”
Elizabeth Jurist was born on July 6, 1947, in Woodstock, N.Y. “I always had a desire to sing, really since I was 4,” she said in a 1977 interview with The Associated Press.
She eventually enrolled at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., but left at 19 and married Barry Titus, a novelist. Soon after, Mr. Fagen arrived as a student at Bard, where he met Walter Becker, a fellow jazz-loving ironist and his future partner in Steely Dan.
Although Ms. Titus and Mr. Fagen did not overlap as students at Bard, she caught his eye on a return visit to see friends. It was “only from a distance,” she told Rolling Stone, “but I was wearing a fur coat and had a short, short skirt and was all done up, and he said he thought I looked like bohemian royalty.”
Her first marriage was short-lived. (She and her husband had a son, Ezra, who died in 2009.) Ms. Titus was trying to carve out a singing career in New York City when a friend invited her to Saugerties, N.Y., to meet the members of the Band. She became enmeshed with the group and began dating the group’s drummer and vocalist Levon Helm. In 1970, the couple had a daughter, Amy Helm, who went on to become a recording artist. Information on survivors in addition to Mr. Fagen and Ms. Helm was not immediately available.
In 1968, Ms. Titus released her first solo album — also called “Libby Titus” — on the independent Hot Biscuit Disc Company label. The album, which included three Beatles covers, failed to make waves.
Even so, when she was 23, Albert Grossman, who managed Bob Dylan and the Band, signed her to his label, Bearsville Records. “We began a record with Todd Rundgren producing,” she told The Associated Press, “and we didn’t finish it because I was insecure and unfocused — defocused. I saw no future in making a Diana Ross commercial hit record.”
Ms. Titus lived for a time in Los Angeles, where she became friends with Ms. Simon. Ms. Simon included a tribute to Ms. Titus, “Libby” — about escaping their troubles by traveling to Paris — on the 1976 album “Another Passenger.”
Ms. Titus’s career hit a high with the release of her 1977 album and an appearance on “Saturday Night Live” that October.
Besides taking a minor Hollywood detour — she had small parts in the 1986 Mike Nichols film, “Heartburn,” and the 1990 Penny Marshall film, “Awakenings” — she worked as concert promoter starting in the 1980s.
By the end of the decade, she was spearheading the New York Rock and Soul Revue, a loose supergroup of sorts that included Dr. John, Phoebe Snow and Michael McDonald, with Mr. Fagen, whom she married in 1993, serving as de facto bandleader. The revue played regularly in New York City clubs, toured, and released a live album in 1991.
In 2016, Mr. Fagen was arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault after a reported physical altercation with Ms. Titus. The charges were eventually dropped, and the couple issued a statement: “Despite misleading reports in the press, we’re happily married.”
Despite her brushes with fame, Ms. Titus sometimes expressed an uneasiness with life in the spotlight.
“Nervous is a euphemism for what I get,” she told The Associated Press in an interview before her “Saturday Night Live” appearance. “I could burst into tears,” she added, “but I won’t.”
Then again, her music was often more suited to quiet corners. As Robert P. Laurence wrote in a Copley News Service review of her first album, she “didn’t so much perform a song as share a very special secret with her listener.”
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