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Juice Newton (born Judy Kay Cohen 18 February 1952 in Lakehurst, New Jersey) is an American pop music and country singer and guitarist. To date, Newton has received five Grammy nominations in the Pop and Country Best Female Vocalist categories (winning once in 1983), as well as a CMA Award for Best New Female Artist and two Billboard Album Artist of the Year awards (won consecutively)
. She has several Gold and Platinum records to her credit, including Juice, Quiet Lies and her first Greatest Hits album. In the 1980s, Newton charted 14 Top-10 hits across the Billboard US Country, US AC, and the US Hot 100 charts, with many of the recordings achieving crossover success and six of the songs reaching Number One.
Early careerIn the early 1970s, Juice Newton, Otha Young and Tom Kealey formed a band called Juice Newton and Silver Spur that, due to local success, was signed to RCA Records. The group released two RCA albums (in 1975 and 1976) and scored only one charting country single with "Love Is a Word". The band signed with Capitol in 1977, but disbanded shortly after releasing one album for the label. In 1978, Newton went solo (but remained with Capitol Records), although Silver Spur would re
Newton's solo debut album, Well Kept Secret, was released later in 1978. The album saw Newton cultivating a rock sound, and it stands as Newton's most rock-oriented record, to date. Unfortunately, neither the record nor its single ("Hey Baby") charted, though Capitol Records proceeded to renew Newton's contract. Capitol's investment in Newton began to pay off in 1979, when Newton had her first country top-40 hit with "Let's Keep It That Way" (another one-off single). Later that year, the album Take Heart featured five modestly charting singles: "Until Tonight", "Any Way That You Want Me", "You Fill My Life", "Lay Back In The Arms of Someone" and "Sunshine". The latter became Newton's second top-40 single on the country charts (in 1980), with "You Fill My Life" reaching #41 and "Until Tonight" reaching #42. Both of Newton's initial solo efforts performed with modest success but failed to have a lasting impact on the album charts.
Early '80s pop music successIn 1981, Newton's third solo album, simply titled Juice, was released. It spawned her biggest country hits up to that point, each crossing over into the pop Top 10: "Angel of the Morning" (written by Chip Taylor and originally recorded by Merrilee Rush and The Turnabouts in 1968), "Queen of Hearts", and an updated version of "The Sweetest Thing (I've Ever Known)" (the original version appeared on the 1975 Silver Spur debut album), which earned her the first of several country #1 hits. A fourth top-40 country hit, "Ride 'Em Cowboy", was culled from Juice in 1984 to support Newton's first Greatest Hits album.
Juice sold more than a million copies in the United States and an excess of 300,000 copies in Canada. "Angel of the Morning" and "The Sweetest Thing (I've Ever Known)" also reached #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart, where Newton would chart regularly until the release of her 1985 album "Old Flame", her first album targeted solely at the country market. In 1982, Newton received two Grammy nominations for Best Female Vocalist: one for "Angel of the Morning" in the Pop category, and another for "Queen of Hearts" in the Country category. These two singles became her biggest sellers in the United States, both earning RIAA Gold certifications. (Note: in 1981 and 1982, when these singles were certified, the RIAA standard for Gold singles was 1 million units sold. In 1989, RIAA lowered the standard to 500,000 for Gold single certifications.) The songs were also sizable hits in Australia, Germany, Holland and other countries.
Later in 1982, Newton released her fourth solo album Quiet Lies, which went Gold in the United States by year's end for sales of more than half a million copies; the album went Platinum in Canada (100,000 copies). From Quiet Lies came the top-10 pop hit "Love's Been A Little Bit Hard On Me" (which garnered her another Pop Female Vocalist Grammy nomination). "Break It To Me Gently" was the second single from the 1982 album, and it hit #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart, #2 on the Billboard country charts, and #11 on the Hot 100. The recording, a contemporary remake of a Brenda Lee hit from the '60s, won Newton a Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance, beating out contemporaries Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris and Rosanne Cash. The third and final single from the album was "Heart of the Night", which, in early 1983, hit #4 on the Adult Contemporary chart (making it her sixth consecutive Top-10 hit on that chart) and climbed to #25 on the Hot 100. The album also garnered Newton an award from Australia as the "Top International Country Artist" for the continent.
The direction for Newton's sixth (and final) Capitol album, 1983's Dirty Looks was decidedly more rock and experimental than her usual blending of folk, pop and country styles. The album spawned a #27 pop/#14 AC hit with "Tell Her No" (originally a hit for the Zombies in 1965) and the title track, a rock number that charted low in the Hot 100. The country-oriented single "Stranger at My Door" had a brief stay on the country charts, but failed to sustain Newton's popularity with country radio. The album was a moderate success, selling in excess of 250,000 copies in the United States and going Gold in Canada (50,000 copies). (The song "Dirty Looks" was written by Dave Robbins and Van Stephenson, who would later become part of the country group Blackhawk in the '90s. The pair also wrote Newton's '84 country single "Restless Heart.")
According to a 1984 front-page article in Billboard magazine, changes at Capitol led Newton to return to RCA. The 1984 album "Can't Wait All Night" continued with a rock-oriented sound. The launch single "A Little Love" and the title track became her final charting pop singles to date, reaching #44 and #66, respectively; while "Restless Heart" made it to only #57 on the Country chart. "A Little Love" became Newton's seventh and final Top-10 Billboard Adult Contemporary single to date, hitting the #7 spot
Career evolution: from pop to countryIn 1985, Newton's country-music career would be revitalized with the release of her most commercially successful country album, Old Flame, which reached #12 on the Billboard chart and featured six Top-10 country hits including the #1s "You Make Me Want to Make You Mine", "Hurt" and "Both to Each Other (Friends and Lovers)" with Eddie Rabbitt. The duet, released to the public prior to the pop version "Friends and Lovers" (which hit radio and stores two weeks after Newton and Rabbitt's version first appeared, even though it was recorded first) by Gloria Loring and Carl Anderson, was available only on special editions of the Old Flame album and on the Eddie Rabbitt album Rabbitt Traxx.
Newton continued her Country Top-10 hit streak the following year with "Tell Me True" from her 1987 album Emotion, while the album's lead single, the progressive country tune "First Time Caller", stalled at #24.
Newton's final album of the decade ''Ain't Gonna Cry'' (1989) was not promoted by the label and didn't chart, but it did spawn her final Top-40 country hit to date, "When Love Comes Around The Bend," which was never released as a single to stores.
Highlights: 1990s to todayIn 1994, Newton contributed a track called "Lovers Of One Day" to the Edith Piaf tribute album, which also included songs by Pat Benatar and Donna Summer.
In 1995, she recorded a double-album of pop duets (which was slated to be sold via info-mercial), but the project was riddled with legal issues, resulting in a low-impact, "accidental" release of the "Platinum & Gold" series of duets in the early 2000s (the CD set was released without Newton's permission). Subsequently, bootleg CDs including most of the duets turned up on U.S. store shelves as "Gold & Platinum, Volumes 7 and 8". Those CDs also contain 1995 solo versions of three of Newton's pop hits ("Angel of the Morning", "Love's Been A Little Bit Hard On Me" and "Queen of Hearts"). During most of the '90s, Juice Newton spent her time touring sporadically, horseback riding, and focusing on her family.
Newton returned to recording in 1998 with "The Trouble with Angels", a collection of seven re-recorded hits and three new tracks, including the single "When I Get Over You". The 1998 effort was quickly followed by American Girl in 1999, which was Newton's first album of all-new material since 1989 and featured the single "They Never Made It To Memphis". The collection featured tracks written by Otha Young, Freddie Mercury, Nanci Griffith, Tom Petty and Newton herself.
Every Road Leads Back to You (consisting of live material with a bonus EP of four studio recordings of new songs) was released in 2002 with an accompanying DVD. And American Girl Vol. II, which is sold exclusively on cdbaby.com and at Newton's live shows, was released in 2003.
In 2005, Juice Newton appeared on the TV show "Hit Me Baby One More Time" on which she performed a well-received rendition of Ashlee Simpson's "Pieces Of Me" and a truncated version of "Queen of Hearts"; online voters selected her performance as their favorite of the five acts that appeared on the episode. In the mid-2000s, Newton also contributed tracks to the albums "An All-Star Tribute To Cher" and "An All-Star Tribute to Shania Twain".
On November 15, 2007, Newton released The Gift of Christmas, her first Christmas album. The 12-song album includes a new version of Newton's "Christmas Needs Love To Be Christmas" and the classic "Mary's Boy Child", as well as a special Christmas version of "For Believers", an Otha Young-penned song first recorded in 1983 for the Dirty Looks album.
Discography
Copyright Citations
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