Gayle McCormick (November 26, 1948 – March 1, 2016) was an American singer, best known for her work with the rock band Smith.
She attended Pattonville High School in Maryland Heights, Missouri and sang high soprano with the Suburb Choir, a 150-voice unit that performed annually with the St. Louis Symphony. Her recording and performing career stretched from 1965-76. McCormick started her career singing songs by Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight and Tina Turner before joining Smith.
In 1967, she was the lead singer in a band called Steve Cummings and The Klassmen. The band released a single in 1967 called "Without You" which had success in Missouri, and a second and final single in 1968 called "Wonderous Time". In 1969, Smith was formed in Los Angeles, their first album titled A Group Called Smith, featured McCormick as the primary vocalist.
Smith mainly played and recorded covers of pop and soul songs and made the top five with a remake of "Baby It's You", charting higher than the previous hit version by The Shirelles. Smith's version was also featured in Quentin Tarantino's film Death Proof, part of the Grindhouse double feature. While riding the wave of that hit, McCormick and the band made appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, American Bandstand and elsewhere.
Despite the group’s early burst of success, Smith disbanded following the release of their sophomore album, 1970’s Minus-Plus. Not wanting to lose the dynamic singer to another label, Dunhill signed McCormick to a solo deal which led to her self-titled debut in 1971. Though unable to match the early success of Smith, the set’s standout single, the dance-ready “It’s a Cryin’ Shame,” did reach No. 44 on the Hot 100.
Two more solo albums followed: Flesh & Blood on Decca/MCA in 1972 and One More Hour on Fantasy in 1974. After that, as her friend King writes, “Gayle had lost some interest in the music business, married a carpenter and moved to Hawaii” before ending up back in St. Louis a few years later.
McCormick recorded the tracks "Coming in Out of the Rain" and "Simon Said" for a 1975 single on the Shady Brook label; it scraped the lower reaches of the Adult Contemporary chart that fall. McCormick also contributed backing vocals to Jimmy Rabbitt and Renegade's Waylon Jennings-produced 1976 self-titled Capitol LP, from which the single "Ladies Love Outlaws" was drawn after which she retired from the entertainment industry.
In 2015, McCormick was hospitalized for pneumonia, and during the treatment, it was discovered that she had cancer that had metastasized from a tumour in a lung to the rest of her body. McCormick died of cancer March 1, 2016 in suburban St. Louis. She was 67 years old.
(Edited from Wikipedia Billboard)