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But at Arista, the label she recorded for starting in the late 1970s, her artistic ambitions— more jazz, more adult, more complicated— kept colliding with a market demanding instant crossover appeal. Years of contractual disputes left her stuck, unable to record elsewhere, until she finally escaped to Philadelphia International Records in 1985.
But the toll taken in the meantime was enormous. Hyman struggled with bipolar disorder and depression, diagnosed in the 1980s. To cope, she leaned on alcohol and cocaine. In May 1993, over the span of just twenty-eight days, she lost her mother, her grandmother, and a close friend, all at once.“ She was crying a lot,” one friend would recall. Another would later say Hyman had already attempted suicide twice before, and that she often spoke of death as something that was hers by right—“ if she didn’ t like the pain, didn’ t like her life, she had the right to get out of it,” her friend Glenda Garcia explained.
On June 30, 1995, six days before her forty-sixth birthday, Phyllis Hyman took a mixture of sleeping pills and vodka in her New York City apartment. She was found unconscious at two in the afternoon— just hours before she was scheduled to perform that very night at the Apollo Theater, the most sacred stage in Harlem. She died at the hospital that evening. She left a note:“ I’ m tired. I’ m tired. Those of you that I love know who you are. May God bless you.” That night, the show at the Apollo went on anyway. The Whispers, booked as the opening act, hesitated to take the stage at all. An employee of the theater talked them into it.“ She told me that Phyllis would have wanted us to go on, and I think that’ s true,” one member of the group would later say. They played their most upbeat songs to a tearful room, surrounded by Hyman’ s family, who had come that day expecting to celebrate her birthday.
Flashmag! Edition 174 Juillet 2026
Five months later came the posthumous release of the album she had just finished polishing before her death: I Refuse to Be Lonely. Critics who heard it got chills. One Chicago Tribune writer would say no artist in music history had perhaps ever made a record that so hauntingly foreshadowed her own end. Her songwriting collaborator Gordon Chambers went further:“ In retrospect, a lot of what we wrote were her parting words. It’ s almost chilling to hear‘ Why Not Me?’ now, because it really is her testimony.”
Phyllis Hyman
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