Renée Rebecca Geyer (11 September 1953 – 17 January 2023) was an Australian singer who was long regarded as one of the finest exponents of jazz, soul and R&B idioms. Geyer had commercial success as a solo artist in Australia with "It's a Man's Man's World", "Heading in the Right Direction" and "Stares and Whispers" in the 1970s and "Say I Love You" in the 1980s. Geyer was also an internationally respected and sought-after backing vocalist, whose session credits include work with Sting, Chaka Khan, Toni Childs and Joe Cocker. In 2000, Geyer's autobiography, Confessions of a Difficult Woman, co-written with music journalist Ed Nimmervoll, was published. In her candid book, she detailed her drug addictions, sex life and career in music. She described herself as "a white Hungarian Jew from Australia sounding like a 65-year-old black man from Alabama". She spent more than 10 years based in the United States but had little chart success there under her own name, yet contributing to releases by Neil Diamond, Men at Work, Sting, Trouble Funk and many others. Geyer returned to Australia in the mid-1990s and her career continued into the 21st century with her eleventh studio album Tenderland (2003), which peaked at No. 11 on the ARIA albums charts. Rock historian Ian McFarlane described Geyer as having a "rich, soulful, passionate and husky vocal delivery". Geyer's iconic status in the Australian music industry was recognised when she was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame on 14 July 2005. Geyer and fellow 1970s singer Marcia Hines are the subjects of Australian academic Jon Stratton's 2008 cultural studies article "A Jew Singing Like a Black Woman in Australia: Race, Renée Geyer, and Marcia Hines". Biography 1953–1973: Early years Renée Geyer was born in 1953 in Melbourne, to a Hungarian-Jewish father, Edward Geyer, and a Slovak-Jewish mother, a Holocaust survivor, as the youngest of three children. Geyer was named Renée after another Holocaust survivor who had helped her mother in Auschwitz after Josef Mengele had assigned the rest of her mother's family to death. At a young age, the Geyers moved to Sydney where her parents were managers of a migrant hostel. Geyer described herself as a problem child, and her parents called her übermutig (German for "reckless"). She attended various schools and was expelled from a private school, Methodist Ladies College, for petty stealing. Her first job was as a receptionist