Amy Winehouse was an English neo-soul and jazz-influenced singer from an Ashkenazi Jewish background. Born in Southgate, London, England, on September 14, 1983, she died on July 23, 2011, in Camden, London.  A great talent, she drank excessively, increasingly progressing to harder drugs, ending her short but brilliant career at age 27.

Winehouse’s mother was born Janis Seaton, after her father changed his name from Steinberg because of the anti-Semitism he had suffered during his military national service. After migrating from Eastern Europe, the families of both Janis’ parents lived in the Jewish section of the East End of London. After marrying, her parents, Janis and Mitchell, moved to Southgate in north London, a suburb to which many Jews moved as they became more assimilated and middle class. Mitchell left the family when Winehouse was nine and became a London cab driver.

After Mitchell’s departure, the family continued to go to synagogue on High Holy Days, and Alex, Winehouse’s older brother by four years, celebrated his Lit. "son of the commandment." A boy who has reached legal-religious maturity and is now obligated to fulfill the commandmentsbar mitzvah there.. While the family became less religious with time, they retained what Winehouse described as cultural Jewishness. Winehouse attended cheder classes but disliked them, and she did not have a Lit. "daughter of the commandment." A girl who has reached legal-religious maturity and is now obligated to fulfill the commandmentsbat mitzvah. Throughout her life, her extended family met for SabbathShabbat meals on Friday evenings, and she joined them when she could. In her application essay for the Sylvia Young Theatre School, Winehouse wrote: “All my life I have been loud, to the point of being told to shut up. The only reason I have had to be this loud is because you have to scream to be heard in my family.” She was no doubt referring to these Shabbat get-togethers.

Jazz in the United Kingdom was influenced by strong Jewish participation. Janis’s uncle Leon was a horn player, while his son was a drummer with the Joe Loss Orchestra. Joe Loss himself came from a Russian-Jewish background. Winehouse’s paternal grandmother, Cynthia, was a jazz enthusiast who had dated Ronnie Scott (born Schatt), co-founder of a celebrated jazz club. He often invited Cynthia and members of her family to the club to meet artists such as Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Tony Bennett. Cynthia played an important role in Winehouse’s young life. Her extensive record collection, centered on jazz, included albums by Sarah Vaughan and Frank Sinatra, both of whom were influences on Winehouse’s vocal style; indeed, Sinatra was one reason her first album was titled Frank. Mitchell often sang Sinatra songs. At home, Winehouse heard Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, and Dinah Washington.

Winehouse was considered a hyperactive student at school. Study did not interest her. In 1993, the same year that her parents separated, Winehouse was enrolled part-time in the Susi Earnshaw Theatre School in Barnet, at her grandmother Cynthia’s suggestion. In 1996, Winehouse became a full-time student at the Sylvia Young Theatre School, from which she was apparently asked to leave because of her inattentiveness. Between 1998 and 1999, she attended the BRIT School in Croydon, which offered vocational training in the performing arts. In 2000, Winehouse was the featured singer with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra.

Meanwhile, Winehouse sang in clubs for some years. At age ten, she and her best friend Juliette Ashby formed a duo called “Sweet and Sour,” based on the African American hip-hop girl group Salt-N-Pepa. Under the guidance of Ashby’s high-profile producer stepfather Alan Glass, they recorded three tracks.

In 2002, Winehouse signed with the Simon Fuller management company. Fuller is a highly successful entertainment entrepreneur best known for creating the Pop Idol format, and he assigned Nick Godwin as Winehouse’s handler. In 1995, Fuller began managing the Spice Girls, a group that rapidly became a popular culture phenomenon. That same year, Winehouse signed with Island Records.

Winehouse’s album Frank was produced primarily by Salaam Remi and was recorded in 2002 and 2003 across various studios in London, Miami, New Jersey, and New York. It was not released in the United States until the international success of Winehouse’s second and final album Back to Black in 2007. Island Records considered Winehouse to be part of the UK “blue-eyed” soul tradition, which included Dusty Springfield. Yet Springfield, herself, was not ethnically English; born Mary O’Brien, she had Irish roots and was Catholic. Though Winehouse’s vocal style owed nothing to Springfield, her signature look included Springfield’s beehive hairdo and heavily accented black eyeliner.

Frank sold well in the UK, where it reached three times platinum and number three on the album chart. In the United States, Frank only reached number 33 on the Billboard pop chart and number 26 on the hip-hop/R&B chart. Remi was a good choice to give the album a soulful, urban tinge. He had produced the Fugees album The Score in 1996 and the same year he produced Frank he worked on the English R&B and rap artist Ms Dynamite’s A Little Deeper. Frank was shortlisted for the prestigious Mercury Prize in 2004.

Frank was partially named after Winehouse’s musical idol, Frank Sinatra. “Frank” also means upfront and honest. The lyrics of Winehouse’s album candidly cover, among other things, sex and infidelity. One track, “What Is It About Men?,” is a critical commentary founded on her father’s infidelity. Frank also includes “Fuck Me Pumps”; co-written, like other tracks, with Remi, it is an observation of a woman in a bar looking for a pick-up. The use of the expletive as a descriptor suggests how unconstrained the album’s lyrics are. They build on the “straight-talking” influence of Billie Holiday and other African American artists such as Erykah Badu.

In 2005, Winehouse met Blake Fielder-Civil in the Good Mixer pub in Camden. Up to this point, Winehouse’s tendency toward self-destruction had been limited to her bulimia, an illness since she was a teenager, to cannabis use, and to excessive alcohol consumption. During her traumatic off-on relationship with Fielder-Civil, including their marriage between 2007 and 2009, Winehouse’s mental and physical health went into a steep decline. Fielder-Civil introduced Winehouse to various harder drugs, including heroin and crack cocaine.

In August 2007, Winehouse had her stomach pumped after binging on heroin, ketamine, cocaine, and ecstasy. After this incident, she and Fielder-Civil entered rehabilitation at The Causeway Retreat. In 2008, Winehouse went into rehab again, after a video surfaced on the web showing her smoking crack cocaine. Winehouse’s shout of defiance that she would not go into rehab on the track “Rehab,” from her album Back to Black, reached number seven on the UK singles chart and number ten on the U.S. Billboard pop chart.

Also in 2008, Fielder-Civil was sentenced to 27 months in prison for attacking a pub owner and then trying to bribe him to not testify in court. In 2011, when Winehouse died, Fielder-Civil was back in prison serving 32 months for armed robbery.

In 2006, before the downward spiral became too bad, Winehouse made her second and more highly regarded album, Back to Black. The album can be understood as being in the genre of break-up albums, as the tracks mostly describe Winehouse’s state of mind after one of the times Fielder-Civil left her. Rather than being influenced by jazz, as Frank had been, Back to Black suggested Motown and 1960s girl group sounds and fermented these references with more recent R&B vocal stylings. It was made with the African American retro soul singer Sharon Jones’ back-up group, the Dap Kings.

The majority of Back to Black was produced by Mark Ronson. Ronson, also Jewish, spent his early years in London before moving to New York with his mother and stepfather when he was eight. Ronson’s cosmopolitan background, his knowledgeable outsider status reinforced by his Jewishness, enabled him to appreciate the sound for which Winehouse was looking. Back to Black was nominated for best British album in the 2007 BRIT Awards and for the 2007 Mercury Prize. In the United States, Winehouse and the album were nominated for six Grammy awards and won five. Back to Black climbed to number one on the UK chart and went thirteen times platinum. In the US, it achieved number two on the Billboard pop chart and number four on the R&B/hip hop chart and went double platinum.

Signaling the importance to both Ronson and Winehouse of their Jewish minority backgrounds, in 2008 it was reported that the pair planned a holiday album with Hanukkah tracks on one side and Christmas tracks on the other. Winehouse was said to have already written two tracks, “Kosher Kisses” and “Alone Under the Mistletoe.” The album was never made.

In the United States, Winehouse has been criticized for using African American vocal stylings. She occupied the typically Jewish-American role of mediating black culture for a white audience. In the American tradition, Winehouse’s work stands at a cultural intersection. One of her final recordings in 2010 was a reworking of the track Lesley Gore made famous, “It’s My Party.” Authored by Jews and sung by the Jewish Gore, “It’s My Party” was one of the first productions by the African American jazz multi-instrumentalist Quincy Jones, in 1963. Winehouse’s version of the song produced by Ronson was released on a tribute album for Jones titled Q: Soul Bossa Nostra.

Shortly before she died, Winehouse worked with African American rapper Nas. Produced by Remi and released on Nas’s 2012 album Life Is Good, “Cherry Wine” includes Winehouse singing and Nas rapping. In 2013, it was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration. Winehouse’s duet with Tony Bennett on the standard “Body and Soul” was the last piece of music she recorded; it won a Grammy in 2012.

Winehouse checked out of rehab at the Priory in Southgate at the beginning of June 2011. On June 18, in an extremely intoxicated state, she gave a stumbling and at times incoherent performance at the Tuborg Festival in Belgrade, Serbia. On July 23, she was found dead in her bed at her home in Camden, London, by her bodyguard. Her death was attributed to alcohol poisoning, but it was probably also linked to her bulimia. Photographs show the obvious decrease in her weight between her teenage years and when she died. It is likely that her weakened constitution could not process the large amount of alcohol she had ingested. Two empty vodka bottles were found on the floor by her bed.

Winehouse either celebrated her Jewishness or rebelled against it, but she always identified as Jewish. Throughout her brief career, she frequently wore a gold Star of David around her neck. In 2007, after receiving the British Female Solo Artist of the Year designation at the BRIT Awards, Winehouse was quoted as saying that what she wanted most in life was a husband and seven children. It might have been her fantasy of Jewish domesticity that she remembered from those Shabbat dinners with her family. Throughout her heartbreaking and too-often public self-destruction, Winehouse remained a nice Jewish girl with an incredible talent.