Marianne Faithfull, Chanteuse of Survival, Is Dead at 78-OxBig News Network

At a 1964 party for the Rolling Stones, she was approached by their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, who was drawn by her beauty. “He asked me, ‘Can you sing?’ And I said, ‘Mm-mm, I can,” she said in a 2005 interview on NPR. “About a week later, I got a telegram from Andrew saying, ‘Be at Olympic Studios at 2 o’clock.’”

There she recorded her first track, “As Tears Go By,” often said to be the first original composition by Mr. Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, which until then had mostly performed blues and R&B covers. The recording, with its wan English-horn hook and wistful lyrics, “was a very strange song for two 21-year-old boys to write and a stranger one for an 18-year-old girl to sing,” Ms. Faithfull told The Daily News of New York in 1987.

Still, the single became a Top 10 hit in Britain in 1964 while also breaking into Billboard’s Top 25 in the United States. In his introduction to a photo-driven book about her, “A Life on Record” (2014), Salman Rushdie described the young Ms. Faithfull, with wry affection, as having “the voice of a slightly zoned-out chorister.” She racked up three more Top 10 hits in Britain in 1965, “Come and Stay with Me” (No. 4), “This Little Bird” (No. 6) and “Summer Nights” (No. 10).

For her album debut, her label Decca issued two simultaneous releases: One, titled “Marianne Faithfull,” concentrated on her pop songs, while the other, “Come My Way,” consisted mainly of traditional folk pieces. The latter rose to No. 12 on the British charts, three positions higher than its companion.

At the age of 19, in 1965, Ms. Faithfull married John Dunbar, owner of the hip Indica Gallery, where John Lennon would meet Yoko Ono the next year. Six months after they wed, she gave birth to their son, Nicholas. Not long after, she left her husband to live with Mr. Jagger, and Nicholas was sent to her mother to raise. (The Dunbars didn’t formally divorce until 1970.)