Just hearing his name uplifts you

Singer and actor Dana Gillespie is a blues icon, who began her career in the 1960s as a teenage performer.

- BY ANIRUDHA KARINDALAM

She has released 74 albums and collaborated with legends such as Mike Jagger and Bob Dylan. In 1972, she played the role of Mary Magdalene in the first London production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar. She became a devotee of Sathya Sai Baba in the 1980s, a profoundly transformative experience. Since then, Gillespie has recorded several devotional albums in Sanskrit, too. She visits Puttaparthi every year to sing and participate in cultural activities. Edited excerpts from an interview:

What drew you to Baba?

I think I first saw a photograph of him when I was about 15 or 16. I never forgot that image—his halo of hair and those huge garlands. Forty years ago [in the 1980s] I knew I had found my answer. Within three weeks, I was on a plane to India. He completely ignored me—for 12 years! I used to come once or twice a year, always sitting at the back. Even if I saw just a flash of his orange robe or a wisp of his hair from behind a pillar in the hall, I was content.

After 12 years of silence, I wanted to take his music to a wider audience. I am a blues singer, but I recorded a cassette of bhajans, hoping somehow he might bless it. On my last day at the ashram, I hid the cassette under my clothes, as you weren't allowed to take anything into Sai Kulwant Hall. That day, I suddenly found myself seated in the front. Baba walked straight over to me and said, “Ah, the singer! Give me the cassette.” No one knew who I was or that I had hidden it there. From that moment, I was completely hooked.

You performed in front of him on his 70th birthday.

Yes, that was quite something.