Amy - The Reluctant Lioness

If Amy Winehouse were still alive today, she wouldn't be caught dead using Instagram. Or Twitter. Or Facebook. After watching her documentary Amy I'm more convinced than ever that she was never hungry for glory and would have been satisfied if she remained a journalist moonlighting as a jazz singer at an obscure bar because her relationship with music was that pure. Like her idol jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, it was all about the music and her energy was devoted to improvisation so that the audience can feel the many nuances to her deceptively simple songs.

But to have been blessed with such enormous talent, it was inevitable that fame, which crippled her delicate frame under its weight, would seek her out from Southgate, London where she grew up in a music-loving family. Sensing that she was a diamond in the rough, various big record companies scrambled to sign her before Amy Winehouse became Amy.

I myself love her debut album Frank the most - when hope hadn't been drained from her voice and her eyes, when she could still see her heartbreaks with a sense of humor. With the dawning of the Back to Black era she started singing like her silver lining had been broken and her middle name should be Jaded, not Jade. And she kept singing from a place of unbearable pain until the very end.

It is beyond tragic that she's gone too soon when she could have enjoyed a career of longevity like her collaborator Tony Bennett or her other idol gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, grown old together with director and writer Reg Traviss who seemed to be her solid rock, and put her co-dependent past with Blake Fielder-Civil behind her...all the could-have-beens...

P.s. Glamorizing Club 27 is just plain wrong - take that Lana Del Rey (www.nerve.com/entertainment/music/lana-del-rey-cobain-death-27-club) - we don't need more members in the club which also includes cultural deities such as Kurt Cobain and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Amy performing at a church in Ireland

Amy singing "You Sent Me Flying" from Frank

Amy covering her idol Donny Hathaway

Amy singing a very soulful version of "Happy Birthday" to her friend when she was just 14