At 75, LA songwriter Jane McNealy started a record label to archive her work

Years ago, Jane McNealy got some advice: Digitize her reel-to-reel archives. McNealy — who’s worked on everything from pop songs to musicals to film music – thought it was a good idea, one she’d eventually get around to doing.

“This is what I’ll do for a legacy kind of thing,” she recalls, “and I can give it to somebody when I die.” 

Then, in 2015, she was diagnosed with cancer and the project took on much more urgency.

In 2020, when she was 75, McNealy officially launched Lo-Flo Records, the label that serves as an archive for her vast body of work, from pop-minded recordings made in the 1960s to jazz pieces to reimaginings of her music for film. 

This summer, Lo-Flo has focused on a series of five previously unreleased collaborations between McNealy and singer Lydia Marcelle made over 50 years ago. The third single in the series, “This Time We’re Really Through,” dropped on August 11. It was preceded by “Where Has It Gone” and “I Want to Know.” The releases represent a time when McNealy and Marcelle, who died in 2015, were up-and-coming talents navigating L.A.’s music scene. 

When Jane McNealy moved to Los Angeles from Northern California, she settled into the Hollywood Studio Club, the residence for women working in entertainment whose famed alumni include Marilyn Monroe and Kim Novak.

McNealy, who lived there at the same time as future TV stars Sally Struthers and Farrah Fawcett, wasn’t an actress. A pianist, she had just started to get serious about songwriting. 

“I had been going around to publishers, the kind of stuff you can’t do now, sitting down at the piano and playing songs,” she explains. “They would have an upright piano and I would sing and play my song.”

While living at the Hollywood Studio Club, she met Marcelle, a singer from New Orleans who already had regional hits to her credit.

“She loved the stuff that I had been writing,” McNealy recalls on a recent video chat from her home studio in Los Angeles. 

So did Harold Battiste, Jr. A producer and arranger, Battiste had his own label and publishing company and had already worked with Sam Cooke and Sonny & Cher. He wanted to get the songwriter and the singer in the studio. 

McNealy had some success, but when she and Marcelle met Battiste, it kickstarted a decades-long working relationship between the songwriter and the producer. “Everything I wrote, he wanted,” she says. “That was very cool. We started doing the demos and I continued to work with him.”

Back when McNealy was living at Hollywood Studio Club, another resident introduced her to the writer and librettist Alice Kuhns, who became her longtime collaborator on musicals. Their first collaboration to be produced, “To Be Fred,” hit the stage in the 1970s and others would follow. A few of their works appear on the Lo-Flo release “Marsha Bartenetti sings McNealy & Kuhns.” 

While McNealy underwent chemotherapy, artist and web designer Julie Floegec, who made the videos for the Marcelle releases, organized the archive and built a website. 

“This was almost without me realizing it because I was spending a lot of time in chemotherapy,” she recalls. McNealy now had to think of a name for the project, so she thought back to her mentor Battiste, who was from New Orleans, and the jazz, funk and soul that had influenced her. 

“I decided to call it lo-flo because everybody was so laid back,” she says. “Lo-Flo Records, just go with the flow, relax, enjoy it.”

It took a bit of time to put together the team, but Lo-Flo officially launched in 2020 with the release of the song “Turn Away From Darkness” featuring Joyce Dunn on vocals. It was followed by “Running Around,” a full-length collection of McNealy’s work from the 1960s and 1970s that features performers like the soul singer Tami Lynn and jazz trumpeter Melvin Lastie, as well as her song with Marcelle, “A Good Thing.” 

More releases spanning McNealy’s eclectic career have followed, including a new version of “Fly Away,” originally sung by Petula Clark in the movie “Never Never Land,” with Floegec on vocals, as well as other updated renditions of music from her catalog. 

McNealy continues to make music. She has been at work on a musical called “The Griffin,” an adaptation of Frank R. Stockton’s fairy tale “The Griffin and the Minor Canon.” McNealy also wrote a concerto, “Through Fire and Ice: Five Stages of Grief,” inspired by her own experience with cancer, which, in her case, she notes, is not curable, but is manageable. She says, “You can feel go through the different stages of knowing that you have this kind of disease.” 

And there are still more archives to search for upcoming Lo-Flo releases. “I’m still going through tapes and finding other music,” she says before mentioning future projects. “I’m keeping busy.”

For more information on Lo-Flo releases, head to loflorecords.com