Ellie Greenwich, songwriter

[Maurice]

Ellie Greenwich 23/10/40 - 26/08/09



Daily Telegraph:



Songwriter whose Sixties pop hits included the classics 'Do Wah Diddy' and

'River Deep - Mountain High'



In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest hits of all time included six by Ellie Greenwich and her husband and writing partner, Jeff Barry - more than by any other songwriting team.



They had 17 singles in the pop charts of 1964, surpassed only by John Lennon and Paul McCartney of the Beatles and the Americans Holland, Dozier and Holland....

[JohnB_Toronto]

Well worth viewing "Girl Groups: The Story of A Sound" in which Ellie was interviewed at length about her involvement with all those great Brill Building girl groups of the early 60s. In that documentary, Jerry Leiber of Leiber & Stoller fame, talks about her as being "a great dame". What a great string of hits she left behind.

name='Maurice']Ellie Greenwich 23/10/40 - 26/08/09



Daily Telegraph:



Songwriter whose Sixties pop hits included the classics 'Do Wah Diddy' and

'River Deep - Mountain High'



In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest hits of all time included six by Ellie Greenwich and her husband and writing partner, Jeff Barry - more than by any other songwriting team.



They had 17 singles in the pop charts of 1964, surpassed only by John Lennon and Paul McCartney of the Beatles and the Americans Holland, Dozier and Holland....

[darrenburnfan]

From The Times

August 28, 2009



Ellie Greenwich: songwriter of Be My Baby and Leader of the Pack

Eleanor Greenwich was born in New York in 1940 to a Catholic mother and Jewish father, both of Russian origin. She grew up in Brooklyn into a music-loving family, and as the records of Perry Como and Benny Goodman were playing, her aunts and uncles transformed the living room into a dance hall. The young Ellie was a prolific collector of 45s and she took lessons on the accordion. By her teens she had taught herself to play the piano and was composing music. At high school she formed a singing group, the Jivettes, and at 17, calling herself Ellie Gaye (after Barbie Gaye who sang My Boy Lollipop) she released her first single, Silly Isn’t It / Cha-Cha Charming.



But it was as a songwriter that she began to flourish and Tell Laura I Love Her (1960), co-written with Ben Raleigh, was her first hit as a composer. This was followed up with a string of hits written with Tony Powers, including He’s Got the Power for the Exciters, and (Today I Met) the Boy I’m Gonna Marry for Darlene Love which was co-written with Phil Spector.



She was still relatively unknown when in 1962 she arranged to meet one of the Brill Building composers, John Gluck Jr. When he kept her waiting in an office she started to tinkle on the piano. The producer Jerry Leiber poked his head in, thinking it was Carole King, and spotted her potential immediately. Leiber and his partner Mike Stoller allowed her to stay and use the facilities in return for first refusal for the songs she wrote. It was a big break into the male-dominated world of music production and before long she was signed to their publishing company, Trio Music, as staff songwriter.



By the end of that year she had married Barry who was also signed to Trio Records, and the partnership had its most fruitful period in 1963 with Be My Baby and Baby I Love You for the Ronettes and Then He Kissed Me and Da Doo Ron Ron for the Crystals, Not Too Young To Get Married for Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans) and Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) by Darlene Love, all co-written and produced by Spector.



At the same time Greenwich and Barry formed the Raindrops for which Greenwich provided all the female vocals and Barry sang backing. They signed for Red Bird records in 1964 and enjoyed further success that year writing the US No 1 single Chapel of Love for the Dixie Cups and Leader of the Pack and Out in the Streets for the Shangri-Las. Meanwhile, Do Wah Diddy Diddy for the British R&B blues band Manfred Mann reached No 1 on both sides of the Atlantic.



By the end of that year though, Greenwich’s own love story was at an end and she and Barry divorced. They continued to write together and the following year the partnership was reinvigorated when Greenwich discovered a young Jewish singer-songwriter called Neil Diamond. Recognising that Diamond was destined for stardom, they formed a company, Tallyrand Music, to publish his songs.



On hearing his songs for the first time she recalled: “I didn’t even know if I loved them or not. But I thought, there’s something here. And when he sang them to me, I was like, ‘What a weird voice’. It wasn’t the kind of voice I was hearing on the music scene in those days.”



Diamond was soon snapped up by Bang Records but Greenwich-Barry continued to produce his records such as Cherry Cherry and Kentucky Woman. In 1967 she formed Pineywood Music with Mike Rashkow, and they produced her first solo album, Ellie Greenwich Composes, Produces and Sings. She later released a second album Let It Be Written, Let It Be Sung (1973). During this period she was able to pursue her love of backing singing and worked for Dusty Springfield, Bobby Darin and Frank Sinatra among others.



After splitting with Rashkow in 1971, she formed a new songwriting team with Ellen Foley and Jeff Kent but like many of the great singers and songwriters who set the Sixties alight, the hits began to dry up in the Seventies. A notable exception was Sunshine After the Rain (1977) which was a big hit for the British singer Elkie Brooks.



By this point Greenwich had developed an alternative career writing jingles for TV and radio commercials. She made her mark on the Eighties pop scene, working with Cyndi Lauper.



A musical about her life and works, Leader of the Pack, was rapturously received when it was released on Broadway in 1985 and would subsequently be revived on several occasions and tour all over the world.



Her Sixties classics enjoyed a modern-day revival after being used on many film soundtracks, And Then He Kissed Me featuring in a memorable scene from the Martin Scorsese gangster movie Goodfellas (1990). In 1991 she and Jeff Barry were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.



Ellie Greenwich, pop singer, producer and songwriter, was born on October 23, 1940. She died of a heart attack on August 26, 2009, aged 68



************************************************** *****************

The Daily Telegraph Published: 5:52PM BST 27 Aug 2009



Ellie Greenwich

Ellie Greenwich, who has died aged 68, co-wrote some of the most enduring pop songs of the 1960s and collaborated with the "Wall of Sound" producer Phil Spector on such classics as Da Doo Ron Ron, Be My Baby (both 1963), and River Deep – Mountain High (1966).



In 2004 Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest songs of all time included six by Ellie Greenwich and her husband and writing partner, Jeff Barry – more than by any other songwriting team. They had 17 singles in the pop charts of 1964, surpassed only by John Lennon and Paul McCartney of the Beatles and the Americans Holland, Dozier and Holland.



When, in the spring of 1962, the songwriter Jerry Leiber discovered 21-year-old Ellie Greenwich singing at a piano in the Brill Building in New York, he thought she sounded like Carole King, but looked more like the comedienne Judy Holliday. He observed a strapping young woman wearing a college blazer over a prim blouse with a Peter Pan collar, her hair teased into a platinum helmet.



She had an early success the following year when, with Jeff Barry, she wrote the animated dance song Hanky Panky, which did well for Tommy James and The Shondells and eventually topped the American charts.

Although 1964 was the year the Beatles conquered America, it was also the heyday of the Greenwich-Barry hit factory. In June the Dixie Cups took Chapel of Love to number one in the US, and in August Ellie Greenwich had her first British number one with Do Wah Diddy – a huge hit for Manfred Mann.



She was hoping to repeat the success of Da Doo Ron Ron, which she, Barry and Spector had written in two days the previous year and which had been a hit for the American girl group the Crystals.



When she and Barry came up with Do Wah Diddy Diddy, it was recorded first by another American band, the Exciters. But this struggled to reach number 78 in the US hit parade, and Ellie Greenwich and Barry were preparing to record it themselves as The Raindrops when they heard that Manfred Mann had released it in Britain.



Manfred Mann's lead singer, Paul Jones, had bought the Exciters' version and thought the title a great euphemism for sex. The song went to the top of the charts in Britain and America, and launched Manfred Mann on the international pop scene.



As Ellie Greenwich, Barry and Spector worked on Da Doo Ron Ron at Spector's office, Spector's friend Bill Walsh dropped in, inadvertently inspiring the opening couplet: "I met him on a Monday and my heart stood still/Somebody told me that his name was Bill." The recurring gobbledegook line Da Doo Ron Ron was originally inserted pending a proper lyric, but Spector liked it so much he kept it in.



Ellie Greenwich considered both Da Doo Ron Ron and Do Wah Diddy to be rooted in the tradition of nursery rhyme. "Everybody of every age can sing them," she remarked, "because they are so easy to remember."



Eleanor Louise Greenwich was born on October 23 1940 in Brooklyn, New York, but moved to Long Island when she was 11. Named after Eleanor Roosevelt, she learned music from her Catholic father, a painter turned electrical engineer; her Jewish mother managed a doctor's surgery. Ellie's father played the balalaika and mandolin, but when friends from Germany gave the family a bulky Hohner accordion, she took lessons and learned to play it.



At 14 she formed her own group, the Jivettes, singing at schools and hospitals, and while still a schoolgirl, started writing her own songs. Two of these, Cha-Cha Charming and Silly Isn't It, were recorded by RCA in 1958, but the single flopped.



Rejected by the Manhattan School of Music because it did not accept accordion students, Ellie enrolled at Queens College to study piano and later at the private Hofstra University on Long Island. After graduating, she briefly taught English at a high school before choosing a career in music.



She found a berth at the Brill Building on Broadway with the songwriting partnership of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, selling her songs for $25 a time. Her first success was with He's Got the Power, written with Tony Powers and recorded by the Exciters.



Signed on a weekly salary of $100, Ellie Greenwich played another of her songs to Phil Spector, but the young producer seemed more interested in preening himself in the mirror. "Listen to me, you little prick," she snapped. "Did you come to look at yourself or to hear my songs?"

In March 1963, after Spector had recorded her doo-wop number Why Do Lovers Break Each Other's Hearts? with Bob B Soxx and the Blue Jeans, Ellie Greenwich, hearing her work on the radio for the first time, was so thrilled that she crashed her car into a toll booth.



The record reached number 38 in the charts, and her follow-up (Today I Met) The Boy I'm Gonna Marry finished one behind at number 39 that May.



A year earlier Ellie had married the cadaverous Jeff Barry (born Joel Adelberg), a distant relation, who replaced Tony Powers as her writing partner. Despite his wife's inauspicious introduction to Spector, Barry and the producer hit it off at once, and in 1963-64 the Greenwich-Barry partnership composed 15 hit songs that sealed Spector's reputation and established the newly-weds as major pop songwriters.



(And) Then He Kissed Me and Da Doo Ron Ron – both recorded by the Crystals – were the first songs they wrote with Spector. Then came Be My Baby, a huge hit for the Ronettes, reaching number two in the US charts.

Spector's collaboration with Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry had, in Tom Wolfe's phrase,

crowned him the "tycoon of teen", but by 1965 Spector's powers were already waning, and a week-long songwriting session between them produced only three numbers.



One of the three songs, however, was the idiosyncratic River Deep – Mountain High, recorded by Ike and Tina Turner in February 1966, which perhaps more than any other Spector production defined his "Wall of Sound".



A year before, Ellie Greenwich had recorded one of her own songs, You Don't Know, and there was talk of launching her as an American Dusty Springfield and touring Britain. But the record flopped, the idea was dropped, and she divorced Barry in December 1965.



Although the Greenwich-Barry writing partnership foundered with the marriage, the pair enjoyed continued success as producers of Neil Diamond's early hits.



Ellie Greenwich had discovered Diamond and persuaded Leiber and Stoller to give him a songwriting contract. With Diamond and Barry, she formed a company to publish and promote Diamond's songs.



In the late 1960s Ellie Greenwich again tried unsuccessfully to launch a solo singing career, but suffered a nervous breakdown and turned to writing and singing commercials and jingles.



Ellie Greenwich, who died on August 26, was a member of the American Songwriters' Hall of Fame.