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Unless you’re really into the pop music of the sixties (or the name-dropping Portland indie band Parenthetical Girls), there’s a pretty good chance you’ve never heard of Ellie Greenwich. Surely you know some of the songs she wrote, though: “Be My Baby”, “Leader of the Pack”, “(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Going To Marry,” “Chapel of Love,” “And Then He Kissed Me,” “Hanky Panky,” “River Deep Mountain High,” “Da Do Run Run,” and “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home.)”
She also recorded her own songs sometimes, including the incredibly wonderful You Don’t Know (above), which some bored person put on Youtube alongside images from a 1964 Disney movie called The Gnome-Mobile.
She died in Los Angeles today at the age of sixty-nine after a brief hopitalization for pneumonia. Ann Powers at the LA Times has a very good obituary. And after the jump, some more Youtubery:
The Ronettes doing Be My Baby on Shindig!:
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Darlene Love’s (Today I Met) The Boy I’m Going To Marry, set (hilariously) to stills from Friends:
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Tommy James and the Shondells’ Hanky Panky:
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Insane-looking footage of Ike and Tina Turner’s River Deep Mountain High, which is a pretty insane song to begin with:
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And here’s Greenwich’s own I Want You To Be My Baby, which I think probably would have been a big hit had it come out before 1968:
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Actually, Ellie’s “I Want You To Be My Baby” was released as a single in 1967. It hit #83 on The Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in May of ’67. Definitely sounds more early to mid ’60s though.
You forgot to mention that she and her husband Jeff Barry recorded as The Raindrops back in the early ’60s, and they scored a #17 pop hit single of their own right around this time in 1963 with “The Kind of Boy You Can’t Forget” (their only top 40 pop hit single together as a recording duo).
Ellie was a also briefly a member of Tony Orlando’s group Dawn in 1970. She was one of the two female vocalists on the # 3 pop hit “Candida” and the huge #1 hit “Knock Three Times” (the other member of Dawn was Toni Wine). But both were later replaced in 1971 by Joyce Vincent and Telma Hopkins.
Sorry! Maybe somebody else will die today!
Damn you, Matthew, I was going to put Ellie in my Summer of Death collection.
Poor Ellie, dying on Teddy Kennedy Day. Who will remember her now? She’s Mother Theresa to Teddy’s Princess Diana. Farrah Fawcett to his Michael Jackson. Tear.