In World of Songwriting, at the Top of the Pack

When Ellie Greenwich was married in the fall of 1962, she had not yet written her giddy song about married love, “Chapel of Love,” that has been played at thousands of weddings.

And still ahead of her were dozens of pop hits, including “Be My Baby,” “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Leader of the Pack” and “River Deep, Mountain High.”

On her wedding day, she was just another 22-year-old hoping for a break in the music world and a happy marriage, said Dorothy Danziger, who worked in an office with her in Midtown Manhattan. “We had life in common, not music,” Ms. Danziger said Thursday. “Hopes and dreams, that kind of thing.”

Ms. Greenwich, whose masterful way with melody helped to shape popular music in the early 1960s, died last week at 68. She was widely heard and little known. With Carole King and Cynthia Weil, she was one of three influential women songwriters who came of age in New York just after the three-minute 45-r.p.m. vinyl record became a standard.

She learned her craft in the Brill Building, at 1619 Broadway, near 50th Street, a place teeming with music publishers, arrangers, musicians, composers, promoters. It was as if an entire industry had settled into a high-rise hive.

“Brill was a building where songwriters would go up to the 11th floor and would come down on the elevator and stop at each floor, trying to sell their songs at every office,” said Mike Stoller, a composer who, along with Jerry Leiber, wrote early hits of Elvis Presley.

For those who could not afford space in the building, the phone booths in a restaurant on the street, the Turf, served as a kind of office. Session musicians and writers lingered there.

“If a songwriter was doing a demo session and someone hadn’t shown up, they’d run into the restaurant and shout, ‘I need a bass player,’ and he’d get one,” Mr. Stoller said.

As the story goes, Ms. Greenwich, who taught high school for less than a month after attending Queens College and Hofstra, made the rounds in the Brill Building, selling a few songs for $25. One day, a friend of a friend got her an appointment to see a big-name songwriter, who turned out to be busy elsewhere. Told to sit in a room in the ninth floor offices of Leiber and Stoller that was equipped with a piano, she played a few of her songs while she waited.

Mr. Leiber, who thought he was hearing Carole King, stuck his head in and said, “Carole?” Ms. Greenwich introduced herself, and he told her to keep playing and to come back as often as she wanted. He also gave her $100 a week, in exchange for having the chance to hear her tunes first. Ms. Greenwich teamed up with another writer, Jeff Barry; they married and lived in Lefrak City in Queens, composing one of their first songs as they rode the E train. They also wrote with Phil Spector and a producer, George Morton.

These were not the crystalline lyric songs of musical theater, or hard-banging rock and roll; the “concept” album had not yet been born. Ms. Greenwich and Mr. Barry specialized in girl groups, with lyrics that painted, or crayoned, the high dramas of the teenage heart.

These young composers “became keenly conscious that they were writing records, not songs,” writes Ken Emerson in his rich history of the Brill Building era, “Always Magic in the Air”.

Nearly for the first time, women songwriters were being widely heard. “The prominence of Carole King, Cynthia Weil, and Ellie Greenwich was unprecedented in American popular music, all the more so because King and Greenwich not only wrote but arranged and produced songs,” Mr. Emerson wrote.

Mr. Stoller, whose joint autobiography with Mr. Leiber, “Hound Dog,” was published in June, said that Ms. Greenwich had a knack for stripping songs to their essentials. “It’s very difficult to write simple,” he said. “She could write simple songs that were ultimately indelible.”

She and Mr. Barry separated after three years of marriage; they continued to write together for a short time. She occasionally worked as a song doctor while singing backup for stars like Aretha Franklin, Cyndi Lauper and Debbie Harry. She had a comfortable income from royalties, but had signed away valuable stakes in the songs.

After parting with Mr. Barry, she did not find another collaborator in work or life, and never had children, to her regret. In an interview for a radio series by Charlotte Greig, she reflected on the unkept promise of her “Chapel of Love” — that “we’ll never be lonely anymore.”

“Lord knows, if you go by my songs and the way my personal life has gone, you’d say, ‘Oh my, this lady was dreaming,”’ Ms. Greenwich said. “But I still feel it would be nice.”

A few weeks ago, at the Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs, a captivating jazz singer named Jeanne O’Connor closed a show with a song for a member of the band who was getting married: “Chapel of Love.”

It’s not likely that many in the audience knew who Ellie Greenwich was. But all of them, from kids to old-timers, spontaneously sang out her chorus, “We’re going to the chapel ...” They knew it by heart.

The History of Blues Music: An Overview

The Blues and the Development of Personalized Song

Because of its personalized form, the popularity of blues music among blacks marked a unique period in the history of secular African American song. Prior to the emergence of the blues sometime in the 1890s, solo music was atypical. Such individualized song had never been the main ingredient of black music. Prior songs consisted of field hollers, which served as a means of communication among plantation workers, and work songs, which were used by slaves to keep time with a task. While field hollers and work songs had elements of personalized song, they had never truly developed as solo songs.

Despite the blues uniqueness from hollers and songs, it was forged from the same musical repertory and traditions. The call and response form of expression remained, but instead of incorporating a response from another participant, the blues singer responded to himself or herself. Thus, it was not created from a new type of music, but from a new perception about oneself.

Blues music reflected the new status of blacks. Slaves newly acquired freedom, Booker T. Washington’s teachings, and the Horatio Alger model, which asserted that the individual molds his own destiny, influenced this form of personalized music. According to historian Lawrence Levine, "there was a direct relationship between the national ideological emphasis upon the individual, the popularity of Booker T. Washington's teachings, and the rise of the blues. Psychologically, socially, and economically, Negroes were being acculturated in a way that would have been impossible during slavery, and it is hardly surprising that their secular music reflected this as much as their religious music did." (Levine, Lawrence W., Black Culture and Black Consciousness) As a consequence, it was the emphasis on the individual that influenced the blues personalized form of song.

The Emergence of the Blues

The blues was first sung by men at leisure and was called the folk blues. W.C. Handy, a composer, musician, and bandleader of the Mahara Minstrels, came across the blues in a Tutwiler, Mississippi train station in 1903. According to Handy, while he was waiting for the train he heard the unforgettable sound of a man running a knife against the strings of his guitar while he sang, “Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog.” Handy was struck by the music, and never forgot it. Not long after, in 1912 Handy published “Memphis Blues,” making him the third person in a few months to publish a song with the name “blues.”

The first recording of the blues was in 1895. George W. Johnson's "Laughing Song" was the first blues song recorded. Thereafter, blues songs began to appear in music rolls. The 1906 series of Music for the Aedian Grand, listed one blues title among the forty-nine music rolls.

The Rising Popularity of the Blues

As folk singers migrated north in the early 20th century, they brought the blues with them. Joining them from New Orleans were “black-butt” pianists who played in honky-tonks; Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas gave way to the “Fast Western” pianists who sang as they played, imitating the sounds of southern guitarists. Country singers joined the New Orleans and “Fast Western” pianists’ migration, and brought their style to Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and New York, where the classic blues singers united with these musicians and introduced their blues style in clubs, theaters, and dance halls. Classic blues singers brought a professional quality to it, and constructed the foundation for the classic blues.

The Classic Blues Era

The classic blues style, the style that was popularized by female singers, was popular among newly arrived blacks in the cities. The migration of many blacks to the cities gave them a new freedom from the church and community that had not been experienced in rural areas. Blacks demanded entertainment, and black theaters, dance halls, and clubs were opened. Women stopped singing in their churches and schools, and began to perform in theaters, clubs, dance halls, and vaudeville shows.

The blues entered the forefront in 1920, when Mamie Smith's recording of "Crazy Blues" became popular and opened the doors to other classic blues singers. The record was priced at one dollar and sold 75,000 copies the first month of release.

The market for the recorded blues was almost entirely black during the 1920s and 1930s, and the records became known as "race records." Record companies advertised exclusively to blacks and only black stores sold the records. As a result of Smith's success, record companies seized the opportunity to make a profit in the new market. Companies searched for talented blues artists; classic blues singers such as Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter, and Ethel Waters became popular blues artists.