Beverly Ross worked for Elvis, Bill Haley and wrote a song that the Chordettes sang to number two. An obituary.
He wasn’t entirely ungrateful, she said later. Phil Spector invited her over to his apartment one day, probably just to show off how far he’d come, and made her an omelette. “He had no conscience, so the only way he could show his remorse was with the omelet.”
Music producer Spector, who died last year killed a woman in 2003 and was sentenced to life imprisonment for it. Beverly Ross then published a book with the unequivocal title “I Was the First Woman to Shoot Phil Spector”. The two were friends, two ambitious, music-addicted songwriters who wanted to make more than a lukewarm hit in the very male, very white music industry. She worked for Elvis and Bill Haley and wrote “Lollipop,” which the Chordettes sang to number two in 1958. In her book, she tells how the producers lured destitute black musicians into the studio, gave them new clothes, maybe even gave them a car and collected all the rights in return. Spector learned from the bosses: Ross (as she put it) had found the jingle for “Spanish Harlem”, Spector carried it without her knowledge to the famous composer couple Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who turned it into the hit for Ben E. King and the Drifters made.
Ross sank into deep depression, but the time that knew how to combine lard and a cappella in such a brilliant way came to an end. In Greenwich Village, she listened enthusiastically to a young folk singer, but asked herself in a very businesslike manner: “How do you make a lot of money with great songs when they are so different that they are only played by small stations with no advertising revenue?” So Bob Dylan became famous on his own, and Ross retired from the business at the age of 23. As has only just become known, Beverly Ross died on January 15 in a Nashville hospital. The goddess of lollipop music turned 87.