Barry, Jeff and Ellie Greenwich

Barry, Jeff and Ellie Greenwich, songwriting hitmakers of the early 1960s. Jeff Barry (b. N.Y.C., April 3, 1938) and Ellie Greenwich (b. Brooklyn, N.Y., Oct. 23, 1940). While attending Hoftra in the early 1960s, Greenwich became fascinated by rock music. She hung out in record stores, and one of the proprietors introduced her to some record company scouts. They signed her to MCA as Ellie Gaye. While Ellie Gaye’s recording career was relatively shortlived, Greenwich started writing songs like Darlene Loves’s “;Today I Met the Boy I’m Going to Marry.” She met another aspiring songwriter, Jeff Barry, at a party not too long after Loves’s single came out. Barry had written the tune “Tell Laura I Love Her.” The two began writing together. With a handful of songs, they went to the Brill Building, joining such songwriting teams as Leiber and Stoller, Mann and Weill, and King and Goffen.

Barry and Greenwich began writing and producing for wall-of-sound producer Phil Spector’s Philles label and working with Leiber and Stoller. In that atmosphere, they wrote songs like “Da Do Ron Ron” and “Be My Baby.” They recorded together as The Raindrops, landing a hit with “The Kind of Boy You Won’t Forget” (#17, 1963). When Lieber and Stoller formed Red Bird records, Greenwich and Barry wrote and produced there, helping sculpt—along with producer George “Shadow” Morton—the epochal “girl group” sound.They wrote “Chapel of Love” for the Dixie Cups and “Leader of the Pack” for the Shangri-Las. With such a romantic attitude in their music, it isn’t surprising they got married.

As the girl group sound ebbed, Barry and Greenwich created such hits as “Do Wha Diddy,” “Hanky Panky,” “Then He Kissed Me,” “River Deep Mountain High,” and the Beach Boys’s “I Can Hear Music.” However, their marriage fizzled and so did their songwriting partnership and pop success. Greenwich turned her talents to jingles and sang backup for performers ranging from Jim Croce to Blondie. She put together a 1984 musical autobiography called Leader of the Pack that ran on Broadway for a while.

Barry wrote a few more hits, including “I Honestly Love You” with Peter Allen and “Sugar Sugar” with Andy Kim. In the early 1990s, he began creating children’s records, writing music inspired by children books like the Clifford the Big Red Dog and the “Babysitter’s Club” series.

—Hank Bordowitz