Beverly Ross had not yet completed high school when one of her songs was performed on a national TV show by Peggy Lee. The 17-year-old student had been planning to become a commercial artist, but the success of Out of This World made her “obsessed and determined” to make it in the music business.
“I heard people say that you could make contacts by hanging around the Brill Building on Broadway in the heart of Tin Pan Alley,” she said. “I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but I did it and made contacts.”
In 1952 she moved from New Jersey to New York. Within two years of “hanging around the Brill Building” this white, Jewish teenage daughter of poultry farmers and her black collaborator, Julius Dixon, had produced a hit for Bill Haley and the Comets — Dim, Dim the Lights (I Want Some Atmosphere), a flirty, high-school style number that is regarded as the first “white” song to cross over to R’n’B and reached No 11 in the Billboard singles charts.
The pair had more lasting success with Lollipop, which was taken to No 2 in the charts in 1958 by the Chordettes, the catchy melody, simple lyrics and popping sound-effect making it recognisable across the generations. For Ross, Lollipop was a personal challenge. “I was writing serious songs, and I just decided to write the silliest thing I could think of,” she explained in 1987. “I wanted to write something silly and airhead, and see if I could out-silly what was out there.”
Beverly Ross was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1934. Her Lithuanian-born father, Aron Ross, was a cobbler, and her mother, Rachel, known as Ray (née Frank), was a housewife. She and her older sister, Phyllis, were raised in the Bronx until the family moved to Lakewood, New Jersey, where their younger brother, Jeffrey, was born and where their parents ran a chicken farm.
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Between the success of Dim, Dim the Lights and Lollipop she was signed to a subsidiary of Capitol Records and released a single, Beach Party, but her stint as a singer “fizzled out because I didn’t want to tour. I’m more of a writer than performer.” By the age of 24, she had published more than 30 songs, among them Dixieland Rock for Elvis Presley in the movie King Creole (1958).
In 1960 she was signed by Hill and Range, the top music publisher in New York. With her reputation as a rock’n’roll wunderkind, she was on the highest-level salary, $250 a week (about $2,500 or £1,920 today) plus advances on royalties. “I was kind of a queen bee up there, and I had an open budget for demos.”
She soon met Phil Spector (obituary, January 17, 2021), then just starting out as a songwriter. He was, according to his biographer Mark Ribowsky, “drawn to Ross as a career propellant”. As Ross remembered it, his eyes lit up when she told him about her job. “He was very impressed. And I was impressed that he’d written To Know Him Is to Love Him. The two of us were kind of looking at each other thinking, ‘Geez you’re so young and you’ve had a big hit’. We hit it off straight away.” She introduced him to many of her contacts. “I think we had a tremendous chemistry, and one time when I was over at his place, he kissed me and we had a powerful boy-girl reaction to each other. I think he was in love with me, and possibly I with him. But I never wanted to get romantically involved.”
They wrote several songs together and cut a demo tape, but one night while they were working on a riff, Spector suddenly announced that he had business to attend to and dashed out. A few months later Ross was shocked to hear the same riff in the song Spanish Harlem, recorded by Ben E King. By this time, Spector was avoiding her.
Disillusioned by his betrayal, she went on to write a few more hits, including Candy Man, which was first recorded by Roy Orbison, and Judy’s Turn to Cry, which was recorded by Lesley Gore. However, it became harder as she watched Spector’s career taking off. “I remember going into a suicidal depression for about a year,” she said. She set the record straight in I Was the First Woman Phil Spector Killed, published in 2013, four years after his conviction for the murder of Lana Clarkson.
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Ross married the comedy writer Ferris Butler in 1974. Although they were divorced, the couple were later reconciled and spent her final years together.
In the late 1980s she began producing TV jingles. She enjoyed a comfortable income from royalties and spent her final years in Nashville. “The business is very challenging,” she said. “You have got to be very tenacious, aggressive. You can’t let anything discourage you, from monsoons to family pressures to death. You have to persevere. Music has given me a satisfaction that I would never trade.”
Beverly Ross, songwriter, was born on September 5, 1934. She died from complications of dementia on January 15, 2022, aged 87