More Obituaries

Ellie Greenwich, 68, who with one-time husband Jeff Barry wrote some of the most famous songs of the 1960s, has died. She passed away from a heart attack.

Barry and Greenwich also collaborated with one-time music producer and now convicted murderer Phil Spector on many of their most famous songs.

"Chapel of Love," "The Kind of Boy You Can't Forget," "Be My Baby," "Do Wah Diddy," "Leader of the Pack," "Da Doo Ron Ron," "River Deep, Mountain High" were just a few of the most famous songs Greenwich is associated with. A list of her work can be found here.

This is the New York Times obituary.

She was truly one of the all-time great songwriters. I've been a big fan of her music for decades.

Here is another obituary.

Snip:

"She was the greatest melody writer of all time," Brian Wilson told The Times on Wednesday. The chief creative force of the Beach Boys, whose music was strongly influenced by many of the hits Greenwich and her husband Jeff Barry wrote with Spector, has often cited "Be My Baby" as his favorite record of all time.

"Those songs are part of the fabric of forever," said songwriter Diane Warren, whose compositions have been recorded by Aretha Franklin, Celine Dion, Barbra Streisand, Whitney Houston, Mary J. Blige and dozens of others. "Her songs were written in the '60s, and it's 2010 almost, but they are as relevant and meaningful today as the day when they were born. "

An appreciation is here.

Able to sing, arrange and produce as well as pen indelible hits, Greenwich found her artistic home within New York's Brill Building, where she, her husband and songwriting partner, Jeff Barry, and their peers transformed an art form without making a big deal of it. She was a natural collaborator who could match wits with control freaks like Phil Spector and totally relate to the kids in the groups who recorded her songs.

She could write silly and she could write serious. But Greenwich's key works -- such classics as "Leader of the Pack," "Chapel of Love" and "River Deep, Mountain High" as well as more obscure ones like "Out in the Streets" and "Girls Can Tell" -- have a particular resonance that goes beyond catchiness or nostalgia.

Their quality has to do with Greenwich's gift for capturing the frisson of a decision almost made, a change that hasn't quite come, and which could still go either way. The voices for which she wrote, young and nearly always female, had a natural waver. They belonged to the kids who would change everything: multicultural girls such as Barbara Alston and Dolores "La La" Brooks of the Crystals, Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes and Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las, girls who aspired to certain feminine ideals but also wished for a certain freedom promised by the changing attitudes of their time.

Manfred Mann performing "Do Wah Diddy" in 1964:



A recent configuration of the Crystals singing "Da Doo Ron Ron":



I can't get enough of that stuff.
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Writer and personality Dominick Dunne, 83, of bladder cancer.

I enjoyed his show on TruTV, Power, Privilege and Justice.