Lesley Gore

Lesley Gore stands out as the top-selling solo artist tied to the girl group era, reaching the summit of the charts with her debut single “It’s My Party” the same year it appeared, 1963. Quincy Jones shaped the sessions by layering her vocals and adding dense backing choruses plus horn lines, and she followed with several additional smashes across 1963 and 1964—“Judy’s Turn to Cry,” “She’s a Fool,” “You Don’t Own Me,” “That’s the Way Boys Are,” and “Maybe I Know.” Although her voice lacked the deepest soul inflections, she embodied the quintessential portrait of teenage female longing; her strongest tracks endure as standards, above all the melodic “Maybe I Know” and “Look of Love,” both penned by Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, along with “You Don’t Own Me,” a declaration of autonomy whose feminist stance felt unusually forward for early 1964.

The question of why Quincy Jones would oversee a previously unrecorded white teenager from the suburbs found its answer in a pair of demo tapes her vocal coach had made; those reached Mercury’s president, who in turn steered her to Jones, then the label’s A&R director. At their initial date they selected “It’s My Party” from roughly two hundred submitted songs, and Jones hurried the track into release upon learning that Phil Spector intended to cut the same number with the Crystals.

The pairing of “It’s My Party” with its lighter follow-up “Judy’s Turn to Cry” left Gore with an undeserved reputation for petulance. Those two singles linger most vividly in memory, yet much of what came afterward revealed greater maturity and musical substance. The productions themselves remained polished, featuring orchestral charts by Claus Ogerman that leaned toward mainstream pop rather than Phil Spector’s denser Wall of Sound. Career surveys of Jones often minimize or skip his Gore recordings despite their strong sales; today he is recognized chiefly for funkier work, but the commercial leverage those earlier sides supplied strengthened his standing inside the industry at the time.

She shared the stage of the historic T.A.M.I. Show with the Rolling Stones, James Brown, and Smokey Robinson, yet her popularity faded sharply after 1964. Mercury continued to devote attention to her recordings through the remainder of the decade, and the songs and arrangements demonstrated a broader stylistic reach than many listeners recognized. Jones, however, ceased regular collaboration with her after the mid-sixties. Only two later singles cracked the Top 20: “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows” (1965) and “California Nights” (1967), each co-written by Marvin Hamlisch. Once her hit-making period ended she turned to cabaret stages and found additional success penning material for other artists. Early in the new century she resumed recording with multi-instrumentalist Blake Morgan; the 2005 album Ever Since earned strong reviews and placed tracks in CSI: Miami, Showtime’s The L Word, and Jeff Lipsky’s film Flannel Pajamas, which premiered at Sundance in 2006. Lesley Gore passed away from lung cancer in New York City in February 2015 at the age of 68.