(The Best Part of) Breakin' Up
However, according to Ronnie Spector, the group's lead singer, producer Phil Spector had already begun to somewhat lose enthusiasm for the Ronettes in early 1964. The group had recorded the Phil Spector, Jeff Barry, and Ellie Greenwich song "Chapel of Love" in early 1964, but Spector refused to release it. "It doesn't sound like a hit," he told the group, so The Dixie Cups recorded their version of the song, which peaked at number one on the Billboard top 100, a position never held by the Ronettes.
The Ronettes
The Ronettes began as a family act where the girls grew up in Washington Heights, Manhattan. According to Nedra Talley, they started singing during childhood visits to their grandmother's home. "Estelle and Veronica are sisters," she said in a later interview. "I'm their cousin. Our mothers are sisters. We came out of a family that, on Saturday nights, home for us was at our grandmother's, entertaining each other." The Bennetts' mother was African-American and Cherokee; their father was Irish-American. Their cousin, Talley, is African-American, Cherokee and Puerto Rican. The trio also had a great-grandfather who was Chinese."By the time I was eight, I was already working up whole numbers for our family's little weekend shows," Ronnie Spector later recalled. "Then Estelle would get up onstage and do a song, or she'd join Nedra or my cousin Elaine and me in a number we'd worked out in three-part harmony."