With hits like “Lollipop,” she became a top woman songwriter in the early 1960s, but she quit the business in frustration over the theft of her work.
Beverly Ross, who with hits like “Lollipop” became one of the top women songwriters in rock ’n’ roll’s early years, but who ended her career early after a work relationship turned sour, died on Jan. 15 in a hospital in Nashville. She was 87.
The cause was dementia, said her nephew, Cliff Stieglitz.
While in high school, Ms. Ross would ride the bus from her family’s home in New Jersey to hang around the Brill Building, then the center of New York music publishing. There she managed to strike up conversations with songwriters like Julius Dixon.
In 1954, when Ms. Ross was only 19, she collaborated with Mr. Dixon on her breakout song, “Dim, Dim the Lights (I Want Some Atmosphere).” A recording of it by Bill Haley & His Comets reached No. 11 on the Billboard singles chart, just months before the band’s “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” became the first rock ’n’ roll song to reach No. 1.
Rolling Stone would later describe “Dim, Dim the Lights” as “the first ‘white’ song to cross over to R&B.” It had bluesy electric guitar riffs, a jaunty walking bass and lyrics of come-hither flirtatiousness, even as it maintained an adolescent innocence, inspired by high school crushes and party games like spin the bottle: “I’m full of soda and potato chips/But now I wanna get a taste/Of your sweet lips.”
That combination of upbeat rhythms and lightly romantic themes became Ms. Ross’s formula.
She and Mr. Dixon scored another hit with “Lollipop,” a song as sweet and compact as the titular candy. A 1958 recording by the Chordettes reached No. 2 and became an enduring pop-culture earworm, with appearances on “The Simpsons” and in a commercial for Dell computers.
By the early 1960s Ms. Ross had become, along with Carole King and a few others, one of the top women writers in rock, “one of only a sprinkling of female writers to make it in a vehemently male structure,” Mark Ribowsky wrote in “He’s a Rebel: Phil Spector, Rock and Roll’s Legendary Producer” (2000).
Ms. Ross also co-wrote songs recorded by stars like Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison. But in just a few years, her career would abruptly unravel.
By Ms. Ross’s telling, in 1960 she struck up a working friendship with a then-obscure aspiring songwriter who stood to benefit from her clout: Phil Spector. The two worked on song ideas, cut a demo tape and confided in each other about troubles in their families. Ms. Ross introduced him to players in the industry.
While they were tinkering with a riff together one night, Ms. Ross recalled, Mr. Spector suddenly declared he had business to attend to and ran out the door.
Soon, Ms. Ross was shocked to hear the riff, in the hit song “Spanish Harlem” by Ben E. King. Mr. Spector had used it without giving Ms. Ross credit (he and Jerry Leiber were the credited writers) — and he had also begun to ignore her.
From then on, she declined to work if it would bring her into the orbit of Mr. Spector, but she was still determined to prove she could write hits and co-wrote several more in the early ’60s, including “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” which as recorded by Lesley Gore reached No. 5.
Then she quit, spiraling into what she described to Mr. Ribowsky as “a suicidal depression.”
“This strange move I made away from the enormous acceptance and potential I’d worked so diligently to achieve left me hanging in nowheresville,” she wrote in a dishy, score-settling memoir, “I Was the First Woman Phil Spector Killed” (2013), “but I may have saved my sanity by doing it.”
Yet Ms. Ross also lived with regret. “I should have just bowed down and realized I’d been asked to write for the ‘royalty of rock ’n’ roll,’” she wrote.
Beverly Ross was born on Sept. 5, 1934, in Brooklyn and grew up in Lakewood, N.J. Her father, Aron, worked as a cobbler with his brother in New York City and then as a chicken farmer in Lakewood. Her mother, Rachel (Frank) Ross, worked as a bookkeeper for the shoe business and helped out at the farm.
Bev, as she was called, aspired from a young age to a career in music, but she did not know how to get started. She encountered musicians who were performing at a hotel where her sister worked in Lakewood, and she struck a deal with one of them: He would tell her how to break into the industry if she set him up on a date with her sister.
All the man had to do, it turned out, was inform Bev of the existence of the Brill Building.
Ms. Ross’s burst of songwriting success gave her an income in royalties that she lived on comfortably. She resided for many years in an apartment on the Upper West Side, but later bought a house in Nashville and began writing country music.
She is survived by her companion, Ferris Butler, a comedy writer. They married in the mid-1970s and later divorced, but they reconnected and were together for the final years of her life.
