Priscilla Paris (January 4, 1941 – March 5, 2004) was the lead singer of the 1960’s American girl group from San Francisco, The Paris Sisters.
It was the Andrews Sisters who gave the Paris Sisters their first professional leg-up in show business. In 1954, their mother strategically placed her daughters in the audience of every matinee performance of an Andrews engagement at the Warfield Theater in their hometown of San Francisco. Dressed alike, they dutifully followed their mother's directive and sat there mouthing the words to the Andrews' songs.
Finally, as Priscilla recalled in a 1990 interview, "Our mom took us backstage to meet them." The Andrews Sisters invited Priscilla, Sherrell and Albeth on stage to sing. An MCA agent in the audience heard and signed them, and the Paris Sisters were on their way. They had been non-pros since the late 1940s; now, for the next seven years they performed a professional act in a style that mixed dancing, comedy and more. They played fairs, USO tours, Vegas, did radio, and signed a recording contract with Decca Records. Nearly all their singles for the label found the trio recording in a style very similar to the highly popular McGuire Sisters.
The stylistic turnabout for the trio came in 1961 when their mother put the girls in touch with record label owner Lester Sill. Sherrell recalls "His protégé was Phil Spector and they were looking for groups or an unusual sound. Phil came to our home one day and sat with us, and interviewed us and had each one of us sing separately. And that was it, we started recording with him." Spector completely revamped the group from top to bottom. Suddenly, instead of belting out a song, Priscilla was almost whispering the lyrics in a style described by columnist Walter Winchell as the sexiest he had ever heard; with Albeth and Sherrell relegated to playing a more supporting role in the group.
The song was one of his earliest hits, 'I Love How You Love Me'", which peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart. However, the recording was so costly that the Sisters made little or no money off of it, nor from the other three hits they cut with Spector at Gregmark Records. Some of the group's other hit songs include the US Top 40 single "He Knows I Love Him Too Much" (March 1962, No. 34), "All Through The Night" (1961), "Be My Boy" (No. 56), "Let Me Be The One" (No. 87), and "Dream Lover" (No. 91).
At the time Spector was also recording a Paris Sisters album for the label, and involved in a feud with Sill over the escalating cost of the project. Sill's version of what happened next was that an assistant accidentally discarded the master tapes of the album. However, other accounts of the episode, told by informed bystanders over the years, hint at events somewhat less than accidental. Whatever the cause of the tapes' destruction, shortly thereafter Spector split with Sill and Gregmark, and the Sisters were soon cut loose from the label.
Pluck ensued, though, and the threesome were able to land on their feet. They continued performing and recorded three albums, culminating, in 1967, with “The Paris Sisters Sing Everything Under The Sun!'. The pluperfect Wall-Of-Soundalike recording was overseen by Jimmy Bowen and arranged by Spector standby Jack Nitzsche, but was not a hit. Shortly after the album, due to tensions arising from twenty years of subordinating their individual personalities and talents to the good of the group, the Paris Sisters didn't so much split up as drift apart. Priscilla went out on her own and recorded three solo LPs, 'Priscilla Sings Herself', 'Priscilla Loves Billy' (both 1967) and 'Love Is ...' (1978), the first and last of which contained all self-penned material. Albeth and Sherrell continued to perform, but none of the three ever again achieved the high profile of the Paris Sisters act.
In the late 1970s Priscilla Paris had an accident resulting in facial paralysis. She stopped singing for a while and went through a period of serious depression. During that time she "accidentally" (her word) ended up in Paris, France. She fell in love with the city, continued her education there and eventually ran her own business, Telamerique, which specialized in educating French hotel workers how to interact with English-speaking tourists. "I'm at the right place at the right time. Everything I ever did that was disjointed has fallen into place. Plus. . .I love it!" she told an interviewer in 1990. She also occasionally sang in small Parisian clubs.
Sherrell Paris formed a band called Sherell Paris and the New People that toured until the late 70s. She remarried for the second time and became an executive assistant on Bob Barker's TV show, The Price Is Right until she was released in 2000. In the spring of 2002 Priscilla returned to the U.S. for a proposed Paris Sisters reunion concert. Sadly, the show was aborted after the 18-hour flight left her too exhausted to perform. On March 5, 2004, Priscilla died at her home in France, due to the result of a fall. She was 59.
Albeth Paris went into independent TV production with her husband. She died in Palm Springs, California, on December 5, 2014. She was 79.
(Edited from Bill Reed’s article @ Spectropop, Wikipedia, AllMusic & History Of Pop)