Barbara Alston (29 December 1943 - 16 February 2018) was a founding member of the 1960s girl group the Crystals. She sang lead on the band’s first two hits, “There’s No Other Like My Baby” and “Uptown.”
Barbara Ann Alston was born in Baltimore to Ethel Banks Alston and John Westry. She moved to Brooklyn with her mother and graduated from what is now the W. H. Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School there. She was a choir-trained teenager and won a talent show with a group called the Delphi Thezonians. She was 17 when she became part of a quintet of Brooklyn high-school students organised in 1961 by her uncle, Benny Wells who named them The Crystals. More interested in choreography than singing, she nevertheless served as the band’s first lead vocalist, backed by fellow singers Dolores “Dee Dee” Kenniebrew, Mary Thomas, Patricia Wright and Myrna Giraud.
Spector signed the Crystals in 1961 when he was beginning to develop the richly orchestrated “wall of sound” style that would make him one of the 20th century’s most acclaimed producers. For the group’s earliest pop hits, he surrounded Alston’s alto voice with lush strings and guitars in songs such as “There’s No Other Like My Baby”, which peaked at No. 20 on the Billboard charts in 1962.
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The group’s second single, “Uptown” (1962), an upbeat number about the consolations of tenement life, written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, featured playful Spanish guitars and castanets and reached No. 13 on the chart.
The band’s next single, “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)”, was a disastrous ode to domestic abuse co-written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, who later said she regretted lending her name to the track. “‘He Hit Me’ was absolutely, positively the one record that none of us liked,” Alston once said. “We knew in our hearts that it was going to be a controversial piece and argued on several occasions with Phil about releasing it.” Spector, who was later convicted of the 2003 murder of actress Lana Clarkson, prevailed but eventually pulled the single after some radio stations refused to play it.
The group, which quarrelled with Mr. Spector for years over royalties and other issues, went through several line-up changes and eventually shrank to four members. Their only chart-topping hit, “He’s a Rebel” (1962), was actually sung by another group, the Blossoms, whose lead singer was Darlene Love; Mr. Spector released it as a Crystals record because he thought the song would be more successful if it came from an established group.
In later years, Alston sued Spector to receive her share of royalties from the Crystals, who regrouped in 1963 without Thomas and with Dolores “La La” Brooks as lead singer. They released hits including “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “Then He Kissed Me” before Alston left the group in 1965 to raise her son. Ms. Alston, who was shy and suffered from stage fright, was relieved to step out of the spotlight. She left the Crystals in 1965 to raise her first son, Tony, and the group broke up in 1967.
Alston appeared in the original 1966 Broadway production of Cabaret as one of the Kit Kat Girls. In 1968 she and fellow Crystal’s singer Mary Thomas were backing singers on Teri Nelsons Kama Sutra album “Sweet Talkin’ Teri.” Then, in 1971, with the rock & roll revival in full swing, Alston and the other the group members of the Crystals reunited and spent a few years delighting audiences on the oldies circuit. Otherwise, she stopped singing and held secretarial positions in New York and then in Charlotte, where she had lived since 1984. She had originally planned to move to Atlanta, her daughter said, but her car broke down in Charlotte. She never left.
She died in Charlotte, North Carolina, after a two-week battle with the flu, her family says. She was 74.
(Edited mainly from the New York Times & Independent)