In the Beginning, Nedra Talley Ross Was a Ronette
The first time my teenage guy buddies and I saw a picture of the Ronettes, our reaction could best be summarized as “Jesus!”
Nedra Talley, who was one of the Ronettes, would a few years later say the same thing, but with a rather different inflection. She became a born-again Christian, embracing a belief to which she adhered for the rest of her life, which ended with her peaceful death Sunday at the age of 80.
Talley — Nedra Talley Ross after her marriage — was not one of the signature voices of rock ’n’ roll. In fact, even fans of the era-defining records the Ronettes made in the 1960s — “Be My Baby,” of course, plus “Walking In The Rain,” “I Can Hear Music,” “Baby I Love You,” “The Best Part of Breaking Up” and more — would find it hard to identify her harmonies behind Veronica Bennett Spector’s lead voice and producer Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound.
Ross was the last surviving original Ronette, after Estelle Bennett died in 2009 and Ronnie Spector in 2022. But Ross wasn’t an incidental footnote. She played an essential role in creating and developing an essential group — and the way she divided her life into two remarkably different chapters tells a classic story about the rewards and the cost of pop music stardom.
As a Ronette doing sultry steps on stage, she was adored by millions, and not just teenage boys who had been staring at the cover of the Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes album.
When the Ronettes toured England in 1964, their opening act was the Rolling Stones, who on Talley’s 18th birthday brought a cake to her room and sang “Happy Birthday.” The late Brian Jones was infatuated with her and some reports say they briefly dated.
She and her fellow Ronettes were among the first artists with whom the Beatles hung out on their first visit to America. They later opened for the Beatles on the band’s last American tour in 1966, with Nedra singing lead because Phil Spector didn’t want Ronnie on the road with what he feared might be the competition.
There were parties, TV appearances, magazine covers and fame — all of which unfolded for Talley while she was a teenager. A teenager who like Ronnie and Estelle had grown up in Spanish Harlem, blue collar kids with mixed-race parents who listened to the formative years of rock ’n’ roll on the radio and had enough performing talent to dream of getting onto the radio themselves.
Talley was a cousin of the Bennett sisters, particularly close to Ronnie. So when the families thought it would be cute to have their pre-teen kids form a singing group, Nedra, Estelle and Ronnie were part of it. They also turned out to be the ones who were serious about it, and as their siblings dropped out, they persisted. By the late 1950s, as teenagers, they were making records, which went nowhere, but still were records.
They scored gigs as background vocalists and eventually were hired as dancers at New York’s Peppermint Lounge, epicenter of the twist. This got them in with Joey Dee, whose “Peppermint Twist” made him a hot ticket, and they mingled with the celebs and show biz people who wanted to be part of the Peppermint Lounge scene. That included New York’s famous hustler DJ Murray Kaufman, a/k/a Murray the K, which had the incidental effect of introducing Talley to Scott Ross, who was Murray’s producer and would become Talley’s husband.
How the Ronettes hooked up with Phil Spector has spawned a number of stories, but however it happened, that was the break that propelled them into, eventually, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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It was also, by Talley’s accounts, what eventually broke them up. They would later accuse Phil Spector of shortchanging them by millions on earnings, but long before that he had done two things that had larger immediate consequences.
First, he swooped in on Ronnie, whom he would eventually marry, and peeled her away from the group as, quite literally by Ronnie’s later accounts, his private property.
Second, he made Estelle and Nedra almost musically irrelevant. Spector saw himself as the star of the records he produced, and while he featured a few vocalists like Ronnie and the Righteous Brothers, he considered most singers anonymous and interchangeable. By Ronnie’s account in her autobiography, Be My Baby, he didn’t bring Estelle and Nedra into the studio for most Ronettes sessions, and used other voices for the harmonies on a number of popular Ronettes records.
By late 1966, Nedra would later say, it didn’t feel like fun any more. The music had been subsumed under the pressure to find something commercial. Ronnie had disappeared into Phil Spector’s world, which Talley futilely warned her was a disaster waiting to happen. Even the Beatles tour was no fun, the music almost irrelevant behind the screaming.
In January 1967 Nedra and Estelle walked away, ending the original Ronettes. Ronnie would recruit replacements, but when she proposed a reunion of the originals in 1973, both Estelle and Nedra declined — Estelle because she wasn’t 21 any more, Nedra because she and Ross had found the Lord, started a family and left rock ’n’ roll behind.
It wasn’t until 2007, when the Ronettes were inducted into the Rock Hall, that Talley Ross joined Ronnie on stage to again sing “Be My Baby.” In her brief acceptance remarks that night, she called the biz a mixed experience, but had warm words for the Ronettes’s music and expressed confidence fans would still be listening to it in a hundred years.
Talley Ross spent many of her post-Ronettes years raising four children. After the kids grew up, she worked in real estate. Still, she didn’t completely give up singing. She cut a gospel album in 1978 and lent her voice to other projects, including a set organized by Roger McGuinn, a fellow 1960s rock ’n’ roller who had also declared himself a born-again Christian.
While the Ronettes’s breakup wasn’t without tension — neither Talley Ross nor Estelle Bennett were invited when Ronnie married Phil — Nedra did eventually re-establish a relationship with Ronnie. When Ronnie finally pried herself loose from Phil, she detoxed at Nedra and Scott’s home. Ronnie’s and Nedra’s respective remarks at the Rock Hall did not suggest they had recaptured their tight childhood bond — which Ronnie wrote in her autobiography included a fair amount of mischief — but it did suggest they still cared for each other from their very different worlds.
Besides making marvelous records, the Ronettes also were a central force in recasting the image of “girl groups.”
The standard to that point, still embraced by contemporaries like the Supremes, was to look demure and ladylike, as if the singers had just stepped out of charm school. Groups with that look, like the Chantels and Shirelles, still made wonderful music. The Ronettes just injected another option: the toughness and sexuality previously associated in rock ’n’ roll with the guys.
In her first life, Nedra Talley was part of that. In her second life, she was part of something else.
Good for her.
