Almost before the five Bronx schoolgirls who called themselves the Chantels had finished their unaccompanied delivery of a song called The Plea in his office on Broadway one day in 1957, the record label owner George Goldner was fishing in his desk for a contract they could take home and show their parents. Within months the group were high in the charts with a ballad called Maybe, featuring the powerful lead voice of the 16-year-old Arlene Smith.
The Chantels set the pattern for the success of such “girl groups”, as they became known, as the Shirelles, the Crystals, the Chiffons, the Ronettes, and many more.
Smith, who has died aged 84, had formed the group four years earlier, recruiting fellow members of the choir at the St Anthony of Padua school in the Bronx, New York. With the school choir, she recalled singing in Latin, practising harmonies, and singing Gregorian chant. But with Jackie Landry, Renee Minus, Lois Harris and Sonia Goring, she moved into secular territory, singing standards such as Autumn Leaves and Summertime, to the nuns’ distress.
After growing up with parents who played Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughan records at home, Smith widened her listening to include such R&B singers as Shirley Gunter and Etta James. Listening to the boys in her neighbourhood practising their doo-wop harmonies on the street corners, and knowing that a local group called the Chords had made the national Top 10 with Sh-Boom in 1954, she felt the urge to match them.
“My thing was, ‘The guys are not the only ones who can do this,’” she told Laura Flam and Emily Sieu Liebowitz, the authors of But Will You Love Me Tomorrow? (2023), an oral history of girl groups. Their name was adapted from that of another local Catholic school, St Frances de Chantal.
They were not the very first of the girl groups. The Hearts, also from the Bronx, had an R&B hit with Lonely Nights in 1955, and the Bobbettes, from East Harlem, made the Top 10 of the pop chart with Mr Lee in 1957. But something about the ardour of Smith’s voice, and the richness of the group’s harmonies, set a template for what would become one of the most beloved of pop music’s sub-genres.
“I never wanted to sing girl songs and I never wanted that typical girl sound – my thing wasn’t cutesy,” Smith said. Shirley Owens of the Shirelles, Judy Craig of the Chiffons, Barbara Alston of the Crystals and Veronica Bennett (later Ronnie Spector) of the Ronettes were among those who took the lesson to heart. The finest girl-group records, although dedicated to the ups and downs of teenage romance, possessed an enduring emotional resonance.
After winning local talent contests, the group decided to go in search of Frankie Lymon, the 13-year-old singer who, with his group the Teenagers, had just enjoyed a smash hit with Why Do Fools Fall in Love?. Instead they found his manager, Richard Barrett. When they sang The Plea to Barrett, he thought they had “an angelic sound – I thought it would be really good to put a sound like that in rock and roll.”
It was he who introduced them to Goldner, on whose label their first records would appear: He’s Gone, written by Smith, and then Maybe, credited to Barrett and Goldner, which sold more than a million copies. A classic four-chord 12/8 doo-wop ballad, Maybe focused on what would become the classic girl-group theme, the desperate yearnings of the young heart.
Under Barrett’s supervision, the song took many takes to record, but after being given the initial impetus of Goldner’s expert use of payola, bribing radio programme directors and disc jockeys to give it airtime, it made a legitimate claim on the public’s imagination and went on to reach No 15 on the pop charts and No 2 on the R&B list.
On the strength of their hit, the group went on a nationwide tour. In the deep south, they found themselves playing a show to a white audience in the main auditorium followed by a second show for their black fans in the basement. Barrett, who travelled with them, did not allow them to mingle with older fellow artists, locking the doors to their dressing rooms and hotel bedrooms.
Each member was given a $20 a week allowance, but at the end of 1959 they were told that the record company was going out of business and that the earnings supposedly put aside for them did not exist. Goldner had gambled it away. “If you want to see the Chantels’ money,” Smith said, “go to the racetrack.”
She announced that she was leaving the group to start a solo career, which never caught fire, despite the release in 1961 of a song called Love Love Love produced by the 21-year-old Phil Spector. The others continued without her, but there would be no more significant hit records. Her former bandmate Minus commented: “My feeling is that the public fell so in love with all five of us and our sound together. Things were never the same after the split.”
Smith resumed her music studies at the Juilliard conservatory in New York. In 1973 she formed a version of the Chantels with two new members before taking a master’s in education and teaching music in Bronx schools until her retirement. It was at one of them that she was filmed for Heart & Soul (2023), Kenny Vance’s doo-wop documentary, in front of pupils astonished to discover who she had once been.
• Arlene Smith, singer, born 5 October 1941; died 29 July 2026
