Singer with the Ronettes girl group who renounced show business for gospel music
Her sweet smile made Nedra Talley Ross the odd one out in the Ronettes, whose other two members, her cousins Veronica and Estelle Bennett, faced the world with sultry stares as they climbed the pop charts in 1963 with their first hit, Be My Baby.
All three, however, shared a look borrowed from the tough girls in Spanish Harlem, the New York neighbourhood where they had grown up: piled-up hairdos, heavy eye makeup and slinky, shiny, skin-tight dresses.
Talley Ross, who has died aged 80, was with the group when they toured Britain in 1964, supporting the Rolling Stones and meeting the Beatles at a party. A great deal of flirting, and in some cases more than that, went on between the American girls and the English groups, but Nedra Talley, as she was then called, had already met a New York disc jockey named Scott Ross, whom she would marry in 1967, following her departure from the Ronettes, and with whom she would become a born-again Christian.
Be My Baby was masterminded by the producer Phil Spector, who brought resources unprecedented in pop music to three-minute singles he described as “little symphonies for the kids”, and it became the dramatic opening to a string of Spector-produced successes for the trio of mixed-race girls from New York. Their follow-ups included Baby I Love You (1963), Walking in the Rain (1964) and Born to Be Together (1965), all of them featuring the striking lead voice of Veronica, soon better known as Ronnie.
