Lesley Gore (2 May 1946 - 16 February 2015)
Lesley was the youngest of our four artists.  Her meteoric rise to stardom is the stuff of legend.  Later in life she joked that she wasn't an overnight success -- it took a few days!  She began singing and recording her voice at a very early age, under the tutelage of her father, Leo.  Structured voice lessons began when she was 15.

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Eventually she made a few rough demo recordings with her vocal instructor.  Through an improbable process, these recordings eventually made their way to Irving Green, President of Mercury Records.  He passed them along to young, up-and-coming producer Quincy Jones.

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On Saturday, March 30, 1963, 16-year-old Lesley recorded four songs for Jones (who nicknamed her "Little Bits").  One of those tunes was "It's My Party," which Jones quickly sent out to regional radio stations on Monday.  By Wednesday, it was already generating tremendous airplay.  "It's My Party" entered the National charts on May 11 at #60, and later that month reached #1.  Lesley Gore was now the most famous teenage girl in the country.

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An impressive string of 20 consecutive memorable songs followed, each charting.

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Unfortunately, by the end of the decade, the party was over.  Tastes in popular music had been changing rapidly.  As with so many solo artists of that period, the pop queen fell victim to the British Music Invasion with its emphasis on groups rather than solo performers.

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She continued nevertheless to enjoy a long and productive career as a singer and songwriter.  Her last album was released in 2005.

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Connie Francis (12 December 1937)
Connie owes a great deal of her success as "America's Sweetheart" to two men:  her father, George Franconero, and Dick Clark.  She too was a teenager when she secured her first recording contract with MGM Records:  two years, ten 2-sided 45-rpm singles.  But her early career went poorly -- her first nine singes "went nowhere."  In 1957 she was informed by MGM that her contract would not be renewed after the last single.

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At the end of that last session, she had but 16 minutes of recording time left on the tape.  She had already begun mentally preparing herself for a career away from music.  Reluctantly, but at her father's insistence, she recorded a "modernized" version of a song originally written in 1923 -- "Who's Sorry Now?"  Connie disliked the song, thinking it "too square" for the younger crowd.  Even MGM had previously advised her, "Tell your ol' man to stick to his roofing business."
 

In October "Who's Sorry Now?" was released, initially to scant attention, as Connie had predicted.  But in early 1958, Dick Clark began promoting the song on his television shows American Bandstand and The Saturday Night Beechnut Show.  Before she knew it, she was world-famous, her beautiful voice loved by all.  An amazing 46 albums followed in the decade between 1958 and 1968.

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Connie's reign as "princess of rock and roll" was also relatively short, ending before the mid-60s -- another victim of changing times and the British Music Invasion.  But because of the variety and range of her repertoire, she is to this day a well-known and popular international star.

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Dusty Springfield (16 April 1939 - 2 March 1999)
Dusty joined her first professional singing group, The Lana Sisters, in 1958 when she was 19.  Two years later, in 1960, she and her brother Dion (Tom Springfield) dormed The Springfields, a folk trio, which had moderate success, recording five Top-40 songs in the UK.  Then in late 1963 Dusty took her distinctive mezzo-soprano voice, filled with emotion and sensuality, and became a solo artist, recording her first LP, A Girl Called Dusty.  She quickly became a fixture on the AM airwaves as a singer of blue-eyed soul, powerful 60s pop and dramatic ballads.

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One of the highlights of her solo recording career was the single "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me," originally an Italian love song she heard performed at the San Remo Music Festival.  Recorded in 1966 with new English lyrics, it became her biggest hit.  Another highlight was her LP Dusty in Memphis which received critical acclaim for its pared-down music with Dusty's soulful voice "out front," rather than competing with orchestral arrangements.  "Son Of A Preacher Man" was the most famous song from those recording sessions.

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Dusty was a mainstay on the music charts until the end of the decade.  Her distinctive look -- hairstyles, heavy eye makeup, evening gowns, and stylized gestural performances -- helped make her an icon of the "Swinging Sixties."  Even after her years as a Top-40 artist, Dusty had a long and successful international career for three more decades.  She was inducted posthumously into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999.

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Petula Clark (15 November 1932)
Petula is the eldest of our four singing stars.  As you might expect, she began her career well before the others.  Singing as a child during the Blitzkrieg bombings of London during WWII, her voice helped to settle jittery underground theater audiences.  Those impromptu engagements led to a series of about 500 performances on radio programs to entertain the troops, and she frequently toured the UK with friend and fellow child performer Julie Andrews.

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After the war, Petula launched a successful acting and singing career, and eventually became well-known throughout Europe, singing popular hit records in German, French, Italian and Spanish.

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Despite all the success on the Continent, however, her career in her native England began to founder.  Encouraged to record more in English, she was teamed up with composer/arranger Tony Hatch who wanted music for Petula that would appeal to younger 1960s listeners and record buyers without alienating fans she already had.

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That would seem to be no small task for a vocalist accustomed to perfoming with orchestral arrangements.  "The trick," Hatch conceded, " was to try to make a giant orchestra sound like a rock band."  Ironically, one of the session guitarists for their first record together was Jimmy Page, later one of the founders of Led Zeppelin.

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The results proved irresistable.  Her first hit "Downtown" exploded onto the airwaves in 1965, and 32-year-old Petula Clark embarked on the most popular phase of her career as the "First Lady of the British Invasion."  She never looked back.  From that auspicious debut she went on to be known and loved world-wide, not only as a recording star, but also for her appearances on stage, on television and in film.  She continues to act and sing to this day.

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Cellar Full of Noise Entertainment considers it nothing less than a travesty that Lesley Gore, Connie Francis and Petula Clark have not joined Dusty Springfield as members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  Their contributions to pop music, especially in the 1960s (and late 50s), are clear and indisputable.

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Grateful appreciation to Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Brittanica online, the Connie Francis web page and You Don't Own Me by Trevor Tolliver for parts of the above information.