Lesley Gore, the singer whose 1963 recording of “It’s My Party” made her a teenage pop star, died of lung cancer in New York City on February 16, 2015. She was 68. Her career extended well beyond that hit: she recorded songs including “You Don’t Own Me,” graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, co-wrote the Oscar-nominated “Out Here On My Own” for Fame, and later worked in theater and television.
How Lesley Gore became a pop star
Born Lesley Sue Goldstein in Brooklyn on May 2, 1946, Gore grew up in Tenafly, New Jersey. In 1963, when she was 16, her voice teacher made demonstration recordings that reached Quincy Jones at Mercury Records. Jones recorded and produced her version of “It’s My Party,” with an arrangement by Claus Ogerman. The Television Academy describes it as Jones’s first smash single as a producer.
“It’s My Party” tells a compact story of birthday-party heartbreak: Johnny arrives with Judy, who is wearing his ring. The song was written by Walter Gold, John Gluck Jr. and Herb Weiner for publisher Aaron Schroeder. TIME reported that the single was released March 30, 1963, and reached No. 1 within four weeks; the Los Angeles Times reported that it spent two weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Those chart details are historical positions reported by the publications, not figures cited here from Billboard’s own records.
The songs that followed
“Judy’s Turn to Cry” and the teen-story hits
Gore followed “It’s My Party” with “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” a continuation of its love-triangle story. TIME reported that the follow-up reached No. 5. Other early-1960s singles included “Maybe I Know” and “She’s a Fool,” adding to a hitmaking run that could easily overshadow the range of work she did later.
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“You Don’t Own Me”
Written by John Madara and David White, “You Don’t Own Me” became another signature recording. The Los Angeles Times reported that it reached No. 2 in early 1964. Its insistence on independence offered a different kind of voice from the teenage dramas of her first hits. Gore later recalled: “My take on that song was: I’m 17, what a wonderful thing, to be able to stand up on a stage and shake your finger at people and sing you don’t own me.” Biography.com reproduced the remark from an interview.
She kept studying and became a songwriter
Gore continued her education while performing and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1968. TIME quoted her explaining why she stayed in school: “It would be very foolish of me to leave school to go into such an unpredictable field on a full-time basis.”
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She went on to develop as a songwriter, recording two albums of material written with Ellen Weston. In 1980, she returned to New York and worked with her younger brother, composer Michael Gore, on songs for Alan Parker’s film Fame. Their song “Out Here On My Own” was recorded as a hit by Irene Cara and received an Academy Award nomination. Gore co-wrote it; she was not the singer on the film hit.
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Gore’s later career included theater and cabaret, a 1999 Broadway run in Smokey Joe’s Café, and the 2005 album Ever Since. That year, she came out publicly and hosted episodes of PBS’s LGBTQ newsmagazine In the Life. The New York Public Library’s finding aid describes her advocacy for women’s and LGBTQ rights and documents her long-term partnership with Lois Sasson.
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The NYPL collection description lists an extensive archive of Gore’s papers and recordings: 20.38 linear feet in 70 boxes, plus 6.9 gigabytes across 743 computer files, 257 audio recordings and 87 moving-image recordings. These figures describe the collection as cataloged by the library, not her record sales or audience size.
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Sources
- Television Academy biography of Lesley Gore
- New York Public Library finding aid for the Lesley Gore papers
- TIME obituary, 2015
- Los Angeles Times obituary, 2015
- Biography.com biography of Lesley Gore
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