Barbara Alston

Original lead singer with successful 1960s American girl group the Crystals

Barbara Alston, a founding member of the 1960s girl group the Crystals, who sang lead on the band’s first two hits, There’s No Other Like My Baby and Uptown, died on 16 February in Charlotte, North Carolina. She was 74.

The cause was complications of flu, her daughter Donielle Prophete said.

Alston was a choir-trained teenager in Brooklyn, New York, when she formed the Crystals with high school friends. Their harmonious songs, often about young romance, were like those of many other popular all- female R&B vocal groups in the early 1960s.

Producer Phil Spector signed the Crystals in 1961, and they became an early example of his dense, layered “wall of sound” production style. Alston’s clear, bright voice made her a natural lead for the wistful There’s No Other Like My Baby, which reached No.20 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in 1961. The group’s second single, Uptown (1962), an upbeat number about the consolations of tenement life, reached No.13 on the chart.

Their only chart-topping hit, He’s a Rebel (1962), was actually sung by the Blossoms, whose lead singer was Darlene Love; Spector released it as a Crystals record because he thought the song would be more successful if it came from an established group.

Alston moved into the background when Dolores Brooks became lead singer for the Crystals’ later hits. She left the Crystals in 1965 to raise her son. The group broke up in 1967.

Barbara Ann Alston was born in Baltimore on 29 December, 1943. She moved to Brooklyn with her mother.

Her two marriages ended in divorce. She is survived by a sister, two daughters, two sons, five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

Her son Tony, who was transgender, was shot and killed in 2010 in a case that has not been solved. New York Times 2018. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service