Former singer for the Crystals, Barbara Alston, dies at 74

Barbara Alston, who sang “Da Doo Ron Ron” and contributed lead vocals for several hit songs by the Crystals, one of the most beloved “girl groups” of the early 1960s, has died at a hospital in Charlotte, N.C. She was 74.

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

Alston was not yet 18 when she became a founding member of the Crystals, a quintet of Brooklyn high schoolers organized in 1961 by her uncle, Benny Wells. More interested in choreography than singing, she nevertheless served as the band’s first lead vocalist, backed by singers Dolores “Dee Dee” Kenniebrew, Mary Thomas, Patricia Wright and Myrna Giraud.

According to the reference source All Music, Alston was pushed to the fore by producer Phil Spector, who was searching for up-and-coming acts for his newly formed label, Philles Records, and overheard a Crystals rehearsal at the Brill Building, a music industry hub in Manhattan.

Then 21, Spector was beginning to develop the richly orchestrated “wall of sound” style that would make him one of the 20th century’s most acclaimed producers. For the group’s earliest pop hits, he surrounded Alston’s alto voice with lush strings and guitars in songs such as “There’s No Other Like My Baby,” which peaked at No. 20 on the Billboard charts in 1962, and “Uptown,” a Latin-tinged single about the “sweet” charms of urban tenements.

Barbara Ann Alston was born in Baltimore on Dec. 29, 1943, and grew up in Brooklyn. She won a talent show with a group called the Delphi Thezonians — “Gag!” she later wrote, “nobody remembers how we came up with that ridiculous name or what it even means” — before joining the Crystals, named for a daughter of songwriter Leroy Bates.