Arlene Smith, the co-founder and lead singer of The Chantels who wrote and sang the lead vocal on the group’s classic 1957 hit Maybe, has died at 84.
Smith had been in and out of hospital before dying Wednesday of natural causes at a rehabilitation centre in her hometown of New York City, her friend Matt Beckoff told The Hollywood Reporter.
Born on 5 October 1941, Smith received classical training as a child and performed at Carnegie Hall at just 12 years old.
She and four schoolmates, Lois Harris, Sonia Goring, Jackie Landry and Renée Minus, had been singing together for years in the choir of Saint Anthony of Padua on Prospect Avenue in the Bronx before auditioning for record producer Richard Barrett, a member of the doo-wop group The Valentines, in the summer of 1957.
Signed to End Records shortly afterwards, the group released their debut single, He’s Gone, written by Smith about a boyfriend while she was practising piano, which peaked modestly on the charts.
Their follow-up, Maybe, recorded at a church in midtown Manhattan and released that December, became a genuine sensation, climbing to No. 15 on the pop chart and No. 2 on the Billboard R&B chart and making The Chantels one of the first female R&B vocal groups to achieve nationwide success.
In 2003, Rolling Stone placed Maybe at No. 199 on its list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.”
The group’s success helped pave the way for later girl groups including The Shirelles, whose singer Shirley Alston Reeves once said of The Chantels: “They were our inspiration.”
Smith left the group in 1959 to pursue a solo career, though she later reunited with surviving original members for occasional performances, including a dedication of Maybe to bandmate Jackie Landry during a 1990s PBS special following Landry’s death in 1997.
The Chantels were inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2002.
