Thanks for the (Do Wah) Diddies

Last night we were driving home listening to NPR (no, we don't own a Volvo or a Subaru) and found out that songwriter Ellie Greenwich had died.

I always hate it when you don't know how amazing someone is until they have passed. This is true for Greenwich because for better or worse, her catchy fun songs were what helped create the pop star state of music. The woman could write. Hot damn could she write, but most of us never knew her name. I am, however, grateful for her contribution to music. Not only are the songs catchy, but most of them are written in my alto range, which means I can sing my heart out to them, like my husband and I did in the car (and into the house) last night.

Sure, most of them were about boys (and all the heteronormative trappings therein), but she seemed to have some pretty smart thoughts on that:

I think, no matter how much of a feminist one claims to be…Lord knows, if you go by my songs, and the way my personal life has gone, you'd say, "Oh my, this lady was dreaming." It didn't exactly happen the way I was writing it. However, I would have liked it to have gone that way. I am a very firm believer in equality, women and men: if you can do the job, by all means go ahead and do it. But I still feel it would be nice if that romance can be there, birds could sing if you fell in love, and you could hear violins. I think that would be really terrific.

One of them was also used for one of my favorite movies ever. So with out further ado: