Various Artists - Covered: Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, Volume 2: 1964-1977

I just posted Volume 1 of my Covered series collection of the best songs by the songwriter team Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. I'm wasting no time in posting the second and final volume.

I pretty much explained the basics of who Barry and Greenwich are in my first post, so please refer to that. (By the way, as I write this, Barry is still alive, while Greenwich died in 2009.) In short, this songwriting team had its heyday in 1963 and 1964, when they had dozens of hits. This volume catches the tail end of that.

Unfortunately, Barry and Greenwich were married in 1962, but they divorced in 1966. They continued to work together through the late 1960s, but more as producers instead of songwriters. The vast majority of the songs here come from after their split, and they find Barry and Greenwich either writing solo or with other songwriting partners.

As I mentioned in my notes for volume 1, the two of them were experts at a very poppy sound, and they were most successful when the "Girl Group" trend was big. Changing musical tastes made it harder for them to have success with this sound. They continued to have production success in the late 1960s with musicians still using that earlier poppy sound, such as Neil Diamond, the Monkees, and the Archies. But those acts didn't actually use many songs written by Barry and/or Greenwich, whith the notable exception of "Sugar, Sugar," which was one of the biggest hits of 1969. I've used a version by Wilson Pickett instead of the more familiar Archies version, because the Archies version is so sweet and poppy, as well as overplayed, that some people can't stand it.

In the 1970s, musical tastes continued to change, moving even further away from the kind of songs that Barry and Greenwich were so talented at writing. Thus it's not surprising that their chart success continued to peter out. Some of their later hits were actually written earlier. For instance, "Sunshine After the Rain" was a big hit for Elkie Brooks in 1977, but it first appeared on a Greenwich solo album in 1966 (one of only two solo album she did, by the way).

They did have some other successes that I didn't include her beyond the 1970s, mostly in the country music field. I didn't include any of those songs because I thought they weren't strong enough.

01 People Say (Dixie Cups)
02 Don't Ever Leave Me (Connie Francis)
03 Out in the Streets (Shangri-Las)
04 You Don't Know (Ellie Greenwich)
05 The Train from Kansas City (Shangri-Las)
06 River Deep, Mountain High (Ike & Tina Turner)
07 I'm Nobody's Baby Now (Reparata & the Delrons)
08 Friday Kind of Monday (Meantime)
09 How'd We Ever Get This Way (Andy Kim)
10 I Can Hear Music (Beach Boys)
11 Long Time Comin' (Bimbi Worrick)
12 Sugar Sugar (Wilson Pickett)
13 I'm in Love (Archies)
14 Montego Bay (Bobby Bloom)
15 Heavy Makes You Happy [Sha-Na-Boom-Boom] (Staple Singers)
16 I Honestly Love You (Olivia Newton-John)
17 Sunshine After the Rain (Elkie Brooks)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15259441/CoveredBrryGreenwch_1964-1977_Volum2_atse.zip.html

I continue to be frustrated finding good color photos of songwriters, especially songwriter teams, where I want to catch them together. I did find some color photos of Barry and Greenwich, post-2000, when they were accepting various awards. But they were showing their age by then, and that was far removed in time from 1977 and earlier.

The best I could do was find some photos of them at some undetermined earlier time period, and put the photos together. The Greenwich portion of the photo comes from 1988. I'm not sure when the Barry portion was taken, but he looks younger than he did in those awards appearances I mentioned earlier. So this cover art is kind of Frankensteined together. Don't look at it too closely! ;) Hopefully, it's pass until something better comes along. There must be some color photos of them together somewhere.