By JASON PONTEROTTO
Legendary lead vocalist Arlene Smith of the Bronx’s own Chantels died of a cardiac arrest on July 29 at age 84. Laurence Smith, her cousin, said she spent her final years at Bronx Care on Grand Concourse.
Smith, an original member and songwriter for the all-girl doo wop group, was responsible for singing and co-writing hits like “Maybe” in 1957. The group served as inspiration and paved the way for other groups like the Crystals, the Ronettes, both from New York, and the Shirelles from New Jersey, and are credited with helping lay the groundwork for modern rock ’n’ roll and R&B.
Raised in the Morrisania neighborhood, Smith began singing early on. With her classmates at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic School, which closed in 1977, she formed the group with Sonia Goring Wilson, Jackie Landry Jackson, Lois Harris, and Renée Minus White, who is a fashion contributor for the Amsterdam News and has continued singing with the Chantels to this day.
“We didn’t go into it for the money or anything like that,” White said about the group. “We just loved to sing together.”
The girls got together and would copy groups like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers from Harlem, performing songs like “Why Do Fools Fall In Love” or The Five Satins’ “In the Still of the Night.” They had been taught classically in their school choir, learning skills from the choir masters, and would sing on the street corners outside of school, because White said they would be in trouble with the nuns if caught singing those types of songs.
“Everybody was singing. It wasn’t just us,” White said about the time, as she recalls some even showing jealousy at times of their success, “but we had a special sound because we came from the school choir.”
Smith had been trained at Carnegie Hall, and the girls’ musical influences were classical and Latin music. They auditioned for Richard Barrett, who also discovered the Teenagers and signed them to End Records.
They recorded the harmonic ballad “Maybe,” co-written by Smith, Barrett, and others in a small studio in a midtown church in October 1957, about pleading for a lost lover to return. After being released in December, the song became a major hit, reaching No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 2 on the R&B charts. It became the first song by a harmonic urban women’s group to sell 1 million records.
The success of the song was massive for the group as they began touring. White said it was a culture shock to witness segregation and racism when they would perform down south, since they had only vaguely heard about those such instances.
Smith eventually left the group in 1959 to pursue a solo career. White said the group never truly hit the highs they were supposed to because they weren’t together as a unit for long, and would have other lead singers over the years. Today, White’s daughter Naomi sings as lead and says she is startled by how much her voice reminds her of Smith when she sings “Maybe.”
White said she stayed close with Smith all these years, talking on the phone regularly. She has been the fashion and beauty editor for the AmNews since 1975 and said she had the support of Smith. She wrote about the full story of the group in her book, “Maybe: My Memoir.”
“She knew I wanted to be a fashion writer,” White said. “I talked to Arlene about that when I was like 11, 12.”
Years after leaving the group, Smith became a teacher at PS 157 in the same neighborhood where she grew up, and had been retired for over a decade.
Fordham Professor Dr. Mark Naison, who created the Bronx African American History Project, credited Smith and the Chantels as one of the main pioneering acts that reshaped music history.
“[Arlene] was one of many great African American singers and songwriters to come out of the Bronx’s Morrisania neighborhood in the 1950s and 1960s, permanently changing popular music in the U.S. and globally,” Naison said.
Vince Aschettino, a long-time friend of more than 50 years, said he had been a fan since 1957. “Her voice changed my life,” Aschettino said. “Because of her music, I met my high school sweetheart.”
He fondly remembers seeing the Chantels perform in Brooklyn venues as a teenager. “I have all the records; I played them constantly. I had to buy the remakes because I wore them out.”
As a music promoter, Aschettino eventually met and befriended Smith in the early 1970s and said he would book her for shows over the years. He said he introduced her to jazz legend Dakota Staton in 1976, which began a long-time friendship between the two until Staton’s death in 2007.
The group was inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2002 and nominated in both 2001 and 2009 for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, although yet to be inducted. In 2019, they had a street named after them at the corner of Prospect Avenue and East 166th Street in the Bronx.
According to White, the Chantels’ music has stood the test of time. “You’re falling in love with what we sang and the way we sang it … That’s where the babies were made,” White said. “It was special because what we did, we did together.”
