Beverly "Ruby" Ross

Biography

Beverly Ross is a songwriter, singer, and musician whose career has carried her across 50 years of music, from the 1950s to the outset of the 21st century. Ross was born in Brooklyn, NY -- her family moved to the Bronx when she was five, into a new apartment that was vacant except for a piano, on which she discovered that she not only had perfect pitch but also a natural command of the keyboard. Ross started taking lessons a little later, and spent most of her early life in Lakewood, NJ. She was always winning poetry contests in addition to studying music, and her breakthrough into composing came when she was in junior high school and was approached by a group of high-school seniors who were putting on a play -- they were supposed to be doing a musical built (as this was a home economics class) around sewing, and Ross was recruited to set new words to the melodies of Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, George Gershwin, et al. The resulting play was not only a success, but opened the whole field of composition for Ross, who began to think in terms of writing songs for a career.

Later still, in her teens, she was living with a cousin in the Bronx, and heard that a lot of the songwriting business in New York was centered at the Brill Building, on Broadway and 49th Street. She brought her portfolio down and started hanging around at the building, meeting the people who came in and out, and eventually got to know enough of them that she gained entry into the business. Her earliest hits included the song "Dim Dim the Lights," which was among the very last successful singles released by Bill Haley & His Comets. Ross also had aspirations as a performer, and was part of a racially mixed duo called Ronald & Ruby with Lee Morris; it was under that name that she recorded "Lollipop," a song she had written with Julius Dixon -- their version got to number 20, but a rival recording by the Chordettes reached number two. Ross' subsequent hits as a composer included "Candy Man" (Roy Orbison), "Judy's Turn to Cry" (Lesley Gore), and "Remember Then" (the Earls). Her best-known song, however, is probably "The Girl of My Best Friend," which was a huge hit for Ral Donner in the United States, and became one of Elvis Presley's most popular LP tracks (as well as a hit for him in England). Ross has also written more ambitious and complex songs, and in 2009 was back in New York, ahead of the Broadway opening of her musical City of Lights, a story of Paris during the Nazi occupation. ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide