Neil Sedaka

Neil Sedaka biography

Neil Sedaka (born March 13, 1939) is an American pop/rock singer, pianist, and composer. His career has spanned nearly 55 years, during which time he has sold millions of records as an artist and has written or co-written over 500 songs for himself and other artists, collaborating mostly with lyricists Howard Greenfield and Phil Cody.

Early life: Juilliard and the Brill Building

Sedaka was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Mac Sedaka (aka Sedacca), a taxi driver, was of Sephardic Turkish-Jewish descent. ("Sedaka" and "Sedacca" are variants of tzedaka, which translates in both Hebrew and Arabic as the word charity). Sedaka's mother, Eleanor (née Appel), was of Polish-Russian Jewish descent (or generally referred to as Ashkenazi-Jewish descent). He grew up in the then-heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach, which lies on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. Sedaka is a cousin of singer Eydie Gormé.

He demonstrated musical aptitude in his second-grade choral class, and when his teacher sent a note home suggesting he take piano lessons, his mother took a part-time job in an Abraham & Straus department store for six months to pay for a second-hand upright. In 1947, he auditioned successfully for a piano scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music's Preparatory Division for Children, which he attended on Saturdays. His mother wanted him to become a renowned classical pianist such as the contemporary of the day, Van Cliburn, but Sedaka was discovering pop music. When Sedaka was 13, a neighbor heard him playing and introduced him to her 16-year-old son, Howard Greenfield, an aspiring poet and lyricist. They became two of the legendary Brill Building's composers.

Sedaka and Greenfield wrote songs together throughout much of their young lives, with Sedaka going on to being a major teen pop star and the pair also writing hits for a litany of other artists as well as for Sedaka's own career. However, when The Beatles and the British Invasion took American music in a different direction, Sedaka was left without a recording career and decided a major change in his life was necessary, moving his family to Britain in the early 1970s. Sedaka and Greenfield mutually agreed that their partnership reached an end with "Our Last Song Together". Sedaka began a new composing partnership with British lyricist Phil Cody. After Sedaka returned to the US, however, the Sedaka-Greenfield team eventually reunited and continued until Greenfield's death in 1986.

Early career

Rise to fame with RCA Victor: the late 1950s

After graduating from Lincoln High School, Sedaka and some of his classmates formed a band called The Tokens. The band had minor regional hits with songs like "While I Dream", "I Love My Baby", "Come Back, Joe", and "Don't Go", before Sedaka launched out on his own in 1957. However, after a few personnel changes, in 1961, The Tokens would hit #1 on the Billboard pop charts with the international smash "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". Meanwhile, the very young Sedaka's first three solo singles, "Laura Lee", "Ring-a-Rockin'", and "Oh, Delilah!" failed to become hits (although "Ring-a-Rockin'" earned him the first of many appearances on Dick Clark's American Bandstand), but they demonstrated his ability to perform as a solo singer, so RCA Victor signed him to a recording contract.

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