Joan Marie Johnson was a member of the Dixie Cups, three young women who began singing together during their elementary school days in New Orleans. Johnson, who has died aged 72, was joined in the trio by the sisters Barbara Ann Hawkins and Rosa Lee Hawkins; together they enjoyed a hit record, with Chapel of Love, that sold more than a million copies while topping the US charts for three weeks in the summer of 1964, briefly interrupting the dominance of the Beatles-led British invasion.
The Dixie Cups were New Orleans’s principal contribution to the girl-group movement, a phenomenon of the US pop scene in the early 1960s. Unlike rivals such as the Shirelles and the Ronettes, they did not have a strongly distinctive lead singer, and their moment in the spotlight was short-lived. But Chapel of Love, in particular, has retained its popularity, the innocence of its catchy mid-paced tune, simple harmonies and optimistic lyric ensuring its survival as an anthem for betrothed couples across a half-century in which divorce rates rose sharply.
Johnson and the Hawkins sisters, who were her cousins, had grown up on the same housing estate. After she invited them to form the group, they were spotted at a talent contest by Joe Jones, a New Orleans singer and producer who had achieved a Top 10 hit of his own with You Talk Too Much. In 1964, hoping to establish himself in New York, the hub of the music industry, Jones approached the successful songwriters and producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, whose work with Elvis Presley, the Drifters and many others had encouraged them to set up their own family of record labels. Jones brought with him the three young women then known as the Meltones, who were ushered into a recording studio with two proteges of Leiber and Stoller: Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, the husband-and-wife team whose hits already included the Crystals’ Da Doo Ron Ron and the Ronettes’ Be My Baby, both produced by Phil Spector.
Chapel of Love was a song they had co-written with Spector, who had recorded it with the Ronettes but did not think it worthy of release. Neither were Leiber and Stoller keen on the version Greenwich and Barry then cut with the three young singers from New Orleans; for their taste, it was too juvenile. But their new partner, the Mob-connected promotion man George Goldner, felt differently. On his uppers after losing a fortune – “10 or 15 million dollars” in Leiber’s recollection – at the racetrack, Goldner stayed up all night listening to a pile of unreleased material. The following morning he arrived in his partners’ office waving an acetate of Chapel of Love. “This is it,” he told them. “I’ll bet my life on it.”
By that time, in order to avoid confusion with the jazz singer Mel Tormé’s similarly named backing group, the Meltones had been renamed Little Miss and the Muffets. Before the record could be released, however, Stoller – mindful of their origins – came up with the name that stuck, and it was as the Dixie Cups that they scaled the US charts that summer, aided by Goldner’s mastery of the dark arts of record promotion.
People Say, another Greenwich-Barry composition, was less successful. It was during the session for the follow-up that Leiber and Stoller heard the girls singing Iko Iko, a Mardi Gras chant they had learnt from their grandmothers. With Barry and Greenwich supplying an impromptu percussion backing, and with a kalimba – an African thumb piano – as the only other instrument, it was recorded straightaway. Released as their fifth single in May 1965, it made the Top 20 in the US and, as had Chapel of Love, the Top 30 in Britain. The group undertook a tour of UK clubs that year, accompanied by another of Jones’s New Orleans proteges, the singer and guitarist Alvin Robinson.
Iko Iko would be their last hit. Less than a year after its release, Leiber and Stoller, who had never felt comfortable with the teen-slanted material that made their Red Bird label successful and were increasingly uneasy about their partner’s underworld connections, sold the label to Goldner for a dollar and watched from a safe distance as its fortunes plummeted.
Jones moved the Dixie Cups to ABC-Paramount, but without further success. Following a diagnosis of sickle-cell anaemia, Johnson left the group in 1966 and worked for BellSouth, the telecommunications company. She moved to Texas following the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but later returned to New Orleans, where the Dixie Cups were inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2007.
Married and divorced (her married name was Faust), she is survived by a sister, Ida, and a brother, Howard.
• Joan Marie Johnson, singer, born 15 January 1944; died 5 October 2016
