Darlene Love, the Voice Spector Sold Under Other Names, Finally Has a Film of Her Own

Darlene Love

Photo: Wes Washington / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 26, 1941 Los Angeles
Occupation	Singer
Awards	Grammy Award for Best New New Jack Swing Artist · Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

The most famous record Darlene Love made as a young woman carries another group’s name on the label. When “He’s a Rebel” went to the top of the American charts, the lead voice belonged to a session singer from Los Angeles, while the Crystals, stuck across the country, had to learn the song and promote it as their own. For years the pattern held: her voice on other people’s hits, her name in small print or nowhere. At 85 she has a documentary with her own name in the title, a holiday tour booked into December and a plain wish for a small room where “people really hear my voice.”

She was born Darlene Wright in Los Angeles on July 26, 1941, a minister’s daughter raised on gospel, and started singing in a church choir in Hawthorne at ten. Her younger sister, Edna Wright, would later front the soul group Honey Cone. In high school she sang with a doo-wop group, the Echoes, and was then invited into the Blossoms, a girl group that became one of the busiest vocal units in the Los Angeles studios.

In 1962 the Blossoms were booked for a Phil Spector session. His group, the Crystals, could not get to Los Angeles in time, so Wright sang lead on “He’s a Rebel.” Spector rushed it out on his Philles label under the Crystals’ name, and in November it reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. He then signed her and renamed her Darlene Love. Her next lead, “He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” also went out as a Crystals record; its co-writer Cynthia Weil only learned later whose voice it was: “I think it was a terrible thing to do to her.” Love’s own name did appear on “Today I Met the Boy I’m Gonna Marry” and “Wait ‘Til My Bobby Gets Home,” and she sang in Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, whose “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” made the top ten. Then came “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” written by Spector with Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich for Ronnie Spector and handed to Love when the song needed more force. It appeared on A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector in 1963 and took decades to become the song her life is measured by.

With the Blossoms she stood behind a remarkable share of the decade’s pop, from the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” to Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life,” and sang on Elvis Presley‘s 1968 comeback special. In the 1970s she spent about ten years singing backup for Dionne Warwick and grew close to Cissy Houston, who made her godmother to her daughter Whitney. Then the work thinned out, and Love stepped back to raise her children.

The turn she tells most often happened in a house in Beverly Hills, where she was working as a cleaner and “Christmas” came on the radio. “I just looked in the mirror and I said, ‘This is not what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m supposed to be singing,'” she told the Associated Press. Steven Van Zandt helped steer her to New York, where from 1982 she worked rooms like the Bottom Line, and she played herself in Leader of the Pack, the Broadway musical built on Ellie Greenwich’s songs. In December 1986 David Letterman asked her to sing the Christmas song on his late-night show, and she came back almost every year until December 2014, long enough for him to name her the Christmas Queen. Film audiences met her as Trish Murtaugh, Danny Glover’s wife, across the four Lethal Weapon films, and in 1990 she and her sister toured as Cher’s backing singers.

The public version of Darlene Love has become a gentle one: the grandmotherly voice who returns every December, grateful and unbothered. The record is harder. In 1993 she sued Spector for unpaid royalties and was awarded $250,000. Her solo albums, starting with Paint Another Picture in 1988, never became hits, and the holiday crown, affectionate as it is, fixes a singer of wide range to one song and one month. Even the film that brought her a new audience, 20 Feet from Stardom, which won the Oscar for best documentary and earned her a shared Grammy, placed her among the backup singers, the category her career spent fifty years trying to leave. Love will not play the victim. “I don’t carry that. Because I can’t. It’s too heavy a load,” she said this September. She is also blunt about Spector, who died in prison in 2021 while serving a murder sentence: “Phil Spector was afraid. He had a big mouth. He carried a gun.”

She played Motormouth Maybelle in Hairspray on Broadway from 2005 to 2008, until her husband told her that was enough. In 2011 Bette Midler inducted her into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Love thanked Spector from the stage for “making me the main voice in his Wall of Sound.” Introducing Darlene Love, released in 2015 on Van Zandt’s Wicked Cool Records, carried material from Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello. The Christmas song kept moving: to ABC’s The View, to a duet with Cher on her 2023 album Christmas, and since 2024 to The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, with Paul Shaffer and Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul behind her.

This year the stories finally got their own frame. Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been, directed by the Canadian documentary maker Barry Avrich and produced by Taraji P. Henson, had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 14, with Springsteen and the producer Lou Adler among those on screen. In April she sang “That’s What Friends Are For” with Warwick at the American Music Honors, and around her 85th birthday she told Rolling Stone she would like a residency at the Carlyle or in a small Las Vegas room, modelled on Springsteen’s Broadway show: a piano, a couple of background singers and the stories behind the Spector records.

Love has been married to Alton Allison since 1984, has three sons and splits her time between upstate New York, California and Jamaica, where her husband is from. Her 1998 memoir, My Name Is Love, written with Rob Hoerburger, told much of this story first.

Her Love for the Holidays tour opens at the Cabot in Beverly, Massachusetts, on November 27 and closes on December 23 at the Count Basie Center in Red Bank, New Jersey, where she joined the venue’s Walk of Fame last December. Whether she tours again in 2027 is open. “It depends on my husband and me,” she says. What she expects is less open: “I still feel there’s something coming.”

Selected Discography

It's Christmas, of Course (2007)
Paint Another Picture (2012)
Introducing Darlene Love (2015)

Tags: singers, soul, Darlene Love, Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), He's a Rebel, Phil Spector

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