Arlene Smith, founder and singer of the Chantels, died

A singer Arlene Smith, founder and the main voice of the Chantels, American female pioneer group of the 1950s, died at the age of 84, revealed on Thursday his agent, Paul Errante, to the Associated Press agency.

Paul Erranta, a close friend of hers, was one of the first stars of the girls groups, said that the singer died of a heart attack on Wednesday in a New York City hospital.

Male vocal groups, from Drifters to Dion and the Belmonts, were common in early rock years, but female groups — especially black women — were rare until the late 1950s.

Artists such as Chantels and Bobbettes have achieved success and helped give rise to a wave of female groups in the next decade, including Shirelles, Ronettes and Crystals.

“ My idea was: it is not only the boys who can do this,” said the co-author of hits like “Maybe”, recorded in an impromptu studio in a Manhattan church, a simple and begging ballad that Smith sang with an exhaustive force, partly because the group had to repeat it more than 50 times.

The 1958 release was a hit on the Top 20, which eventually sold over a million copies, and was rerecorded by Janis Joplin and the Three Degrees, among other groups.

Smith and the Chantels were elected to the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2002, a year before the specialized magazine Rolling Stone ranked “Maybe” number 199 on the list of the 500 best songs in the magazine.

“ With ‘Maybe’, Arlene Smith imbued his voice with so much determined naivety that it transformed all the anxiety of a doomed relationship into a fervent desire for its rebirth,” says the criticism of the time.

Chantels had a few more hits, including “Every Night (I Pray)” and “Look In My Eyes”, but never matched the success of “Maybe”.

Smith left the group in 1959, around the bankruptcy of his publisher, and worked briefly with producer Phil Spector, recording the single "Love, Love, Love".

His career, however, quickly faded and, in the 1970s, away from the other ‘Chantels? originals, went on tour with a new cast of supporting singers.

Arlene Smith eventually obtained a master's degree in education and taught music to elementary school students in New York City before retiring in the 2000s. She never married or had children.

The Chantels were pioneers, and therefore attached to the conventions of the time: Smith's name was initially omitted from the credits of “Maybe”, a common copyright violation in the music industry of the 1950s, and the cover of his first album, “We Are the Chantels”, originally presented a group photograph, but was changed to show an image of two white young people bent on a “jukebox”.

“There was a lot going on in the country,” Smith told The New York Times in 1995, adding that “there was much to overcome,” but that he never wanted to sing “girl songs” and that instead he was attracted to male groups whose “harmonies were so rich and full.”.

When he was a girl, Smith attended St. Anthony's School of Padua in the Bronx neighborhood of New York, and began singing with choirmates Sonia Goring, Renée Minus, Jackie Landry and Lois Harris, in the early 1950s, when they were all in their early teens.

They named the group after a nearby school and rival in basketball, St. Frances de Chantal, and perfected a complex singing style, partly by dominating Gregorian songs.

The Chantels sang in several local talent contests and achieved professional success in 1957, when Richard Barrett, producer and leader of the male vocal group The Valentines, recommended them to George Goldner, owner of End Records.

His debut single, “He’s Gone”, was released in the summer of that year, and “Maybe” — which is believed to have been written by Barrett and Smith — was released months later and helped the group tour with artists from Chuck Berry to Ike and Tina Turner.