The stroke of fortune that turned Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich into singers and Jeff into a producer started with a song, “What a Guy”, written by the husband and wife team for the Sensations, a doo-wop girl group out of Philadelphia. Jeff and Ellie recorded the demo. What they didn’t know was that Lieber and Stoller thought the demo was good enough to release on the Jubilee label, and they surprised Jeff and Ellie when they told them they needed to come up with a name for the band. Ellie picked the Raindrops in honor of her favorite Dee Clark record. No one was more surprised than Ellie when her voice appeared on the radio in heavy rotation a few weeks later.
The Raindrops: “What a Guy”