Ronnie Spector in Rock Gomorrah
With an Irish American father and a mother half black and half Native American no one in east Harlem could tell what Ronnie, born Veronica Bennett, was. Or they knew all they needed to on sight, calling Ronnie or her sister Estelle halfbreeds and high yellow. “Halfbreed” is what Ronnie calls herself throughout her memoir, in an unaffected way that says she has either claimed it or simply no longer feels the sting. They got beat up a lot, and because of that Mom made them stay inside so they wouldn’t run into the neighborhood kids.
So, sent over to their grandmother’s because both parents worked late, they’d sit on the stoop and harmonize. To Ronnie, no one started out wanting to make money; singing was just something that people in her family did. There were around six of them: sisters Ronnie and Estelle, three cousins, Nedra Talley among them, and a boy cousin, Ira. It was the fifties. Singing was a hobby, what you did when you couldn’t afford bikes or roller skates. All Ronnie’s aunts and uncles sang, her father was an unsuccessful drummer. It seemed the whole family was musical.
Ronnie Spector in Rock Gomorrah follows the life of Veronica Bennett from a street in Spanish Harlem to a La Collina mansion, tracing along the way the allure of “black” music in the white mind and the cost that comes with being held there.
Praise
"Ronnie Spector in Rock Gomorrah does incredible work not just to honor the often washed away history of Ronnie Spector, but also builds an entire ecosystem of black music history and its wide and far reach. The language is as musical as its subjects, but does not sacrifice a narrative arc. So much of the writing is pointing at the large and immovable sins of the American Rock N' Roll Machine, but it is done with so much care and nuance. A teaching tool and a song, all at once."
— Hanif Abdurraqib
"Much like the legend who carries its title, Ronnie Spector in Rock Gomorrah is equal parts entrancing, winsome, and tragic. The author tells small, lyrical stories, striking that tough-but-all-important balance between the intimate and the new. They make strangers of someones we thought we knew—Howlin' Wolf, Little Richard, and most of all Spector herself—then rebuilds them in our imaginary as the kind of friend we might like to share a secret with."
— Eve Ewing