Ms. Weil was born on Oct. 18, 1940, in New York City, the youthful of two youngsters of Morris Weil, who owned a furnishings firm, and Dorothy (Mendez) Weil.
Growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and in a while the Upper East Side, she educated as an actress and dancer and dreamed of a life in theater, a topic she later majored in at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y.
“I used to be at all times fixated on Broadway,” she mentioned in a 2016 video interview with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “I wished to write down for Broadway, I had at all times pictured myself doing one thing on Broadway.”
She channeled these youthful longings into the lyrics for “On Broadway,” which she initially wrote from the perspective of a small-town woman dreaming of a future on the Great White Way — a dream that, the lyrics acknowledged, typically comes with dashed hopes:
They say the neon lights are shiny on Broadway
They say there’s at all times magic within the air
But whenever you’re strolling down the road
And you ain’t had sufficient to eat
The glitter rubs proper off and also you’re nowhere
Ms. Weil finally modified the music’s protagonist to a male for the Drifters’ model, which charted No. 9 as a single in 1962. Sixteen years later, George Benson lodged his personal jazz-inflected version at No. 7.
In addition to her husband and daughter, Dr. Mann, a psychologist, she is survived by two granddaughters.
Content Source: www.nytimes.com