A classical music prodigy turned hitmaker, Neil Sedaka released more than 1,000 compositions over the course of seven decades.
That classical training and talent proved excellent foundations for songwriting, and his ear for melody resulted in a vast catalogue of enduring pop hits including Oh! Carol, Calendar Girl and Stairway to Heaven. He died in Los Angeles last month at the age of 86.
Brooklyn-born Sedaka’s first ambition was to be a concert pianist. His innate ability to play by ear was discovered at the age of eight, when he sat down at a neighbour’s piano.
“The piano was and is my best friend,” Sedaka told GRAND Magazine in 2007. “I could pick out melodies by ear, and I first started listening to Martin Block’s Make Believe Ballroom with Rosemary Clooney, Patti Page, and Les Paul and Mary Ford.”
Sedaka was born to Eleanor Appel, who came from a Polish-Russian family, and Mac Sedaka, a taxi driver from the Lower East Side whose parents had immigrated to the States from Istanbul. He grew up in a cramped two-bedroom apartment with his older sister, parents, paternal grandparents and five aunts in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, New York. His contemporary Neil Diamond was also from the area, and Carole King, then known as Carol Klein, grew up nearby.
Of his fellow Jewish friends and neighbours who went into music, Sedaka told the JC in 2006, “We were the New York City group. Neil Diamond lived across the street… I knew [songwriters] Barry and Cynthia Mann from Brooklyn… I went to school with Mort Shuman, who wrote for Elvis… there was Carol Klein, whom I dated in high school, there was Barbra Streisand, there was little Paul Simon…”
Sedaka described himself as “a Jewish mama’s boy” in his 1982 autobiography, Laughter in the Rain, and he told the JC it is “wonderful to be able to call your mother your best friend.” Recognising her son’s prodigious talent, Eleanor had taken on a job at a department store to buy him a second-hand upright piano. Sedaka practised for several hours a day, and won a scholarship to the preparatory division of the Juilliard School of Music, where he studied for 12 years under Arthur Rubinstein.
Rubenstein described him as “one of the finest classical pianists in New York” and in 1956 chose him to perform Debussy and Prokofiev on the classical music radio station WQXR. At 16, he won best high-school pianist in New York City.
By that point he was already writing pop songs – with American lyricist Howard Greenfield, to whom he had been introduced at the age of 13. The 16-year-old son of a neighbour, Greenfield lived in the same Brighton Beach apartment complex.
The pair fast became a songwriting team – a partnership which continued until Greenfield’s death in 1986. They are said to have begun writing a song a day, which continued for nearly two years until they were signed by Aldon Music, the publishing company formed by Al Nevins and Don Kirshner. Nevins assigned them a room in the company’s Broadway office where they wrote their first major hit Stupid Cupid in 1958, with Where the Boys Are for Connie Francis following, and chart songs for Bobby Darin and Dinah Washington.
Sedaka was a founding member of the doo-wop group The Tokens in the Fifties, before they released the hit The Lion Sleeps Tonight. In 1959, he was signed as a singer by RCA, and it was his fourth single, Oh! Carol, a tribute to Carole King, that launched him as a singer. Performing the songs he composed with Greenfield – Sweet Sixteen, Calendar Girl and Breaking Up Is Hard to Do – Sedaka became the second-biggest-selling artist, next to Elvis Presley, from 1959 to 1963.
But the 1964 British invasion led by the Beatles put a sudden end to Sedaka’s chart reign.
After several years spent writing for others, he moved to the UK in the 1970s and made an impressive comeback. After making an album with 10cc – then unknowns – as his backing band, he was signed to Elton John’s new label Rocket Records, and his single Laughter in the Rain took him straight back to the top of the American charts in 1975. He also wrote Tony Christie’s revival hit, (Is This The Way to) Amarillo – the biggest selling single of 2005.
While Sedaka was not inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he had a street named after him in Brooklyn, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in 2010 was presented with an Ivor Novello Award recognising his 60-year career and “extraordinary musical legacy”.
In 2016, he released his last album, I Do It for Applause, and offered up more than 150 performances on YouTube during the pandemic.
He met his wife Leba Strassberg, who would become his manager, in 1958 in the Catskills where her parents, Esther and Irving owned a kosher hotel.
He is survived by Leba, their son Marc, and daughter Dara, with whom Sedaka released the hit Should’ve Never Let You Go in 1980.
Neil Sedaka, singer and songwriter, born March 13 1939; died February 27 2026
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