Darlene Love: From “Rebel” to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

February 21, 2021

Pop icon and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Darlene Love was honored at the 32nd Annual Bistro Awards on Monday, March 13, 2017, receiving the ASCAP-Bob Harrington Lifetime Achievement Award for her five decades of musical accomplishments.

Rolling Stone has called Love “one of the greatest singers of all time,” and The New York Times stated that “her thunderbolt voice is as embedded in the history of rock and roll as Eric Clapton’s guitar or Bob Dylan’s lyrics.”

Love began her professional career in the early 1960s singing backup for artists including Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, Frank Sinatra, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, the Righteous Brothers, and Dionne Warwick—either solo or as the lead member of the girl group The Blossoms; as part of Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” hit factory, she and The Blossoms appeared weekly on TV’s Shindig. This set the stage for the emergence of Love as a solo star.

She was featured on Broadway in Leader of the Pack, Carrie, Grease, and Hairspray; on screen in all three versions of Lethal Weapon and in the Academy Award-winning documentary Twenty Feet from Stardom.

Her top hits include “He’s a Rebel,” “The Boy I’m Gonna Marry,” ‘Wait Till My Bobby Gets Home,” “He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” and the holiday classic “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” a song that she performed for over 30 consecutive years on the Late Show with David Letterman.

She has recorded more than 20 albums and more than three dozen singles. In 2011, she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, introduced by longtime friend Bette Midler. Her most recent album, Introducing Darlene Love, was produced by Steven Van Zandt, with songs written expressly for her by such renowned songwriters as Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, and Jimmy Webb.


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