YEAR
1996
INDUCTED BY
Darlene Love, Merry Clayton, Marianne Faithful
CATEGORY
Performers
The girls next door sang like a heavenly chorus.
The Shirelles were the honey-voiced purveyors of Fifties and Sixties hits. “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”—the first girl group song to hit Number One—remains a girl group classic to this day.
HALL OF FAME
ESSAY
By Mike Hill
When Laura Nyro and Labelle resurrected the Shirelles’ “I Met Him on a Sunday” on Gonna Take a Miracle, a collection of R&B faves from Nyro’s youth, there was nothing nostalgic about the tune.
The lyrics, which had the feel of jump-rope rhymes, came across as a sort of plainspoken street poetry, a wistfully romantic chronicle of fleeting and fickle desire.
More from the class of 1996