The Chantels broke the mould of doo-wop when they became the first million-selling all-girl group, inspiring a wave of imitators.

Back in the year I was born, five Bronx schoolgirls became the first female group to challenge the previously male bastion of doo-wop. This song – Maybe – sold more than a million copies and launched the “girl group” sound.

The Chantels’ breakthrough hit sparked a wave of copycat girl groups like The Crystals, and The Chiffons, The Ronettes, The Shangri-Las and The Shirelles, produced and popularised by Phil Spector.

Ronnie Spector recalled hearing Smith’s “electrifying” voice as a 14-year-old on her grandmother’s radio – “It was heartfelt and pure girl power” – and both she and Shirley Alston Reeves, lead singer of The Shirelles, credited The Chantels as their inspiration.

Arlene Smith formed the group while singing hymns in Latin in the choir at her Catholic convent school in the Bronx, recruiting her fellow members of the girls’ basketball team.

Their harmonies grew out of their regular post-game sing-songs in the girls’ changing room, where they would adapt doo-wop hits of the day like Sh-Boom by The Chords and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers’ Why Do Fools Fall In Love?

Striking an early blow for feminism, and to the chagrin of the nuns, Smith would later say: “My thing was: the guys are not the only ones who can do this… the uniqueness of our group was that we were young women who had a pop sound.”

Although preceded by another Bronx girl-group, The Hearts, who had a minor hit with Lonely Nights in 1955, Smith was the first to write her own songs, sparking a wave of copycat groups with The Chantels’ 1957 debut recording, He’s Gone.

She was 15 when she wrote it about a boyfriend while doing her piano practice, and and Maybe – recorded in a Manhattan church rather than a studio – was another classic tale of teenage romance and heartbreak.

Her powerful lead voice. backed by the rich soaring harmonies of Lois Harris, Sonia Goring, Jackie Landry and Rene Minus, had an emotional intensity that may have been owed to the 52 takes that reduced her to tears.

The first million-selling record by an all-girl group, it was later covered by artists ranging from The Three Degrees to Janis Joplin. The Chantels made their stage debut at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, and toured the US with Chuck Berry, The Drifters and Ike & Tina Turner.

In the Deep South, they were forced to play separate shows to black and white audiences, and frequently received death threats; incredibly, when their first album was replaced, the cover depicted not the five black girls who sang it, but two white teenagers and a jukebox.

Yet for all their success, they received little financial reward from their (white) manager, George Goldner, who gave them a meagre $20-a-week allowance and gambled away their profits at the racetrack until his label folded.

By the early Sixties, when Spector’s stable of girl-groups ruled the airwaves, Smith had left to launch a solo career that never really took off. Undaunted, she enrolled at the prestigious Juilliard music school to study music theory and composition, before retraining as a teacher in the Bronx.

Yet for all the racism and rip-offs, she recalled her spell in the pop limelight fondly. “It was fun. I was 16, you sit next to your buddy on the (tour) bus, read, crochet, do your homework, look out at scenery, sleep, eat. 

“I didn’t have a care in the world because I was doing exactly what I wanted to do.”