Music History Monday: Cass Elliot and the Making of an Urban Legend

We mark the death of Cass Elliot on July 29, 1974 – 50 years ago today – in an apartment at No. 9 Curzon Street in London’s Mayfair District.  Born on September 19, 1941, she was just 32 years old at the time of her death.

Brief Biography

Cass Elliot was born Ellen Naomi Cohen in Baltimore, Maryland.  According to her biography, “all four of her grandparents were Russian-Jewish immigrants.”

The Pale of Settlement

(Parenthetically, I grew up hearing that all four of my great-grandparents were, likewise, from “Russia,” which created a misunderstanding that I carried around with me until my twenties.  As it turns out, in this case, “from Russia” actually means from the Pale of Settlement, that part of the western region of the Russian Empire where Jews were allowed to live.  Today, the territory that encompassed the Pale includes all of Belarus and Moldova, much of Ukraine and Lithuania, part of Latvia, and only a small area of what is today the western Russian Federation.)

It was while she was in high school that Ellen Cohen was bitten by the musical theater bug and began calling herself “Cass Elliot.” Ms. Elliot’s parents fully expected her to go to college, so we can all imagine their . . . “surprise” when she dropped out of high school just before graduation and moved to New York City, there to pursue her dream to be an actor!

Cass Elliot’s acting career never quite got off the ground.  (Yes, she was part of a touring production of The Music Man, but her one-and-only shot at the bigtime came and went when she lost the part of Miss Marmelstein in the Broadway show I Can Get it for You Wholesale to an up-and-comer named Barbra Streisand.)

It was as a singer that Cass Elliot made her mark.  She had a clear, strong, distinctive voice and a charismatic stage presence to go along with her 300-pound “figure.”  In 1963 she helped form a progressive folk trio called the Big 3 which recorded two albums and appeared on The Tonight Show, Hootenanny, and The Danny Kaye Show.  In 1964, the Big 3 became a quartet called the Mugwumps.  Finally, in 1965, Cass Elliot and fellow Mugwump member Denny Dougherty joined the husband/wife team of John and Michelle Phillips to become the Mamas and the Papas.…

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