Neil Sedaka

Brooklyn-born singer, pianist and songwriter whose paternal grandparents came to New York from Istanbul. He wrote and sang hits including Breaking Up Is Hard to Do and Laughter in the Rain, and wrote songs for many other artists.

Who is Neil Sedaka?

Neil Sedaka is an American singer, pianist and songwriter whose songs have been hits for more than six decades. “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” “Laughter in the Rain” and dozens of songs he wrote for other artists made him one of the great songwriters of American popular music. His father’s family were Sephardic Jews from Istanbul.

Brooklyn

Neil Sedaka was born on 13 March 1939 in Brooklyn, New York. His paternal grandparents had come to the United States from Istanbul in 1910, part of the wave of Sephardic Jews who left the Ottoman Empire for America in the early twentieth century; his mother, Eleanor Appel, was of Polish and Russian Ashkenazi descent. He grew up in Brighton Beach, where his neighbors included Neil Diamond, and where he dated Carole King.

His talent for music showed early. In 1947 he won a piano scholarship to the preparatory division of the Juilliard School, and his mother hoped he would become a concert pianist.

Songwriter and star

As a teenager he began writing songs with his neighbor, the lyricist Howard Greenfield, and the two became one of the most successful songwriting partnerships of the Brill Building era. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Sedaka had a series of hits as a singer, including “Oh! Carol,” “Calendar Girl” and “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” which reached number one in 1962. Their songs were also recorded by many other artists, among them Connie Francis’s “Stupid Cupid.”

After the arrival of the Beatles his career as a singer faded in America, but he kept writing, and in the mid-1970s he returned to the top of the charts with “Laughter in the Rain” and “Bad Blood.” He has sung in many languages, including Spanish, and recorded an album of Yiddish songs.

Legacy

Sedaka was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1983, and his songs continue to be performed and recorded around the world. His family story, joining the Sephardic Jews of Istanbul and the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe in Brooklyn, is the story of many American Jewish families.