Neil Sedaka

Neil Sedaka (/səˈdækə/; March 13, 1939 – February 27, 2026) was an American singer, songwriter, and pianist. Beginning his music career in 1957, he sold millions of records worldwide and wrote or co-wrote over 500 songs for himself and other artists, collaborating mostly with lyricists Howard Greenfield and Phil Cody.

After a short-lived tenure as a founding member of the doo-wop group the Tokens, Sedaka achieved a string of hit singles over the late 1950s and early 1960s, including "Oh! Carol" (1959), "Calendar Girl" (1960), "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen" (1961), and "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" (1962). His popularity declined by the mid-1960s, but was revived in the mid-1970s, solidified by the 1975 U.S. Billboard Hot 100 number ones "Laughter in the Rain" and "Bad Blood". Sedaka maintained a successful career as a songwriter, penning hits for other artists including "Stupid Cupid" (Connie Francis), "(Is This the Way to) Amarillo" (Tony Christie), and "Love Will Keep Us Together" (Captain & Tennille). He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1983 and continued to perform, including in a series of mini-concerts on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic, until his death in 2026.

Sedaka was born on March 13, 1939, in Brooklyn. His father, Mordechai "Mac" Sedaka, was a taxi driver of Lebanese Jewish descent. Sedaka's paternal grandparents came to the United States from Istanbul in 1910. The family name was derived from "tzedakah", Hebrew for charity. Sedaka's mother, Eleanor (née Appel), was an Ashkenazi Jew of Polish and Russian descent. He grew up in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he lived across the street from Neil Diamond and dated Carole King. "We all lived in Brooklyn," he said. "It was a wonderful time. It must have been something in the egg cream. We used to hang out in the sweet shop and have egg creams and potato knishes."

Sedaka demonstrated musical aptitude in his second-grade choral class and, when his teacher sent a note home suggesting he take piano lessons, his mother took a part-time job in an Abraham & Straus department store for six months to pay for a second-hand upright piano. In 1947, he auditioned successfully for a piano scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music's Preparatory Division for Children, which he attended on Saturdays. His mother had wanted him to become a classical pianist like his contemporary, Van Cliburn, and Sedaka continued to show fondness for (and capacity to play) classical music throughout his life.

At the same time, to his mother's dismay, Sedaka was discovering pop music; his mother eventually acquiesced when Sedaka received a five-figure royalty check for his hit "Calendar Girl" in 1961. When Sedaka was 13, a neighbor heard him playing and introduced him to her 16-year-old son, Howard Greenfield, an aspiring poet and lyricist. They became two of the Brill Building's composers.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.