Not many singers manage to have a #1 hit at just 16 years old, but Lesley Gore was in a class of her own. Not only did she top the U.S. charts with “It’s My Party” in 1963 when she was a junior in high school, but she followed that impressive accomplishment with ten more Billboard Top 40 hits…and one of them, “You Don’t Own Me,” turned into a timeless feminist anthem.
Gore, a New Jersey native, was discovered as a teen while taking vocal lessons in New York.
“One day, instead of my lesson, the piano player and I went into a studio right in the building and we put down some demos, just piano/voice,” Gore recalled in a 2005 interview with AfterEllen.
“Those demos got to Quincy Jones through an agent by the name of Joe Glaser who was very friendly with Irving Green, who was president of Mercury, and Quincy was working at Mercury and Irving put my demos on his desk. He listened to them, he called me, and we started to record.”
Gore “had just turned 16” when she recorded the demos, and she “was still 16 when we cut ‘It’s My Party.’ In May of that year I turned 17.”
The massive success of “It’s My Party” instantly catapulted Gore to a level of fame she wasn’t quite prepared to deal with, especially given her age.
“It was very difficult, to be honest with you,” Gore said. “You have to take into account that this was a long time ago, and we didn’t have things like answering machines, OK? So when the disc jockey on WINS or WNCA, which was a big station here in New York, would say, ‘That was Lesley Gore, the sweetie pie from Tenafly,’ well, people just came to Tenafly. You know, I’d wake up and there were people camped out on the grass.”
“Or they’d show up in town and someone would say ‘Where does Lesley live?’ and they’d go, ‘Oh, up the hill, then you make a left over there and it’s the third house on the right,'” she continued. “And it was the same thing with the telephone. People got on the phone and said, ‘Give me Gore in Tenafly.’ So we were getting phone calls that we didn’t even understand half the time. So I was really thrown into it, and those things are, how shall I say, double-edged swords. There’s a lot of positive but there’s a lot of negative and you need to find a way to balance it out.”
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One thing Gore learned quickly was that the record industry has “always been a man’s world.”
“It’s always been a patriarchal situation, and it always puts women, not necessarily down, but certainly on a lower rung,” she explained. Perhaps fittingly, “You Don’t Own Me,” recorded when Gore was 17, addressed women’s rights in a manner few pop songs dared to attempt in the ’60s:
You don’t own me
I’m not just one of your many toys
You don’t own me
Don’t say I can’t go with other boys
And don’t tell me what to do
Don’t tell me what to say
And please, when I go out with you
Don’t put me on display
“You know, ‘You Don’t Own Me’ is a very powerful song: Don’t abuse me, don’t misuse me,” Gore explained.
“It comes from the same place. It’s the ‘don’t’ folder,” she added. “The interesting thing about ‘You Don’t Own Me’ is that it was written by two men, John Madera and Dave White, and they played me this song on guitar live at a hotel up in the Catskills in 1964 on a Saturday afternoon. And I had these guys come back to New York on Monday and meet with Quincy and me and play him the song and he fell in love with it. So you never know where these things are going to come from, but when I heard that song I knew I had to sing it.”
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“You Don’t Own Me” peaked at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 on Feb. 1, 1964, where it stayed for three weeks (“I Want to Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles kept Gore from reaching the top spot).
Years later, Gore called “You Don’t Own Me” her signature work, according to the BBC.
“After some 40 years, I still close my show with that song because I can’t find anything stronger, to be honest with you,” she said. “It’s a song that just kind of grows every time you do it.”
Over the years, “You Don’t Own Me” has become a cross-generational song of empowerment. It was used in a 2012 PSA asking women to vote and saw another resurgence during the #MeToo movement. (It also provided one of the most memorable moments in the classic 1996 comedy First Wives Club, thanks to Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton and Bette Midler.) Gore re-recorded “You Don’t Own Me” for her final album, Ever More, in 2005; that same year, she came out as gay and introduced Lois Sasson as her longtime partner.
Gore died in 2015 at the age of 68. In her obituary, the New York Times praised “You Don’t Own Me” as “indelibly defiant,” adding, “Ms. Gore made herself the voice of teenage girls aggrieved by fickle boyfriends, moving quickly from tearful self-pity to fierce self-assertion.”
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