Neil Sedaka – Oh! Carol

The Girl Who Wrote Back — And The High School That Launched A Generation

In 1959, Neil Sedaka was twenty years old, his record label was threatening to drop him after a string of poor sellers, and his career was hanging by the thinnest of threads. His producer Don Kirshner sat him down and gave him the most calculated piece of advice in the history of teen pop: “Write a song with a girl’s name in the title. Talk in the middle like The Diamonds did in ‘Little Darlin’.” Sedaka went home, studied the Billboard chart to reverse-engineer every number one he could find, and wrote “Oh! Carol” in a single afternoon. It saved his career. The girl it was named after went on to become rather famous herself.

Released in 1959, “Oh! Carol” spent 18 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number nine on December 6. In the UK it hit number three on the NME chart. It topped the charts in the Netherlands, Wallonia, and Italy — and the B-side, “One Way Ticket,” went to number one in Japan. Sedaka had walked into the session facing dismissal. He walked out with an international hit in multiple languages and a career that would run for decades.

Carol was Carol Klein — Sedaka’s ex-girlfriend from Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, where the two had played together in a group called the Linc-Tones. She was not, despite later legend, his girlfriend at the time of the song. Howard Greenfield, who co-wrote the lyrics, had his own theory about which Carol the song referenced — his own sister, also named Carol Greenfield. Greenfield was so embarrassed by the finished lyrics he thought they were terrible. “It was exactly what I wanted,” Sedaka insisted. Carol Klein, who had since married Gerry Goffin and was now recording and writing under the name Carole King, released her own answer record the same year: “Oh! Neil” — co-written by Sedaka, Greenfield, and Goffin himself. It was not a hit. The rest of her career, however, went rather better.

The recording session had one last-minute problem. When Sedaka finished the track, everyone in the room felt something was missing. Producer Al Nevins turned to a girl trio called The Kittens who happened to be hanging around the studio that day and asked them to fill in the gap. Their falsetto vocals behind the spoken bridge gave the record its warm, playful texture — an accidental contribution that became one of the song’s most distinctive moments. Sedaka’s spoken recitation, meanwhile, was a direct instruction from Kirshner: replicate what The Diamonds did on “Little Darlin’.” Sedaka was nothing if not a diligent student. “I took the beat, I took the drum licks, I took the guitar licks, I took the harmony changes, and I went to school on them,” he said years later. Greenfield wrote the lyrics in twenty minutes.

Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn deserves its own footnote in rock history. Sedaka and Carol Klein were not the only students in its corridors who would shape popular music — Neil Diamond was there at the same time. All three attended the same school, played the same talent shows, and eventually signed to publishers within blocks of each other in Manhattan. The Brill Building era that followed was, in a very real sense, built partly in a Brooklyn schoolyard.

The song had an unexpected second life in 1972, when Sedaka re-recorded it as a ballad during his commercial comeback. That version charted in the UK, proving that a song deliberately manufactured to sound like everything on the radio in 1959 had enough genuine feeling buried inside it to survive being reinvented entirely. General Saint and Don Campbell took a reggae version to the UK charts in 1994. Sedaka has performed it live for over sixty years without the crowd ever needing to be told the words.

Sedaka later reflected on the song with the clarity of someone who had always known exactly what he was doing: “Howie wrote the lyrics in twenty minutes but was embarrassed. He thought it was terrible. But it was exactly what I wanted.” A song engineered to be a hit, written under threat of cancellation, named after a girl who would become one of the greatest songwriters of the twentieth century — and she wrote back. That’s a story with more moving parts than most songs can claim.