Doris Coley

Girls weren't supposed to sleep with their boyfriends in the teenage world of the late 1950s, so the release of the Shirelles's Will You Love Me Tomorrow in 1959 provided a double frisson for the record-buying public: four young black female soul voices moulded with the universal appeal of narrative lyrics. Here sex and love were inexorably entwined, with the added worry that once she succumbed to "a moment's pleasure", God knows what would happen "when the night meets the morning sun".

Doris Kenner-Jackson, known publicly by her maiden name of Doris Coley, who has died of cancer at the age of 58, was one of the quartet who enjoyed a run of million-sellers in America between 1959 and 1965, and transformed popular music. With Addie "Micki" Harris, Beverly Lee and Shirley Owens, she formed the group that became the Shirelles for a high school talent show in 1957. There, as the Poquelles, they sang I Met Him On A Sunday - the song that was to be their first single.

Coley was born in the southern state of North Carolina but, like many black families, her parents moved north and she was brought up in Passaic, New Jersey. A classmate, Mary Jane Greenberg, told her music-business mother about the group's school appearance and Flo rence Greenberg became their manager, signing them to Scepter/Wand, her record label.

With their name now changed again, from the Honeytones, the Shirelles first million-seller was a bal lad, Tonight's The Night, but it was swiftly followed by the groundbreaking Will You Love Me. The Shirelles became a major influence on the young white British music scene of the early 1960s, where any musician clued in to mod culture was looking towards soul and r&b, and listening to a clutch of black female vocal groups: the Shirelles, Crystals, Chiffons and Marvelettes. Nowhere was this influence more noticeable than on the white female singers of the day, particularly Dusty Springfield, whose early records are homage to these groups.

Coley, Harris, Lee and Owens were leading exponents of "uptown r&b", so named because it came out of New York, rather than the southern states. In the 1950s, the city saw a blossoming of independent, black-run labels and black venues, like Harlem's Apollo and the Brooklyn Fox. New York also boasted the Brill Building music factory, where young white songwriting teams - including Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and Gerry Goffin and Carole King - put out thoughtful teenage love songs which were snapped up by the black groups.

Goffin and King provided the Shirelles with Will You Love Me, though it was transformed by Luther Dixon's production, overlaying an r&b rhythm section with lush mellow string arrangements behind the slightly nasal voices of the group.

With Greenberg and Dixon, the Shirelles had three more million-sellers: Baby It's You, Everybody Loves A Lover and Dedicated To The One I Love. The last, originally written by Lowman Pauling for his group the Five Royales, featured Doris Coley on lead, and also gave the white Californian group, the Mamas and Papas, a hit in 1967.

The Shirelles toured America and Europe through the 1960s, with Coley billed as Doris Kenner after her first marriage. But, by mid-decade - like many of the original girl groups - they had been superseded by the more sophisticated Motown female sound epitomised by the Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas. In 1968, Coley left the group to concentrate on her family - she had re-married and was now Doris Jackson - but she returned in 1975 when the Shirelles were playing the oldies circuit.

Doris Kenner-Jackson (nee Coley), singer, born August 2 1941; died February 5 2000

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