At approximately 8:30 yesterday morning, Nedra Talley Ross went home to be with the Lord, safe in her own bed at home with her family close, knowing she was loved — words written by her daughter Nedra K. Ross in the announcement that stopped the music world completely.  She was 80 years old, the last surviving founding member of the Ronettes, and with her passing the final living voice of one of the most influential girl groups in the history of American music has gone quiet. Nedra, her cousin Ronnie Spector, and Estelle Bennett built something in those early 1960s

New York rehearsal rooms that the music industry had never heard before and has spent sixty years trying to recreate — a sound so distinctive, so alive, and so completely of its moment that Be My Baby remains one of the most recognizable opening drum beats in all of recorded music to this day. Estelle Bennett and Ronnie Spector died in 2009 and 2022 respectively,leaving Nedra as the last keeper of everything the three of them built together, the last living memory of what it felt like to be in that room when Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound wrapped itself around three young women from Manhattan and changed popular music forever. The Ronettes were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007 — recognition that arrived decades late for a group that deserved it from the beginning — and Nedra was there to receive it, standing for all three of them with the grace and the dignity that defined everything she ever did. The last Ronette is gone, and the silence she leaves behind is the kind that echoes.