Cass Elliot - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Ellen Cohen was born to Philip and Bess Cohen in Baltimore, Maryland, where she grew up. The family then moved to Alexandria, Virginia (a suburb of Washington, D.C.). She adopted the name "Cass" in high school—possibly, as Denny Doherty tells it, borrowing it from the actress Peggy Cass—but in any case, it was "Cass", not "Cassandra." She assumed the surname Elliot sometime later, in memory of a friend who had died.

While still attending George Washington High School, she became interested in acting and was cast in a school production of the play The Boy Friend. She left high school shortly before graduation and relocated to New York City to further her acting career, and toured in the musical The Music Man, but lost the part of Miss Marmelstein in I Can Get It for You Wholesale to Barbra Streisand in 1962.

While working as a cloakroom attendant at The Showplace in Greenwich Village, Elliot would sometimes sing, but it wasn't until she returned to the Washington area, to attend American University, that she began to pursue a singing career. As America's folk music scene was on the rise, Elliot met banjoist and singer Tim Rose and singer John Brown, and the three began performing as The Triumvirate. In 1963, James Hendricks replaced Brown and the trio was renamed The Big 3. Elliot's first recording with The Big 3 was Winkin', Blinkin' and Nod, was released by FM Records in 1963. In 1964 the group appeared on an "open mike" night at The Bitter End Cafe in Greenwich Village, billed as "Cass Elliot and the Big 3", followed onstage by bluegrass banjoist Eric Weissberg ("Dueling Banjos" soundtrack in "Deliverance") and folksinger Jim Fosso.

When Tim Rose left The Big 3 in 1964, Elliot and Hendricks teamed with Canadians Zal Yanovsky and Denny Doherty to form The Mugwumps. This group lasted eight months, after which Cass performed as a solo act for a while. Yanovsky and John Sebastian co-founded The Lovin' Spoonful, while Doherty joined The New Journeymen, a group that also included John Phillips and his wife, Michelle. In 1965, Doherty convinced Phillips that Cass should join the group which she did while she and the group members were vacationing in the Virgin Islands.

A popular legend about Elliot is that her vocal range was improved by three notes after she was hit on the head by some copper tubing shortly before joining The New Journeymen in the Virgin Islands. Elliot herself confirmed the story in a 1968 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, saying,

However, friends later said that the pipe story was a less embarrassing explanation for why John Phillips had kept her out of the group for so long, the real reason being that he considered her too fat.