On July 29, 1974, Cass Elliott died suddenly in London at the age of thirty-two. Initial news reports claimed she had choked to death while eating a sandwich, and that story quickly spread, growing into a legend that she had died onstage choking on a ham sandwich. The official coroner’s report settled the matter differently: the cause of death was a massive heart attack, brought on by obesity and stress. Her ashes were scattered over the Pacific Ocean.

The woman the world knew as Mama Cass had been born Ellen Naomi Cohen in Baltimore. She grew up in the 1940s and 1950s in a middle-class Jewish-American household. Her father, Philip, ran a restaurant business and loved opera; her mother, Beth, played piano. Music surrounded her from childhood, and she found her favorite singers early: Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Blossom Dearie.

She took piano lessons in grade school and later switched to guitar as her interest in folk music grew. She sang in her high school choir and acted in school theater. At seventeen she chose a stage name. Cassandra Elliott came partly from her father’s nickname for her, drawn from Cassandra of Greek mythology, and partly from a friend who had died in a car accident.

She dropped out of Forest Park High School shortly before graduation, never receiving her diploma, and moved to New York City to pursue a stage career. In Manhattan she landed off-Broadway parts and a role in the touring company of The Music Man. To pay rent, she directed at Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa, an experimental theater that would become famous. Her first years in New York also put her inside the city’s vibrant folk music scene.

In 1963 she married James R. Hendricks, and together with him and Tim Rose she sang in the Big Three, a short-lived but pivotal folk group. The Big Three recorded two albums for FM Records, The Big Three and Live at the Recording Studio, but neither found an audience. By the summer of 1964 the group had evolved into the Mugwumps, with Elliott and Hendricks joined by two Canadian-born musicians, Denny Doherty and Zal Yanovsky.

The Mugwumps went electric, developed an original sound, and earned decent reviews, but the public showed little interest. A tape they made for Warner Bros. Records would not be released until Elliott and Doherty had both become famous in another group. By 1964 Cass Elliott’s talents had caught the attention of several musicians, including John Phillips.

Born in South Carolina and six years older than Elliott, Phillips had been recording since 1960 as a member of the folk trio the Journeymen, for whom he had made three albums for Capitol Records. In 1964 John and his wife, Michelle, moved to the Virgin Islands and, along with ex-Mugwump Denny Doherty, began forming a new vocal group. Cass Elliott joined them in the islands. For five months the quartet worked to perfect their sound, financially down and out but artistically inspired.

They received free accommodations in exchange for singing at a local nightclub. Confident in their future, they flew to Los Angeles to find a record deal. There they met Lou Adler, a dynamic producer who had just formed Dunhill Records and was searching for fresh talent. He was impressed by the group’s distinctive personality and sound: Elliott’s soaring contralto, Michelle Phillips’s soprano, Denny Doherty’s tenor, and John Phillips’s tenor and strong guitar work, with Phillips effectively leading the group.

Adler offered to record the quartet and serve as their manager. He also approved their catchy name: the Mamas and the Papas. In March 1966 Dunhill released “California Dreamin’,” co-written by John and Michelle Phillips. The song caught the mood of a generation changing, its faintly melancholy evocation of an earthly utopia within reach.

It shot to number four on the American charts and sold more than a million copies, also reaching number twenty-three in the United Kingdom. Two months later the group released “Monday, Monday,” which went to number one in the United States and number three in Britain. By 1967 the Mamas and the Papas were one of America’s most popular folk-pop groups. Cass Elliott made a major contribution to that success with a voice some critics described as simply stupendous.

Although she was called Mama for her warm, brassy personality and her physical size, she strongly disliked the label, calling it a stigma. In an October 1968 interview with Rolling Stone she emphasized how she had tried to stop people from calling her Mama throughout her folk-singing life. The name only became more firmly attached after the Mamas and the Papas appeared, and with the birth of her daughter, Owen Vanessa, in March 1967, it became virtually impossible to escape. Elliott had struggled with obesity since childhood.

The five-foot-five brunette sometimes weighed as much as three hundred pounds. She tried crash diets repeatedly, once claiming to have lost a hundred and twenty pounds, but her attempts to become slim like Michelle Phillips always failed and likely harmed her health. She insisted her weight had been an advantage in her career, setting her apart from the others. Alongside the health problems from her obesity, she abused drugs and alcohol, which may have contributed to her occasionally erratic behavior.

In October 1967 she was arrested after docking in Southampton, charged with stealing blankets and keys from a hotel during an earlier visit to London. After a night in jail the charges were dropped, but the incident caused a series of Mamas and Papas concerts scheduled for the Royal Albert Hall to be cancelled. By this time rumors of the group’s imminent breakup were circulating, largely because of the collapse of John and Michelle Phillips’s marriage. The Mamas and the Papas officially disbanded in July 1968.

Cass Elliott immediately launched an ambitious solo career, signing a contract for forty thousand dollars a week to perform at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas starting in October 1968. After the first night, her act was cancelled, and she checked into a hospital for eight weeks. When she was released, she announced that she had given up her dependence on both drugs and alcohol. Billing herself as Mama Cass Elliott, she became the most successful solo performer of the group’s former members, each of whom had moved on to solo careers.

Over the next several years she kept busy making albums and singles and performing live in nightclubs. In 1971 she married a German baron, Donald von Weidenman, but the marriage was soon annulled. When she died in London in 1974, the false story of the sandwich went with her into popular memory. The coroner’s report, however, established the truth: a massive heart attack caused by obesity and stress.

She left behind a rich musical legacy and a voice that had become part of her nation’s cultural history.