When her father was transferred to California, she arrived in Los Angeles by train at the age of eight.

While there she wrote a regular column for the Santa Monica Evening Outlook,[3] and began singing and writing songs in her senior year.

[1] While attending college and working at a See's Candy store in Westwood, Los Angeles, California, Sperling re-encountered Dick St. John, an old junior high classmate.

[4] "The Mountain's High" became a smash hit in the Bay Area,[2] eventually becoming number two on the Billboard Top 100 in the United States.

[1] Sperling and St. John soon garnered other hits in the early 1960s, including "Tell Me", (also on Liberty Records) and "Young and In Love", "Turn Around" (written by Malvina Reynolds and recorded by Harry Belafonte) and "Thou Shalt Not Steal" (on Warner Bros.

[2] They toured with the Beach Boys, and were the opening act for the Rolling Stones when the band came to California for the first time in 1964.

[2] In 2007, Phelps self-published her memoir, Vinyl Highway,[7] about touring the world with rock and roll acts in the Sixties.