L. Russell Brown with Ray Bloodworth in the mid-1960s, and working for Bob Crewe, he wrote the hits "C'mon Marianne" and "Watch the Flowers Grow" for the Four Seasons. "C'mon Marianne" featured in "Jersey Boys", the Broadway musical. With Crewe, Brown also wrote "Sock It to Me Baby!", a 1967 hit for Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. Brown started writing with Irwin Levine in 1970, and found success with several hits for Dawn, including "Knock Three Times", "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree" - both songs reaching #1 in the US and UK – and "Say, Has Anybody Seen
An Oak Tree Catholic background and was an altar boy. He sees belief of both artist and viewer as having a key place in art, and that in "An Oak Tree" he had "deconstructed the work of art in such a way as to reveal its single basic and essential element", namely this belief. "An Oak Tree" was a turning point in his artistic development: prior to it his concern had been deconstruction, and afterwards he was "trying to put the pieces together again." Subsequently, using the rationale of Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain", he worked with drawings of utilitarian objects and flat areas of