8
The rock ’n’ roll revolution is usually thought to have begun with the emergence of artists such as Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, both of whom could be considered country singers who crossed over to the pop market. But before them had come black-influenced white pop singers such as Ella Mae Morse, Frankie Laine, Kay Starr, and Johnnie Ray, who covered rhythm-and-blues records or simply sang with an African American feeling. White artists had sung with an African American feeling long before that, of course, and had covered R&B records at least since Louis Prima’s “Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well?” in 1945. But by the early 1950s, it was not uncommon for record companies such as Capitol, who had both Starr and Morse under contract, to have pop singers cover rhythm-and-blues as well as country-western records.
Morse’s father was a dance-band drummer from England and her mother a singer and pianist from Texas; as a young girl in Paris, Texas, Ella Mae befriended and sang along with a black blues guitarist. Although her records sold well enough in her heyday, she never became as famous as her contemporaries Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, and Patti Page, perhaps because of her black-tinged style. Although she didn’t sound as black as most rhythm-and-blues singers or as southern as most country singers, she seemed as natural in those two idioms as she did singing pop or jazz. As one of the only white artists to have multiple No. 1 rhythm-and-blues hits, she may have alienated some white listeners while attracting others. It’s been said that Elvis Presley told her he learned to sing by listening to her records.[1] But she was largely forgotten after her recording career ended and has only recently gained recognition as a foremother of rock ’n’ roll.
Shortly after “Cow-Cow Boogie,” Morse recorded two more hits with Freddie Slack’s band. The jiving “Mr. Five by Five,” written by Gene DePaul and Don Raye in ostensible tribute to Count Basie’s rotund singer Jimmy Rushing, had been introduced by Grace McDonald in the 1942 Ritz Brothers movie Behind the Eight Ball. The song was a No. 1 pop hit for Harry James’s band with singer Helen Forrest and a lesser hit for the Andrews Sisters, but in a reverse crossover, Morse’s version reached the No. 1 spot on the Harlem Hit Parade, as well as the pop Top 10. Morse made the pop Top 20 with “Get on Board, Little Chillun,” adapted by DePaul and Raye from an African American spiritual and first performed by the Delta Rhythm Boys in the 1943 movie Crazy House.
Morse’s next four hits, all recorded in October 1943 with Dick Walters’s band, were also borrowed from Hollywood. The Andrews Sisters had a No. 1 pop hit with “Shoo-Shoo Baby,” which they sang in the movie Follow the Boys; Morse sang it in the movie South of Dixie and once more topped the Harlem Hit Parade, also making the pop Top 5. The flip side, “No Love, No Nothin’,” which Alice Faye had sung in the 1943 musical The Gang’s All Here, made the pop Top 5 as well. In 1944, Dinah Shore sang “Tess’s Torch Song (I Had a Man)” in the musical comedy Up in Arms, and Nancy Walker sang “Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet,” another DePaul-Raye composition, in the musical Broadway Rhythm; Morse covered both songs on the same single for a second double-sided pop hit.
Morse continued to chart with “The Patty Cake Man,” a jived-up nursery rhyme, in late 1944; “Captain Kidd,” a send-up of the Charles Laughton movie of the same title, in 1945; and “Buzz Me,” a No. 2 R&B hit cover version of a No. 1 R&B hit by Louis Jordan, in early 1946—the last two with Billy May’s band. Later in 1946, she scored with “The House of Blue Lights,” accompanied by Freddie Slack’s combo. She recorded similar pop boogies with different groups through 1947, then retired to raise a family but came back in 1951, recording for Capitol with Nelson Riddle’s band. Turning from the bluesy or jivey style of her earlier recordings, she took more of a middle-of-the-road approach and, on her first Riddle session, found a new direction with a cover of Red Foley’s country smash “Tennessee Saturday Night.” Her second session with Riddle produced “The Blacksmith Blues,” a country-tinged pop song that rose to No. 3 on the Billboard chart—Morse’s biggest hit without Slack.
Morse’s next Riddle session, in February 1952, yielded covers of two country hits, Jack Guthrie’s “Okie Boogie” and Little Jimmy Dickens’s “A-Sleeping at the Foot of the Bed.” In May, accompanied by Joe Lippman’s band, she covered two rhythm-and-blues songs, Amos Milburn’s propulsive “Greyhound” and Hadda Brooks’s calypso-tinged “Jump Back, Honey, Jump Back”; Gene Vincent would record the latter in rockabilly style in 1956. After cutting another pop song with Riddle, Morse duetted with Tennessee Ernie Ford on Ford’s composition “I’m Hog-Tied Over You” and the Delmore Brothers’ “False Hearted Girl.” Accompanied by Riddle again, Morse covered Hank Snow’s “The Gal Who Invented Kissin’” as “The Guy Who Invented Kissin’” and, singing in French and English, covered Link Davis’s “Big Mamou,” a version of the Cajun classic “Le Grand Mamou.”
Morse’s final hit came in 1953 with a pop cover of singer-guitarist Danny Overbea’s rhythm-and-blues record “40 Cups of Coffee,” accompanied by Dave Cavanaugh’s band; the song, with its twelve-bar verse-and-refrain structure and stop-time breaks, would be covered as a rocker by Bill Haley in 1957. Also in 1953, she recorded a series of R&B covers with Cavanaugh’s band that included the Dominoes’ “Have Mercy Baby,” the Drifters’ “Money Honey,” the Ravens’ “Rock Me All Night Long,” Bull Moose Jackson’s “I Love You, Yes I Do,” LaVern Baker’s “How Can You Leave a Man Like This?” and Ruth Brown’s “Daddy Daddy,” “5-10-15 Hours,” and “Teardrops from My Eyes”—all released on Morse’s 1954 album Barrelhouse, Boogie, and the Blues.
Morse kept covering rhythm-and-blues and rock ’n’ roll songs through the mid-1950s, among them the Clovers’ “Lovey Dovey,” the Spaniels’ “Goodnite Sweetheart, Goodnite,” Jesse Stone’s “Smack Dab in the Middle” (recorded by Stone under the name Charlie Calhoun and also covered by the Deep River Boys, the Du Droppers, the Jacks, Joe Williams with Count Basie’s band, and, a decade later, by Ray Charles), Bill Haley’s “Razzle-Dazzle,” Fats Domino’s “Ain’t It a Shame,” Nappy Brown’s “Piddily Patter Patter,” Boyd Bennett’s “Seventeen,” and the Coasters’ “Down in Mexico.” In addition, she was the first to record several songs by black rhythm-and-blues songwriters. But her last Capitol sessions, for the 1957 album The Morse Code, featured mainstream pop standards such as “My Funny Valentine,” “I Can’t Get Started,” and “You Go to My Head.” Morse made no further studio recordings after parting with Capitol, but she did continue to tour, with decreasing frequency, well into the 1980s. She died in 1999, at the age of seventy-five.
Frankie Laine’s muscular belting marked a sharp departure from the crooning style that had been dominant among male pop singers at least since the rise of Bing Crosby. According to the author Jonny Whiteside, “Laine’s intense style owed nothing to Crosby, Sinatra or Dick Haymes. Instead he drew from Billy Eckstine, Joe Turner, Jimmy Rushing, and with it Laine had sown the seeds from which an entire new perception and audience would grow.”[2] Although he did not sound particularly black (and does not credit Eckstine, Turner, or Rushing as influences in his autobiography), Laine successfully impersonated Nat “King” Cole on a couple of his earliest recordings and was assumed to be black by many listeners when they first heard his 1947 breakthrough record, “That’s My Desire.”[3]
Born Francesco LoVecchio to Sicilian immigrant parents in Chicago, he discovered Bessie Smith’s “Bleeding Hearted Blues” amid his family’s collection of opera and Italian-pop records. “The first time I laid the needle down on that record I felt cold chills and an indescribable excitement,” he remembered.[4] He began singing in his elementary school choir and later sang for the Depression-era dance marathons at Chicago’s Merry Garden Ballroom. In 1937, at Perry Como’s instigation, he briefly joined Freddie Carlone’s band in Cleveland; the following year, he was hired to sing at a New York radio station and changed his name to Frankie Laine. He struggled for the next few years, working day jobs as well as singing, before moving to Los Angeles in 1943.
Laine cut his first record for the Beltone label in 1944, then signed with Atlas, which had him imitate Nat “King” Cole on two songs and let him be himself on a number of others. Hoagy Carmichael heard Laine at Billy Berg’s Hollywood club and got him a contract with Mercury, for which he initially cut the 1929 standard “I May Be Wrong (but I Think You’re Wonderful)” as the B-side of a single whose A-side featured the comedian Artie “Mr. Kitzel” Auerbach singing “Pickle in the Middle with the Mustard on Top.” The disc jockey Al Jarvis, whom Laine had befriended, played “I May Be Wrong” on the radio, and Laine’s career began to take off.
It was at Billy Berg’s that Laine introduced what he announced as “a brand new song”—actually a 1931 Tin Pan Alley composition, “That’s My Desire,” that Laine had heard during his stay in Cleveland.[5] The song was rapturously received by the clubgoers, and Laine recorded it for Mercury in August 1946 with a band led by trumpeter Manny Klein. Laine’s record made the Top 5 on both the pop and R&B charts in 1947 but was outsold by the sweet-band leader Sammy Kaye’s version with singer Don Cornell. “That’s My Desire” was also covered that year by Hadda Brooks, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Martha Tilton, Art Mooney, and Woody Herman; it has since been recorded by Pat Boone, Gogi Grant, the Four Freshmen, the Channels, the Flamingos, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Dion and the Belmonts, Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, Cliff Richard, the Hollies, Chris Isaak, and James Brown, among others—with all renditions based on Laine’s rather than any earlier recording.
Laine scored eight more pop hits through the end of 1949, including one, “You’re All I Want for Christmas,” that also charted R&B. Most of his early hits are in a richly arranged pop or jazz vein, with Laine convincingly delivering not only Nat “King” Cole’s bluesy “That Ain’t Right” (retitled “Baby, That Ain’t Right”) but also Fats Waller’s “Black and Blue” and the older “Shine,” both clearly intended for a black singer. Charting in the spring of 1948, “Baby, That Ain’t Right” may have been the first white cover of a rhythm-and-blues song to make Billboard’s pop list.
During the second musicians’ union recording ban, which lasted throughout 1948, Laine began working with Mercury’s new A&R director, Mitch Miller. A classical oboist with a distinctive Vandyke beard, Miller initiated new production techniques that would influence the way rock music was recorded, notwithstanding his reputation for making bland pop music and his professed distaste for rock ’n’ roll. Detecting a “universal quality” in Laine’s voice, Miller sought to broaden his stylistic range, and in June 1949 Laine recorded “That Lucky Old Sun,” a Tin Pan Alley pseudo-folk song that, in Laine’s opinion, had a “Western flavor.”[6] Similar in theme to “Ol’ Man River,” the song became a No. 1 hit for Laine and also charted in 1949 for Vaughn Monroe, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, and Bob Houston. It would later be covered by LaVern Baker, Jerry Lee Lewis, Sam Cooke, Bobby Darin, Dean Martin, the Isley Brothers, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Jackie Wilson, Willie Nelson, James Brown, Tom Jones, Jerry Garcia, Johnny Cash, and Brian Wilson, among others. Recorded in Russian by the Ukrainian-born singer Mark Bernes, “That Lucky Old Sun” was performed in the Soviet Union as an anticapitalist anthem.
Laine had previously recorded his next hit, the Frank Loesser ballad “Now That I Need You” (from the 1949 movie Red, Hot and Blue), also a hit for Doris Day. At Miller’s urging, he followed with “Mule Train,” a Tin Pan Alley cowboy song that has Laine describing the goods he’s peddling—“There’s a plug of chaw tobaccy for a rancher in Corona / a gee-tar for a cowboy way out in Arizona”—while driving his mule team to the accompaniment of whip cracks. The gimmicky production became Laine’s second No. 1 smash, quickly covered by Bing Crosby, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Vaughn Monroe, and Gordon MacRae. “Mule Train” has been cited for its precedent-setting use of sound effects, and the author Will Friedwald has described Miller, disparagingly, as “the inventor of rock ’n’ roll mentality.”[7]
According to Friedwald: “Miller established the primacy of the producer, proving that even more than the artist, the accompaniment, or the material, it was the responsibility of the man in the recording booth whether a record flew or flopped. Miller also conceived of the idea of the pop record ‘sound’ per se: not so much an arrangement or a tune, but an aural texture (usually replete with extramusical gimmicks) that could be created in the studio and then replicated in live performance, instead of the other way around. Miller was hardly a rock ’n’ roller, yet without these ideas there could never have been rock ’n’ roll. ‘Mule Train,’ Miller’s first major hit (for Frankie Laine) and the foundation of his career, set the pattern for virtually the entire first decade of rock. The similarities between it and, say, ‘Leader of the Pack,’ need hardly be outlined here.”[8]
In early 1950, “The Cry of the Wild Goose,” a histrionic western-tinged three-minute melodrama—“My heart knows what the wild goose knows / and I must go where the wild goose goes”—became Laine’s third and final chart-topper. His eight subsequent Mercury hits are in a more conventional jazz-pop mold, except for “The Metro Polka,” the “Wild Goose”–like “Swamp Girl,” and a version of Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” with lyrics added. Miller moved to Columbia Records in 1950 and Laine followed in 1951, combining the devil-as-woman theme of his Mercury hit “Satan Wears a Satin Gown” with mock-flamenco rhythms on the No. 2 smash “Jezebel.”
By the end of 1953, Laine had charted twenty-seven more hits, including the flip side of “Jezebel,” eight duets with Jo Stafford, two duets with the juvenile singer Jimmy Boyd (best known for “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”), and one duet with Doris Day. Of these hits, only “Tonight You Belong to Me” and “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans,” both composed in the 1920s, have the jazzy flavor of Laine’s earlier records. Instead, he turned toward pure pop, with such exceptions as the rhythmic African American chant “Hambone,” the South African folk-song adaptation “Chow, Willy,” the Hank Williams hits “Hey, Good Lookin’,” “Settin’ the Woods on Fire” (retitled “Tonight We’re Setting the Woods on Fire”), and “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” and the Carl Smith country hit “Hey Joe!”—all but the last two featuring Stafford.
Laine’s “High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me)” outsold Tex Ritter’s soundtrack version from the 1952 western High Noon, leading Laine to record the actual soundtrack themes for the westerns Blowing Wild (1953), Man Without a Star (1955), Strange Lady in Town (1955), 3:10 to Yuma (1957), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), Bullwhip (1958), and Blazing Saddles (1974), as well as the television series Rawhide (1959–1966), Gunslinger (1961), and Rango (1967). Laine, who appears on several album covers wearing cowboy outfits, recorded additional western songs such as “Cool Water,” “Along the Navajo Trail,” and “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky,” not to mention “Champion the Wonder Horse,” a cover of the theme to the mid-1950s TV western The Adventures of Champion.
Laine acted or played himself in the movies Make Believe Ballroom (1949), When You’re Smiling (1950), Sunny Side of the Street (1951), Rainbow ’Round My Shoulder (1952), Bring Your Smile Along (1955), He Laughed Last (1956), and Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956). He hosted his own TV variety shows and made many other television appearances, singing and occasionally acting.
Laine had his first religious hits, “I Believe” and “Answer Me, Lord Above,” in 1953. With the line, “She was mine yesterday / I believed that love was here to stay,” “Answer Me, Lord Above,” adapted from a German song, is the apparent inspiration for the Beatles’ “Yesterday,” although Paul McCartney probably heard the British tenor David Whitfield’s version along with Laine’s, the two having topped the New Musical Express’s UK Singles Chart simultaneously in late 1953.[9] After recording the black-gospel-style hit single “Rain, Rain, Rain” with the white harmony group the Four Lads in 1954, Laine released the similarly styled album Frankie Laine and the Four Lads in 1956. Also in 1956, he duetted with Johnnie Ray on a remarkably exuberant cover of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Marie Knight’s gospel hit “Up Above My Head, I Hear Music in the Air.”
Laine had Top 10 hits with the western-flavored “Moonlight Gambler” in 1956 and the folkish “Love Is a Golden Ring” in 1957 but did not make the national charts between 1957 and 1963. He released a string of Columbia albums into the early 1960s, including jazz-, folk-, and western-themed LPs as well as collaborations with the French composer-arranger Michel Legrand. He left Columbia in 1964 and spent two hitless years with Capitol before returning to the lower ranks of the charts with ABC, for which he adopted more of an easy-listening sound. He had his last hits in 1969, one of which, “You Gave Me a Mountain,” was written by the country singer Marty Robbins and later performed by Elvis Presley. He cut a pair of rock-tinged albums for the small Amos label in 1970 and 1971, then launched his own Score label. He continued to record into the 2000s and gave his last performance in 2005, dying of heart failure in 2007 at the age of ninety-three.
Born Katherine Starks in Dougherty, Oklahoma, and raised in Dallas, Texas, and Memphis, Tennessee, Kay Starr sang country, pop, and western swing on the radio from an early age. In her mid-teens, she joined Joe Venuti’s band, with which she performed intermittently into the 1940s. In 1939, she briefly worked in Bob Crosby’s and Glenn Miller’s bands, making her recording debut with Miller. Venuti’s band broke up when the United States entered World War II, and Starr went on to Wingy Manone’s and Charlie Barnet’s bands, remaining with Barnet for a couple of years. She made a few recordings with Barnet, including two eloquent 1944 readings of the Dust Bowl lament “Share Croppin’ Blues,” one on a V-Disc and the other for Decca. But in 1944, she temporarily lost her voice and left the band.
Having settled in Los Angeles, Starr recorded jazzy songs for several small labels with various groups in 1945 and 1946; at Dave Dexter’s request, she also cut two numbers with an all-star group for Capitol Records, one of which, “If I Could Be with You,” was released on the 1945 album The History of Jazz, Vol. 3: Then Came Swing. In 1947, she signed with Capitol, which steered her in a less jazzy direction, but with Peggy Lee, Ella Mae Morse, Jo Stafford, and Margaret Whiting already under contract, the label could not find enough new material for Starr.[10] Her first Capitol release, “I’m the Lonesomest Gal in Town,” was a 1912 composition; her first four hits for the label were covers of recent hits by the sweet-band leaders Blue Barron and Russ Morgan and the pop singers Connie Haines and Perry Como.
In 1950, Starr covered Pee Wee King’s country hit “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” which King had adapted from a traditional fiddle tune. Her brass-accompanied version made the pop Top 5, and she followed with a hit cover of Red Foley’s “M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I” and a pair of double-sided hit duets with Tennessee Ernie Ford, separated by a hit cover of Louis Prima’s “Oh, Babe!” Her next two hits were a cover of Rosemary Clooney’s 1951 smash “Come On-A My House” and a revival of the 1925 composition “Angry.”
“Wheel of Fortune,” written by Bennie Benjamin and George David Weiss (the same interracial team responsible for Starr and Ford’s hit “I’ll Never Be Free”), had already been recorded by the jazz singer Johnny Hartman, the Baltimore doo-wop group the Cardinals, the Billy Williams Quartet, Dinah Washington, and the white singer Sunny Gale with the black Eddie Wilcox Orchestra by the time Starr covered it in January 1952, taking most closely after the Gale/Wilcox rendition. The Cardinals’ and Washington’s versions made the R&B charts, those by the singer Bobby Wayne and the youthful Bell Sisters duo charted pop, and the Gale/Wilcox record made both charts, but Starr’s version, a No. 1 pop smash, outsold them all. Washington’s delivery may be more poignant and world-weary, but Starr makes the song wholly her own, belting the lyrics with stirring conviction. Although it’s a ballad without a backbeat or boogie-woogie bass line—“a cartoonish melodramatic song,” in the words of Will Friedwald—parts of it, especially the bridge, where Starr overdubs her own backing harmonies, have a slow-motion rock ’n’ roll feel.[11]
Starr recorded her next hit, the Donald O’Connor–composed ballad “I Waited a Little Too Long,” with the Lancers, the same harmony group featured on her following, double-sided hit, “Kay’s Lament”/“Fool, Fool, Fool.” For jazz-oriented critics such as Friedwald, this venture into rhythm-and-blues represents Starr’s descent into campy commercialism. “Behind Starr’s intense statement,” he writes of “Kay’s Lament,” “you get a hodgepodge of trends corny enough in themselves that acquire the sheen of absolute awfulness when alloyed: bongo drums, electric guitar, and six [actually four] idiots chanting ‘Sing it, Sister Katie!’”[12]
Starr’s subsequent Capitol hits—including Cole Porter’s “Allez-Vous En,” Edith Piaf’s “If You Love Me (Really Love Me)” (translated from “Hymne à l’amour”), and the 1927 standard “Side by Side”—are in a mainstream pop mold. She stuck to the middle of the road after switching to RCA Victor in 1955, following the Top 20 hit “Good and Lonesome” with the chart-topping “Rock and Roll Waltz,” a huge seller in 1956 even though it’s in 3/4 time and doesn’t try to appeal to teenagers. She scored eight more pop hits with RCA, but only two made the Top 40 and just one, “My Heart Reminds Me,” reached the Top 10. She had three last hits in the early 1960s after returning to Capitol—two covers of country hits by Buck Owens and Jim Reeves and a solo rerecording of “I’ll Never Be Free.”
The bluesy cast that distinguishes Starr’s early recordings can hardly be heard on her later hits, but she did return to jazzy form on albums such as RCA’s Rockin’ with Kay (1958) and Capitol’s Movin’ (1959), Jazz Singer (1960), and I Cry by Night (1962). Her final RCA album, I Hear the Word (1959), consists of traditional African American spirituals such as “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” “Rock-a-My Soul,” and “Go Down, Moses,” sung persuasively by Starr with a white chorus. After parting with Capitol for the second time, in 1966, she toured the U.S. and England and played hotels in Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada. She continued to record jazz albums such as How About This with Count Basie’s band (ABC-Paramount, 1969) and Back to the Roots (GNP Crescendo, 1975), as well as the album Country (GNP Crescendo, 1974).
In the 1980s, Starr toured with a shifting group that included Rosemary Clooney, Helen O’Connell, Martha Raye, Margaret Whiting, and Kay Ballard in the revue 4 Girls 4. In 1993, she performed in Britain with Pat Boone’s “April Love Tour”; introducing a medley of “I’m Walkin’,” “Great Balls of Fire,” and “Rock Around the Clock” at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, she says over a hard drumbeat, “Sometime along about ’55 / rock ’n’ roll took over from jive / Everybody sayin’ it was new as could be / Sure sounded awfully familiar to me.”[13] In 2001, she cut “Blue and Sentimental” (a Count Basie tune she’d first recorded in 1957) with Tony Bennett for Playin’ with My Friends: Bennett Sings the Blues, a star-studded album of duets. As of this writing, she continues to perform occasionally. Acclaimed as an outstanding jazz singer with an extraordinary facility for the blues as well as a flair for country music, she has also been recognized as a rock ’n’ roll forebear.
As an up-and-coming young singer, Johnnie Ray idolized Kay Starr, along with Billie Holiday. Born in rural Oregon, Ray grew up listening to country, gospel, pop, and jazz; he sang in church and played boogie-woogie piano. But when he was thirteen years old, an accident caused the loss of hearing in his left ear; undeterred, he sang with a hearing aid. After graduating from high school, he performed in dives in Portland, Los Angeles, and Cleveland, enjoying little success until he was engaged by the Flame Show Bar in Detroit, a club that featured black artists. There he signed a management contract with Al Green, befriended LaVern Baker, and absorbed rhythm-and-blues material into his repertoire.
In 1951, Columbia Records revived the OKeh label as an R&B imprint. On a trip to Detroit, Danny Kessler, the label’s A&R director, discovered Ray and put him in touch with Bernie Lang, who became his new manager. In May, Ray recorded for OKeh with Maurice King and His Wolverines, an all-black band, and the resulting single was marketed to an African American audience. His mature style appears fully formed on the thumping “Whiskey and Gin,” backed with the ballad “Tell the Lady I Said Goodbye”—both written by Ray. His high tenor resembled a woman’s contralto, leading some early listeners to believe he was female. Like Frankie Laine, he belted rather than crooned, but his phrasing was more idiosyncratic. He stretched words and syllables and fell out of time with his accompanists, possibly because he couldn’t hear them; most distinctively, a catch in his voice made it seem that he was about to break into sobs. His impassioned delivery was accentuated by his stage act, in which he kicked over the piano bench and stood at the keyboard or took the microphone from its stand and roamed the stage. He would tear at the curtains, throw his arms forward, fall to his knees, and roll on the floor. In his exaggerated display of abandon, as well as his appropriation of rhythm-and-blues elements, he was a rock ’n’ roll prototype.[14]
Mitch Miller heard Ray in New York and was impressed enough to propose that he record “Cry,” a song written by a black night watchman in Pittsburgh named Churchill Kohlman and first recorded for New York’s small Cadillac label by the white singer Ruth Casey. At Miller’s suggestion, Ray was accompanied on the October 1951 session by the Four Lads, a gospel-oriented white harmony quartet from Canada. For the flip side of “Cry,” Miller let Ray record his own maudlin composition “The Little White Cloud That Cried.” The lachrymose pairing was not merely Ray’s first national hit but a tremendous double-sided pop and R&B smash, with “Cry” topping both charts. With its extended wails and broken rhythms, “Cry” would remain Ray’s best-known and perhaps most characteristic song, earning him such sobriquets as the Nabob of Sob and inspiring a Stan Freberg parody, “Try,” that was a Top 20 hit in its own right.
In early 1952, Ray moved from OKeh to the parent Columbia label and scored his second double-sided Top 10 hit, “Please, Mr. Sun,” backed with “Here Am I—Broken Hearted,” both produced by Mitch Miller and featuring the Four Lads. With lines such as “Babble to her, Mr. Brook / Kiss her for me, Miss Raindrop,” the mawkish “Please, Mr. Sun,” a 1951 Tin Pan Alley composition, is right up Ray’s alley, and he gives it a much more emotional reading than the black pop singer Tommy Edwards or the phlegmatic Perry Como, both of whom also had hits with the song. Ray’s quavering rendition of “Here Am I—Broken Hearted” is likewise more ardent than any of the hit versions from 1927, when the song was introduced. The Four Lads are prominent in the mix, giving the recording the feel of a rock ’n’ roll ballad from the later 1950s. Underscoring the connection, Tommy Edwards revived his own wistful 1951 pop hit “It’s All in the Game” for a No. 1 pop and R&B hit in 1958 using a new arrangement similar to the one on Ray’s “Here Am I—Broken Hearted.” Ironically, Ray used an older-style big-band arrangement when he recorded “It’s All in the Game” for his 1959 British album A Sinner Am I.[15]
Ray broke from the tearful formula on his next two hits, the tongue-in-cheek, Middle Eastern–flavored “What’s the Use” (cowritten by Ross Bagdasarian, who would later record the speeded-up voices of Alvin and the Chipmunks under the name David Seville) and an update of the 1930 standard “Walkin’ My Baby Back Home.” But he was back in histrionic form on the double-sided hit “All of Me,” a throbbingly jazzy version of the 1931 standard, backed with Ray’s own semi-confessional composition “A Sinner Am I,” which hints at his bisexual orientation with lines such as “a love like this was never made for man’s imagination.” His following hit “Love Me (Baby Can’t You Love Me),” cowritten by the pop-classical composer Alec Wilder, was given a sort of doo-wop arrangement with help from the Four Lads.
Ray’s final 1952 hit was the double-sided “A Full-Time Job”/“Ma Says, Pa Says,” a pair of steel-guitar-flavored duets with Doris Day. “A Full-Time Job” is a cover of Eddie Arnold’s country smash, while “Ma Says, Pa Says” is an adaptation of a South African folk song by Josef Marais, the same white South African émigré responsible for the original version of Frankie Laine’s “Chow, Willy.” Ray’s biographer Jonny Whiteside speculates that Mitch Miller produced the record at least in part to dispel Ray’s image as a rhythm-and-blues-influenced singer. He quotes Miller as saying, “I didn’t want Johnnie to be noted just for his black-inspired singing.”[16]
Ray’s string of hits continued in 1953, beginning with a cover of the white gospel singer Martha Carson’s rocking “I’m Gonna Walk and Talk with My Lord” that features the Four Lads.[17] His remaining 1953 hits were the old standards “Somebody Stole My Gal,” “All I Do Is Dream of You,” and “Please Don’t Talk about Me When I’m Gone”; a lightweight duet with Doris Day on the country songwriter Fred Rose’s “Candy Lips”; and a fervent treatment of “With These Hands,” a Tin Pan Alley ballad that the British pop singer Lee Lawrence had introduced in 1951 and that Ray gives much more of a rock ’n’ roll flavor than Eddie Fisher does on his more successful version.
Ray had nearly as many hits in 1954, including an update of Irving Berlin’s 1919 composition “You’d Be Surprised,” which Marilyn Monroe also recorded in 1954; the double-sided “Hey There”/“Hernando’s Hideaway,” both from the Broadway musical The Pajama Game; and the syrupy “To Ev’ry Girl—To Ev’ry Boy (The Meaning of Love),” cowritten by Jerry Samuels, who, under the name Napoleon XIV, would have a novelty hit in 1966 with “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” Turning away from Miller’s template, Ray also charted with a cover the Drifters’ “Such a Night”; his singing, accompanied by the Four Lads, can’t really compare to Clyde McPhatter’s with the Drifters, but one hears in McPhatter’s rendition some of the same vocal manipulations that Ray based his style on. Elvis Presley’s 1960 recording of “Such a Night” became a hit in 1964.
Ray had his heyday in the early 1950s, performing at top nightclubs such as the Copacabana in New York and Ciro’s in Los Angeles, touring Britain and Australia, making frequent television appearances, and acting as well as singing in the movie There’s No Business Like Show Business. Occasionally he appeared on the same bill with rhythm-and-blues artists such as Big Jay McNeely, Tiny Bradshaw, or the Dominoes. Ray was popular enough among African Americans that in March 1953 Ebony magazine published an interview with him under the headline “Negroes Taught Me to Sing.” On the strength of a brief but well-publicized marriage, followed by a torrid affair with the influential newspaper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, he was able to survive scandalous rumors about his sexuality and even the revelation that he’d been arrested a few months before recording “Cry” for soliciting sex from an undercover policeman.
He also survived the onset of rock ’n’ roll. In 1955, he covered Big Joe Turner’s “Flip Flop and Fly,” but it was not a hit, with Ray sounding stiff and unconvincing compared to Turner (though not to Pat Boone, who recorded the song in late 1956) on lines such as “I’m like a Mississippi bullfrog sittin’ on a hollow stump.” In July 1956, at Mitch Miller’s insistence, Ray recorded “Just Walking in the Rain,” a song that had been written by an African American inmate at the Tennessee State Prison, Johnny Bragg, and recorded for the Sun label in 1953 by the Prisonaires, a vocal harmony group consisting of Bragg and four fellow inmates. According to Peter Guralnick, “It was the song that put Sun Records on the map . . . and, very likely [a July 15, 1953, newspaper article about the Prisonaires in the Memphis Press-Scimitar was], the item that captured the attention of Elvis Presley as he read about the studio, the label, and . . . Sam Phillips.”[18] Although it features Ray Conniff’s orchestra and chorus, as well as a professional whistler, Ray’s straightforward rendition is much more of an individual showcase than the Prisonaires’ Ink Spots–style original, and it was a major hit, kept out of the No. 1 spot by Elvis Presley’s “Don’t Be Cruel.” (The song’s bridge section bears a suspicious melodic resemblance to the one on the Silhouettes’ 1958 smash “Get a Job.”)
Ray followed with the double-sided hit “You Don’t Owe Me a Thing”/“Look Homeward, Angel.” Like “Just Walking in the Rain,” “You Don’t Owe Me a Thing,” recorded in November 1956, opens with whistling, after which Ray gives a teen-pop reading—Jonny Whiteside calls it “bubblegum jazz”—to Marty Robbins’s country composition.[19] The earlier session that produced “Just Walking in the Rain” also yielded “Look Homeward, Angel” (first recorded in 1956 by the white harmony group the Four Esquires), which anticipates Roy Orbison’s 1961 hit “Running Scared” with strummed rhythms reminiscent of Ravel’s Boléro and a climactic finale. As if to validate Ray’s teen-anthem approach, two white pop groups—the Fortunes, from Birmingham, England, and the Monarchs, from Louisville, Kentucky—released versions of “Look Homeward, Angel” in 1964, and Cliff Richard included the song on a 1965 album.
Also in November 1956, Ray recorded The Big Beat, an album mostly of rhythm-and-blues covers, among them Faye Adams’s “Shake a Hand,” Julia Lee’s “Lotus Blossom,” Savannah Churchill’s “I Want to Be Loved (but Only by You),” and Ruth Brown’s “So Long.” Included as well were the Cats and the Fiddle’s “I Miss You So” and four songs that Count Basie had recorded: “Sent for You Yesterday (and Here You Come Today),” “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town,” “Everyday I Have the Blues,” and “How Long, How Long Blues.” Rounding out the album were “Trouble in Mind,” “I’ll Never Be Free,” and “Pretty Eyed Baby,” the last a Mary Lou Williams and/or Snub Mosely composition that Frankie Laine had recorded with Jo Stafford in 1951.[20] Listening to The Big Beat, it’s hard to believe that rock ’n’ roll had just exploded onto the national scene. While Ray had a better feel for black music than most white artists of the era, he remained more of a pop singer interpreting rhythm-and-blues than a genuine rocker, and the recording sounds as if it had been made before rather than after Elvis Presley’s arrival.
Ray’s next two hit singles were both chirpy pop-rockers, complete with backbeats. “Yes Tonight, Josephine,” with the chorus “Yip yip way bop de boom ditty boom,” was followed by “Build Your Love (on a Strong Foundation),” which sounds like a trial run for Mitch Miller’s early-1960s television show Sing Along with Mitch. Ray’s next two albums, however, showed little rock influence. In Las Vegas, recorded at the Desert Inn in October 1957, mixes his hits with old standards such as “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “As Time Goes By,” and “Yesterdays,” but even “Yes Tonight, Josephine,” without the chorus and with its backbeat muted, is drained of rock ’n’ roll feeling. ’Til Morning, recorded with the jazz pianist Billy Taylor’s trio in March 1958, consists entirely of standards, the oldest, “It All Depends on You,” dating from 1926 and the newest, “Teach Me Tonight,” from 1953.
Nonetheless, Ray was quickly recognized as a rock ’n’ roll forerunner. “Indeed, there are times when his tunestering shows lines indicating that he fathered the rock ’n’ roll movement, with the latter breed of singers expanding on an original and clean model propounded by Ray,” wrote a reviewer in the December 11, 1957, issue of Variety.[21] But his rock-style 1957 single “Pink Sweater Angel”/“Texas Tambourine” was a flop, and he would have only two more hits, Otis Blackwell’s gospel-toned composition “Up Until Now” in 1958 and his own purely pop “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” in 1959. He cut a single with Duke Ellington’s band and an album of western songs and again toured England and Australia, but surgery to restore his hearing damaged it still further, and he was arrested once more (although this time acquitted) for soliciting sex from a policeman.
In February 1960, Ray recorded “I’ll Make You Mine,” a pop-rocker in a style suaver than but otherwise similar to Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon’s. The record sold poorly, however, and the session proved to be Ray’s last for Columbia. He then recorded for a succession of labels—Decca, Cadence, Liberty, and others—but without success; he cut four duets with the soulful white singer Timi Yuro, but the two sides that were released also failed to sell. After recovering from tuberculosis and then cirrhosis of the liver, the latter brought on by years of heavy drinking, he continued to tour, frequently visiting England and Australia. But his popularity steadily faded, perhaps because his style was simply too sophisticated for listeners raised on rock ’n’ roll, even though Ray was one its pioneers. He died of liver failure in Los Angeles in 1990, at the age of sixty-three.
Pat Boone was one of the most popular singers of the 1950s, selling more records than anyone but Elvis Presley. With his wholesome good looks and squeaky-clean persona, Boone helped broaden the acceptance of rock ’n’ roll among more conventionally minded listeners. Supposedly descended from the frontiersman Daniel Boone, he was born in Jacksonville, Florida, but raised outside Nashville, Tennessee, where his family attended the Church of Christ. He began singing in church, then competed in talent shows and performed for fraternal lodges, crooning pop songs in the manner of his favorite singers, Bing Crosby and Perry Como. By his senior year in high school he was hosting his own radio show, for which he also sang.
He was still in high school when he met his future wife, a daughter of Red Foley. Through her, Boone met the country star Eddie Arnold, who introduced him to the owner of the Nashville-based Republic label. In May 1953, just before his high school graduation, Boone made his first record, the Latin-flavored “Until You Tell Me So,” backed with the tango-tempoed “My Heart Belongs to You,” singing both in pure pop style. Later that year, he would cut four more sides for Republic, crooning pop ballads without the Latin tinge. In July 1953, he entered a talent contest and won a trip to New York to audition for Ted Mack and the Original Amateur Hour, where he beat the competition three weeks in a row. In the summer of 1954, having married and moved to Texas, he returned to New York for a runoff among previous Amateur Hour winners; but while awaiting the results of the finals competition, he entered and won the Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts contest and, having thereby become a professional, was disqualified from the Amateur Hour. He went on to become a regular on Godfrey’s shows.
On the way back to Texas, Boone stopped in Tennessee to meet Randy Wood, the head of Dot Records, who’d seen him on the Amateur Hour and Talent Scouts programs. He didn’t hear from Wood again until 1955, when Wood proposed that he cover the Charms’ “Two Hearts.” For the flip side, Wood chose “Tra-La-La”—not the same song as LaVern Baker’s “Tra La La” but a Dave Bartholomew composition that Bartholomew had recorded with the New Orleans singer Tommy Ridgely in May 1951 and that the Griffin Brothers, a jump band from Norfolk, Virginia, had covered on Dot the same year for a Top 10 R&B hit. Despite competing versions by everyone from Frank Sinatra to the Crew-Cuts, Boone’s March 1955 recording of “Two Hearts”—a fair approximation of the original, with Boone striving to copy Otis Williams’s vocal leaps—was the one that made the pop charts, thanks in part to Boone’s hectic promotion. The personnel at some of the radio stations he visited, however, were reluctant to believe he was Pat Boone. “I captured enough of the flavor of the real rock ’n’ roll or the real rhythm-and-blues that they assumed the recording artist was black,” he reflected.[22]
In May 1955, Boone recorded his pop-chart-topping cover of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t It a Shame” (backed with a cover of Red Foley’s “Tennessee Saturday Night”), catapulting him to a prominence that would include movie stardom and his own television show. He followed with a string of hit covers of R&B songs, including the El Dorados’ “At My Front Door,” the Five Keys’ “Gee Whittakers!” the Flamingos’ “I’ll Be Home,” Little Richard’s “Tutti-Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally,” and Ivory Joe Hunter’s “I Almost Lost My Mind.” After that came a double-sided hit combining the title song from the soundtrack of the movie Friendly Persuasion with a cover of Big Joe Turner’s “Chains of Love,” where Boone brings out the melodic resemblance to “I Almost Lost My Mind.” In late 1956, he had a No. 1 hit with “Don’t Forbid Me” by the black songwriter Charlie Singleton, which Elvis Presley recorded at his “Million Dollar Quartet” session. “Have you heard Pat Boone’s new record?” Presley asks his illustrious associates. “It was written for me, and it was sent to me, and it stayed over in my house for ages. Man, I never did even see it.”
Boone next charted with “Why Baby Why”—not the George Jones country hit by that title but a rocking number written by two black songwriters, Luther Dixon and Larry Harrison—backed with a cover of Lucky Millinder’s 1951 R&B hit “I’m Waiting Just for You.” But beginning with his next, double-sided hit, the chart-topping “Love Letters in the Sand” (a 1931 composition based on an 1881 composition), backed with “Bernadine”—both from the soundtrack of the 1957 movie Bernadine, which starred Boone—he recorded mostly pop songs, although some were embellished with rock effects such as backbeats or habanera bass lines. Nevertheless, “Love Letters in the Sand,” like Boone’s “Ain’t That a Shame,” “Don’t Forbid Me,” and “At My Front Door,” crossed over to the R&B charts.
Written by the Tin Pan Alley stalwart Sammy Fain and his longtime collaborator Paul Francis Webster, the pop ballad “April Love,” from Boone’s 1957 movie by the same title, was his third No. 1 hit, backed with Leon René’s “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano.” But Boone’s 1950s hits also included “A Wonderful Time Up There,” his version of “Gospel Boogie”; the Orioles’ “It’s Too Soon to Know”; a rocked-up take on Eddie Arnold’s 1946 country smash “That’s How Much I Love You,” which Frank Sinatra had covered in 1947; the gospelly Otis Blackwell–Bobby Stevenson rocker “For My Good Fortune”; Wynonie Harris’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight”; the goofy faux-Latin “Wang Dang Taffy-Apple Tango (Mambo Cha Cha Cha)”; and the 1936 hymn “Beyond the Sunset,” a country hit for the Three Suns with Rosalie Allen and Elton Britt in 1950.
None of Boone’s 1960s hits was an R&B cover, although a few were covers of country hits such as Ernest Tubb’s “Walking the Floor over You,” Jean Shepard and Ferlin Husky’s “A Dear John Letter,” and Cowboy Copas’s “Alabam.” Boone’s only real rock hit in the 1960s was a cover of David Dante’s 1961 comic novelty “Speedy Gonzalez,” although his “Beach Girl,” produced by Terry Melcher in Beach Boys style, rocks after a fashion. He had his last No. 1 hit in 1961 with a cover of Chase Webster’s morbidly catchy “Moody River.” He also had hits with a cover of the Bahamian singer (not the bluesman) Blind Blake’s version of the American murder ballad “Delia Gone”; the movie theme “The Exodus Song (This Land Is Mine),” for which Boone wrote the lyrics; the Italian pop song “Quando Quando Quando (Tell Me When)”; the Antonio Carlos Jobim bossa nova “Meditation (Meditação)”; and the sarcastic pro–Vietnam War song “Wish You Were Here, Buddy,” which Boone composed himself. He made Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, just barely, for the last time in 1969 with a cover of the former Kingston Trio member John Stewart’s “July, You’re a Woman,” including such out-of-character verses as “I can’t hold it on the road / When you’re sittin’ right beside me / And I’m drunk out of my mind / Merely from the fact that you are here.”
In the 1970s, as his fame diminished, Boone turned heavily to gospel music, along with country. He published a steady stream of inspirational books, which eventually outnumbered his movie appearances. In 1997, he spoofed his strait-laced image with In a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy, an album featuring brassy pop arrangements of well-known heavy-metal songs. In 2006, he released R&B Classics: We Are Family, featuring modern arrangements of hits by James Brown, the Four Tops, Sister Sledge, and the like. As of this writing, he continues to perform and to participate in philanthropic and conservative political activities.
Boone has been ridiculed for his bloodless interpretations of rhythm-and-blues, but while he couldn’t hold a candle to Fats Domino or Little Richard, he was a decent singer whose versions of songs such as “Gee Whittakers!” and even “I Almost Lost My Mind” compare favorably to the originals. And his clean-cut appearance and upstanding manner made him palatable to those who saw Elvis Presley, to say nothing of Little Richard, as unacceptably rough and wild, providing a bridge to rock ’n’ roll and rhythm-and-blues for the musically faint of heart. “Who among us has a soul so pure that he never liked Pat Boone?” wrote Ellen Willis, the first pop critic for The New Yorker magazine. “I tended to prefer the tame, white versions of rhythm-and-blues records to the black originals. . . . I was one of the white teen-aged reasons the music was being watered down.[23]
The trend for white singers to record rhythm-and-blues material accelerated toward the mid-1950s, drawing in even such staunch middle-of-the-roaders as Perry Como (“Ko Ko Mo”), Eddie Fisher (“Song of the Dreamer”), and Doris Day (“Two Hearts”). Many of these singers were women, and many of their records were issued on major labels. Although much of their output consisted of pop ballads, they also recorded up-tempo rock songs.
Sunny Gale, born Selma Sega in New Jersey and raised in Philadelphia, sang with the bands of Jules Helzner and Hal McIntyre before pursuing a solo career. Her version of “Wheel of Fortune” on the independent Derby label reached No. 2 on Billboard’s R&B chart in February 1952; reviewing a May 1952 performance at New York’s Paramount Theatre, a Billboard reviewer commented that “much of her phrasing was almost a carbon of Johnnie Ray.”[24] She scored a Top 20 pop hit in 1953 when she covered Ruth Brown’s “Teardrops from My Eyes” for RCA Victor under the title “Teardrops on My Pillow.” Later in 1953, she recorded two sides, “Mama’s Gone, Goodbye” and “The Note in the Bottle,” with a black doo-wop group, the Du Droppers. She made the pop charts again in 1954 with her cover of the Spaniels’ “Goodnite Sweetheart, Goodnite.”
In 1955, she covered another doo-wop record, the Four Fellows’ “Soldier Boy,” which Elvis Presley would record in 1960. She last made the national charts in 1956 with a half-baked attempt to ride the rock bandwagon, “Rock and Roll Wedding,” backed with a cover of the Platters’ “Winner Take All.” She left RCA Victor for Decca that year, covering the Coasters’ “One Kiss Led to Another” and recording the semi-rocking Don Raye composition “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad,” which the white singer-actress Betty Hutton had recorded in 1953 and which Wanda Jackson cut in rockabilly style around the same time that Gale did it. In 1957, Gale covered “Come Go with Me,” originally by the racially mixed doo-wop group the Dell-Vikings, and cut the mid-tempo rocker “Let’s Be Friendly” and the pop-rocker “A Meeting of the Eyes.” She recorded another pop-rocker in 1958, “Three O’Clock,” where she acts the part of a schoolgirl, but in 1959 Decca dropped her. In 1960, Gale covered the Willows’ “Church Bells May Ring” for Warwick, but after releasing a few more records, she faded from view and has since been nearly forgotten.[25]
Like Sunny Gale, Bunny Paul did not sound black but nevertheless made the transition from swing-era pop to rhythm-and-blues, covering R&B hits and recording with a black vocal group. She sang with various bands in her native Detroit in the 1940s, making her first record with Don Pablo’s sweet band around 1948; by 1950, she was hosting a local television show. In 1953, she recorded her first hit, “Magic Guitar,” on the Dot label; in 1954, she switched to Essex, Bill Haley’s label at the time, and with Sy Oliver as her musical director recorded a cover of the Drifters’ “Such a Night” that preceded Johnnie Ray’s version onto the pop charts. She charted again in 1954 with a cover of the Clovers’ “Lovey Dovey,” which Oliver’s arrangement gives even more of a doo-wop feel. The same year, she covered the Drifters’ “Honey Love” with accompaniment by the Harptones, on loan to Essex from the Bruce label; the flip side was Paul’s cover of the Harptones’ own “I’ll Never Tell.” The Harptones give Paul’s “Honey Love” a more authentic sound than the white singer Vicki Young’s rival version, but it was Young’s record, not Paul’s, that made the pop charts.
In 1955, Paul signed with Capitol Records and covered Linda Hayes and the Platters’ rhythm-and-blues recording “Please Have Mercy,” but neither Paul’s nor Hayes’s disc charted. Next, Paul covered Billy Brooks’s R&B ballad “Song of the Dreamer,” which Johnnie Ray and Eddie Fisher also recorded, but after a few more releases, Capitol let her go. In 1956, she covered Faye Adams’s waltz-time “Teen-Age Heart” for Detroit’s independent Dash label, backed with Paul’s own hard-rocking composition “Baby Sitter’s Blues.” Later the same year, she cut “History,” backed with “Sweet Talk,” both in classic rockabilly style and both composed by Paul, for RKO’s subsidiary Point label. She cut one more single in 1956, the rocking “That’s Love,” backed with the doo-wop-flavored “The Gypsy,” for the small Dynamic label. At year’s end, she performed at the Fox Theatre in Detroit along with Ivory Joe Hunter, Della Reese, and Bo Diddley.
In 1957, Paul cut two singles for Brunswick: the first coupled the rocker “Buzz Me” with the calypso “Poor Joe” (the latter written by Joe Willoughby, the lyricist of Louis Jordan’s “Run, Joe”); the second paired the pop-rocker “Beedle-Lump-Bump” with the ballad “The One You Love.” She also cut two singles for Roulette, the sugary “Love Birds”/“We Wanted to Marry” in 1958 and a rerecording of “Such a Night,” backed with a cover of Brook Benton’s rhythmic ballad “A Million Miles from Nowhere,” in 1959. Diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1960, she was left partially paralyzed after surgery, but in 1963 she recorded a final single for the Motown-affiliated Gordy label, a cover of the Marvelettes’ “I’m Hooked,” backed with “We’re Only Young Once,” for which Paul composed the music. Both songs are arranged in Motown style, with Martha Reeves, of Martha and the Vandellas, contributing as a background singer. Unlike Johnnie Ray, who maintained his distinctive approach no matter what genre he tackled, Paul was a musical chameleon whose records closely mirrored prevailing trends. But her later records did not sell, and Paul retired from music, neither performing nor recording again.[26]
Born Wanda Stegall in Oklahoma, Vicki Young sang and played banjo in her family’s band as a child. She continued with the band as a teenager when the family moved to Southern California, later striking out on her own. After performing in nightclubs and on Spade Cooley’s television show, she signed with Capitol Records in 1953. She made the pop charts that year with the 1928 Tin Pan Alley standard “I Love You So Much” and again in 1954 with her cover of “Honey Love,” which was backed with a cover of the Robins’ raucous “Riot in Cell Block #9.” In 1955, she covered LaVern Baker’s “Tweedlee Dee” and the Charms’ “Hearts of Stone,” but neither charted, nor did the other pop and country songs she recorded through 1958 for Capitol and then Brunswick. Her 1956 recording of her own ballad composition “Let There Be You,” however, was covered for a minor pop hit in 1957 by the black doo-wop group the Five Keys. After one of her sons was killed by an automobile, she quit the music business. She died in 2007 and remains virtually unknown today.[27]
Little is known about the Philadelphia-born singer Gloria Mann. In the mid-1940s, she sang with the Don Renaldo Quartet (whose leader, born Vincent Pignotti, later directed the string sections for Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff’s Philadelphia International rhythm-and-blues record label). In 1954, she covered “Goodnite Sweetheart, Goodnite” on both the S-L-S and Jubilee labels, accompanied by the Carter Rays, another name for the Eddie Carter Quartet, a black Philadelphia doo-wop group. A Billboard reviewer noted that she “sounds a lot like Sunny Gale.”[28] The same year, again with the Carter Rays, she cut “The Waltz You Saved for Me,” backed with “I’m Living My Life for You,” for the Philadelphia-based Sound label, but the record didn’t chart. She had her first pop hit, on Sound, in 1955 with a cover of the Penguins’ “Earth Angel” and her second at the end of the year with “A Teenage Prayer,” the latter less successful than the version by the white singer-actress Gale Storm but more successful than the one by the black jazz singer Kitty White. She had her third hit, on Decca, in 1956 with a cover of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers’ “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” again less successful than the version by Gale Storm. She kept recording teen-oriented pop-rockers for Decca and, in 1957, for ABC-Paramount, but none made the charts.
Unrelated to Betty Hutton, June Hutton, like her older half-sister, the bandleader Ina Ray Hutton, was of partial African American ancestry but passed as white throughout her career. In the late 1930s, she sang in Ina Ray’s band under the name Elaine Merritt. In 1941, she joined the vocal harmony group associated with Charlie Spivak’s big band, the Stardusters, with whom she sang on a couple of hit records and appeared in the 1944 Betty Grable movie Pin Up Girl. Later in 1944, Hutton replaced Jo Stafford in the Pied Pipers, a vocal group that often accompanied Frank Sinatra. She recorded several hits with the Pipers, including their 1945 chart-topper “Dream.” She went solo in 1950, recording a cover of Lefty Frizzell’s country smash “If You’ve Got the Money I’ve Got the Time” for Decca, backed with a cover of Ruth Brown’s “Teardrops from My Eyes.” In 1951, she married Tommy Dorsey’s former arranger Axel Stordahl, who led the bands on her records for Capitol, including her perky 1954 cover of the Crows’ “Gee.”
Born Frieda Lipschitz in Massachusetts, Georgia Gibbs sang in vaudeville shows and toured as a teenager with the Hudson-DeLange swing band, with whom she cut two sides under the name Fredda Gibson. In the 1940s, she performed and recorded with such bands as Tommy Dorsey’s and Artie Shaw’s and appeared on such radio programs as The Camel Caravan, often working with comedians. After cutting V-Discs with several bands during World War II, she began recording on her own in 1946 but did not have a hit until 1950, when she charted with “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake” (on Coral), a bigger hit for Eileen Barton. Her subsequent string of hits (most on Mercury) continued through the mid-1950s, including the 1952 smash “Kiss of Fire,” adapted from the classic Argentine tango “El Choclo.” She sang mostly straightforward pop ballads but covered everything from country (Bonnie Lou’s “Seven Lonely Days”) to faux-Latin (Ruth Brown’s “Mambo Baby”) to faux-calypso (Eartha Kitt’s “Somebody Bad Stole de Wedding Bell”).
Gibbs is remembered today, however, mainly for her R&B covers “Tweedle [sic] Dee” and “Dance with Me Henry (Wallflower),” which respectively reached the No. 2 and No. 1 spots on Billboard’s pop chart in early 1955, leaving both LaVern Baker and Etta James furious. “My version went underground . . . while Georgia’s whitewash went through the roof,” James later wrote. “I was enraged to see Georgia singing the song on The Ed Sullivan Show while I was singing it in some funky dive in Watts.”[29]
Gibbs had four more hits in 1955: “Sweet and Gentle,” an adaptation of the Cuban cha-cha-chá “Me Lo Dijo Adela”; “I Want You to Be My Baby,” a cover of the white singer Lillian Briggs’s hard-rocking cover of Louis Jordan’s 1953 original, itself adapted by Jon Hendricks from “Rag Mop”; the much-recorded English-language adaptation of the Italian song “Arrivederci Roma”; and its flip side, “24 Hours a Day,” modeled after “Sixty-Minute Man.” She had another four hits in 1956, including the mid-tempo rocker “Rock Right” and a cover of LaVern Baker’s “Tra La La.” The following year brought her final Mercury hit, the country-flavored “Silent Lips,” and her only RCA Victor hit, a cover of Ernest Tubb’s 1941 country classic “Walking the Floor over You.” She also covered Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire” in 1957, but her version, while reasonably convincing, didn’t chart. The same year, she hosted her own short-lived Georgia Gibbs and Her Million Record Show on NBC television. She last made the pop charts in 1958 with “The Hula Hoop Song” (on Roulette), also a novelty hit for Teresa Brewer. She kept recording into the mid-1960s, then retired, dying in 2006.
Easily the best known of the white women who covered rhythm-and-blues songs was Gale Storm, who’d been acting in movies and television shows for fifteen years by the time she made her first record. Born Josephine Cottle in Texas, she acted in high school; at seventeen, she entered a radio talent contest, Gateway to Hollywood, and won a contract with RKO Radio Pictures. Renamed Gale Storm, she debuted in the 1940 movie Tom Brown’s School Days but made only one more film with RKO. She soon signed with Monogram Pictures, winning fame in B-movies that ranged from Freckles Comes Home to Revenge of the Zombies. She also sang on a few Soundies. In the 1950s, she switched to television, starring in the situation comedies My Little Margie (1952–55) and The Gale Storm Show (1956–60).
Randy Wood heard Storm sing on the televised Colgate Comedy Hour in 1954 and offered her a contract with Dot. “I Hear You Knocking,” her first release, “was a cover of something someone named Smiley Louis [sic], the rhythm-and-blues man, had done,” she writes in her autobiography.[30] Storm’s singing on “I Hear You Knocking” is more affected than Smiley Lewis’s; her accompaniment features the same piano introduction but not the subsequent keyboard triplets, and it omits the octave jump from the “Yancey Special” bass line. Nonetheless, Storm’s version was a No. 2 pop and No. 15 R&B hit in late 1955, far outselling the original.
She followed with a double-sided hit, a cover of Gloria Mann’s “A Teenage Prayer” backed with a cover of Dean Martin’s “Memories Are Made of This.” She charted in 1956 with a doo-wop cover of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” followed by a cover of Cathy Carr’s “Ivory Tower,” the latter recorded by pop, rock, R&B, and country artists alike. Her next hit was a cover of Marie Knight’s moving rhythm-and-blues ballad “Tell Me Why,” a song—written by the R&B singer Titus Turner to the approximate tune of the spiritual “Just a Closer Walk with Thee”—that was also covered by the Crew-Cuts and by Elvis Presley (although Presley’s early-1957 recording was not released until late 1965). Storm’s “Tell Me Why,” featuring one of her better vocal performances, keeps the piano triplets from Knight’s original but omits the habanera bass line that helped make it a local hit in New Orleans. The Crew-Cuts omit the triplets but keep the bass line, while Presley, in masterly form, dispenses with both.
Storm’s final 1956 hit was the double-sided “Now Is the Hour”/“A Heart without a Sweetheart,” the first side being a reprise of the New Zealand song that charted for more than half a dozen American artists in 1948, the second a double-tracked original ballad. She had another double-sided hit in 1957, an update of Tommy Dorsey’s 1935 smash “On Treasure Island” backed with a cutesy version of Ruth Brown’s crossover R&B hit “Lucky Lips.” She last made the charts later in 1957 with a cover of Bonnie Guitar’s crossover country hit “Dark Moon.” She quit recording soon afterward, although Dot continued to release her records through 1960. Storm’s career wound down after The Gale Storm Show ended, although she continued to make occasional television appearances. She battled alcoholism the 1970s, then turned to religion, dying in 2009.
White vocal groups also played a part in the development of rock ’n’ roll. Beginning in the 1930s, ensembles such as the Merry Macs, the Modernaires, and the Pied Pipers jazzed up traditional barbershop harmonies, appearing in movies and on television. The Merry Macs were formed in Minneapolis by the three McMichael brothers, who sang harmony while their mother sang melody. In the mid-1920, they performed on local radio and toured with Joe Haymes’s band, billed as the Mystery Trio and then the Personality Boys; in 1930, Cheri McKay was hired to sing melody, and the group was renamed the Merry Macs. In 1933, they performed on network radio and made their recorded debut with “In a Little White Church on the Hill,” backed with “Hiawatha’s Lullaby,” which Victor released on its country series. They became radio favorites and performed with many top big bands; meanwhile, Helen Carroll replaced Cheri McKay.
In 1938, the Merry Macs made their first Decca recording, “Pop Goes the Weasel”; the following year, Mary Lou Cook replaced Helen Carroll, and the group scored its first national hit with “Hawaiian War Chant (Ta-Hu-Wa-Hu-Wa-I),” adapted from a nineteenth-century Hawaiian love song. In 1940, they made their feature-film debut in the Jack Benny–Fred Allen comedy Love Thy Neighbor. In 1941, they charted with “The Hut-Hut Song,” a mock-Swedish novelty that was also a hit for Freddy Martin, Horace Heidt, and the King Sisters. After they filmed Ride ’Em Cowboy that summer, Marjory Garland replaced Mary Lou Cook, and the group cut the western-themed hits “Deep in the Heart of Texas” and “Jingle, Jangle, Jingle.” The Merry Macs had their best seller in 1944 with the chart-topping “Mairzy Doats,” another tongue-twisting novelty. They seem to have had a penchant for nonsense songs, even covering Slim and Slam’s “Vol Vist Du Gaily Star.”
The group continued to score hits into 1946, all on Decca, including collaborations with Bing Crosby and Judy Garland. In 1946 and 1947, they recorded seven singles for the Majestic label, among them a version of “Open the Door Richard!” They recorded several singles for Era in 1955 and 1956, released an album on Capitol in 1957, and cut the “The Christmas Cha Cha” for Portrait in 1961. They disbanded in 1964, reuniting for a concert at the Hollywood Bowl in 1968.
Inspired by Bing Crosby’s Rhythm Boys, the Modernaires were formed in Buffalo, New York, in 1935 as a high school trio, the Three Weary Willies. After appearing with Ted Fio Rito’s band, the trio moved to New York City, where they sang with the bands of George Hall and Ozzie Nelson under the names Don Juan Two and Three and the Three Wizards of Ozzie. Adding a fourth member and renaming themselves the Modernaires, they performed with Fred Waring’s and Charlie Barnet’s bands, recording the radio anthem “Make Believe Ballroom” with Barnet in 1936. They were featured on Paul Whiteman’s radio show and sang with Ray Noble’s band before joining Glenn Miller’s band, with whom they recorded “Make Believe Ballroom Time,” an update of “Make Believe Ballroom,” in 1940. Soon afterward, Paula Kelly, one of the Miller band’s singers, became the fifth Modernaire, giving the group a sound similar to the Merry Macs’. They had a number of hits with Miller (some recorded before but released after he joined the Army Air Forces in 1942), including “Perfidia (Tonight),” “The Booglie Wooglie Piggy,” “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “Delilah,” “Elmer’s Tune,” “Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else but Me)” “(I’ve Got a Gal in) Kalamazoo,” “Juke Box Saturday Night,” “That Old Black Magic,” and “It Must Be Jelly (’Cause Jam Don’t Shake Like That),” the last crossing over to the Harlem Hit Parade. They also appeared in a few movies.
After Miller’s plane disappeared over the English Channel in late 1944, the Modernaires began recording on their own, scoring hits on Columbia through 1947, including the medley “Salute to Glenn Miller.” They backed Doris Day on the 1948 hit “Thoughtless” and Frank Sinatra on the 1950 hits “The Old Master Painter” and “Sorry.” Signing with Coral, they had three more hits of their own: “New Jukebox Saturday Night,” a different “Salute to Glenn Miller,” and “April in Paris,” the last in 1956. They also cut a 1953 cover of the Davis Sisters’ hillbilly boogie “Rock-A-Bye Boogie” and a 1956 cover of the El Dorados’ R&B hit “At My Front Door,” backed with a rock-tinged version of “Alright, Okay, You Win.” They appeared in a few other movies, including The Glenn Miller Story, and performed on several television shows.
The Modernaires covered the Platters’ “Only You (and You Alone)” and “The Great Pretender” for Alan Freed’s 1956 album Rock n’ Roll Dance Party. Together with Freed, his fellow disc jockey Al “Jazzbo” Collins, and the television personality Steve Allen, they recorded the 1956 single “The Space Man” in emulation of Buchanan and Goodman’s comic novelty record “The Flying Saucer,” which interspersed a fictional news broadcast with clips of current rock ’n’ roll hits; for “The Space Man,” the Modernaires faked the rock clips. The group cut a few more singles for United Artists in the early 1960s and toured the country in a 1964 show called “Music Made Famous by Glenn Miller.” Today, a quartet including two daughters of Paula Kelly and her husband Hal Dickinson, an original group member, continues to perform under the Modernaires’ name.
The Pied Pipers formed as an octet in Los Angeles after members of three different harmony groups—the Four Esquires, the Three Rhythm Kings, and the Stafford Sisters—sang together while waiting to audition for the 1938 movie Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Hired to perform on radio with Tommy Dorsey’s band, they were soon dismissed, reportedly because a sponsor objected to such songs as “Hold Tight (Want Some Sea Food Mama).”[31] In 1939, they recorded four sides for Victor. Reduced to a quartet comprising three men and Jo Stafford, the Pipers were rehired by Dorsey around the same time the bandleader hired Frank Sinatra. The Pipers backed Sinatra on the huge 1940 hit “I’ll Never Smile Again” and on thirteen more hits with Dorsey through 1942; they sang without Sinatra on three other Dorsey hits.
Near the end of 1942, the Pied Pipers left Dorsey and signed with Capitol. They had their first hit on their own with “Mairzy Doats” in 1944, a couple of months after the Merry Macs’ version charted, followed by “The Trolley Song,” an even bigger hit. But Capital began recording Jo Stafford as a solo artist, leading to her replacement by June Hutton, who sang on Johnny Mercer’s composition “Dream,” the Pipers’ only No. 1 hit. The group accompanied Mercer on many of his mid-1940s hits, including “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,” “Candy,” “On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe,” and “Personality.” The Pipers also recorded nine more hits of their own through 1948, including a version of “Open the Door Richard!” that’s not as funky as Jack McVea’s but not as corny as one might expect. Their last hit was “My Happiness,” one of the two songs Elvis Presley first recorded at Sam Phillips’s studio.
The Pied Pipers appeared in about ten feature films between 1939 and 1950, later performing on television. From 1945 to 1947, they toured and sang on radio with Frank Sinatra. In 1950, June Hutton was replaced by Sue Allen, who was later replaced by Virginia Marcy. As of this writing, a group continues to perform under the Pied Pipers’ name.
The Four Freshmen had perhaps a greater influence on later rock ’n’ roll than any other white vocal group, if only because they were the principal harmonic model for the Beach Boys. “Months at a time. Days on end. He’d listen to Four Freshmen records,” said the Beach Boy Carl Wilson of his older brother Brian, the group’s leader.[32] In 1948, conservatory students in Indianapolis formed a barbershop quartet, Hal’s Harmonizers, who then adopted a jazzier repertoire and became the Toppers, playing instruments as well as singing. Influenced by the Modernaires and Pied Pipers as well as other harmony groups such as Mel Tormé and the Mel-Tones and the Stan Kenton band’s Pastels, they developed unusual chord voicings that made the quartet sound like a quintet.[33] Renamed the Four Freshman, they toured the Midwest until Stan Kenton discovered them and recommended them to Capitol Records.
In October 1950, the Four Freshmen made their studio debut with “Mr. B’s Blues,” which Billy “Mr. B” Eckstine had recorded at the end of 1947. Uncharacteristically, the group’s rendition features no harmonizing whatsoever; instead, the lead singer shouts the blues in a style cruder and more raucous than the smooth-voiced Eckstine’s. Afterward, the Freshmen showed little rhythm-and-blues influence, except on such recordings as the similarly unharmonized “Stormy Weather,” from 1952, and the gospelly “Crazy Bones,” from 1954. The group appeared in the 1951 movie Rich, Young and Pretty, but Capitol was reluctant to release the two sides they recorded that year—a complex, wordless arrangement of “Tuxedo Junction” and a richly harmonized version of “It’s a Blue World,” the latter originally a hit for Tony Martin after he sang it in the 1940 movie Music in My Heart. Finally issued in 1952, “It’s a Blue World,” backed with “Tuxedo Junction,” became the Freshmen’s first hit. They charted again in 1953 with “It Happened Once Before,” in 1954 with the Duke Ellington standard “Mood Indigo,” in 1955 with a mambo-flavored version of the 1946 Frank Sinatra hit “Day by Day” and a tango-tempoed take on the 1927 Guy Lombardo smash “Charmaine!” and in 1956 with “Graduation Day” (also a hit for the Canadian vocal group the Rover Boys), which the Beach Boys covered on a live recording in 1964 and a studio recording in 1965.
The Beach Boys used the Freshmen’s sumptuous a cappella arrangement of Bobby Troup’s composition “Their Hearts Were Full of Spring,” from the 1961 album The Freshman Year, on their 1963 album Little Deuce Coupe, rewording the song into the James Dean tribute “A Young Man Is Gone.” The Beach Boys closely copied “Their Hearts Were Full of Spring” itself on the televised Andy Williams Show in 1965 and included that song on their British album Live in London (released in the United States as Beach Boys ’69). The Four Freshmen recorded for Capitol until 1965, then cut a few more sides for Decca and Liberty before succumbing to the British Invasion, although they kept on recording sporadically, ultimately releasing nearly as many albums as singles. Although the last original member retired in 1992, a changing roster of Freshmen has continued to perform to this day. Besides the Beach Boys, the Four Freshman influenced such vocal groups as the Harptones, the Lettermen, and the Manhattan Transfer.
Like the Four Freshmen, the Four Lads displayed only a limited affinity for black music. Having met as students at the St. Michael’s Choir School in Toronto, they began performing in area clubs. They were discovered when they sang for the Golden Gate Quartet, a black gospel group whom they idolized, backstage at a local theater where the quartet was appearing; a Golden Gate member recommended the Lads to the quartet’s manager, who invited them to New York.[34] Following their success on Johnnie Ray’s “Cry,” the Four Lads recorded for Mitch Miller on their own, beginning in 1952 with “The Mocking Bird,” an original song, seemingly based on the “Goin’ Home” theme from Dvořák’s New World Symphony, that turns into a takeoff on the African American spiritual “Children, Go Where I Send Thee.” Like “Cry,” it was released on Columbia’s OKeh rhythm-and-blues label. The group’s subsequent Columbia hits included another African American spiritual, “Down by the Riverside,” in 1953, and the Zimbabwean song “Skokiaan,” in 1954. But when they ventured into rock ’n’ roll on the 1955 Percy Faith–Carl Sigman composition “Too much! Baby, Baby!” the results were distressingly square.
Most of the Four Lads’ hits were upbeat pop songs such as “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” and “Gilly Gilly Ossenfeffer Katzenellen Bogen by the Sea.” Ironically, their biggest hits, “Moments to Remember,” “No, Not Much,” and “Standing on the Corner”—all strictly pop—coincided with the rock ’n’ roll explosion of the mid-1950s. They continued to score hits through 1959, including both a reissue and a re-recording of “The Mocking Bird,” but afterward the group gradually disbanded before ultimately re-forming. Today, a Four Lads group including only one original member still performs.
Products of the same Toronto choir school that the Four Lads attended, the Crew-Cuts formed in 1952, performing as the Jordonaires [sic], the Otnorots, the Four Tones, and the Canadaires. A television appearance in Cleveland around the end of 1953 led to their meeting the disc jockey Bill Randle, who renamed them the Crew-Cuts and got them a contract with Mercury Records. Their first release, “Crazy ’Bout You Baby,” was a Top 10 hit in 1954; if anything, the up-tempo song, written by two of the group’s members, rocks harder than their next hit, the landmark “Sh-Boom.”
The Crew-Cuts followed “Sh-Boom” with a string of pop hits in 1954 and 1955, mostly covers of rhythm-and-blues records such as Shirley Gunter and the Queens’ “Oop Shoop,” the Penguins’ “Earth Angel,” Gene and Eunice’s “Ko Ko Mo,” Nappy Brown’s “Don’t Be Angry,” the Danderliers’ “Chop Chop Boom,” the Nutmegs’ “A Story Untold,” and Otis Williams’s “Gum Drop.” Billboard noted that “the boys were among the first pop artists to make it big with r.&b. ditties.”[35] But their popularity declined when they stopped covering R&B songs, and they scored their last hit in 1957 with a cover of “Young Love,” a No. 1 pop smash for both the country singer Sonny James and the movie star Tab Hunter. Beginning in 1958, they recorded eight singles for RCA, but none charted; in the 1960s, they recorded for Warwick, Vee-Jay, Camay, ABC-Paramount, Chess, Firebird, and other labels. After disbanding, they reunited for a 1977 concert in Nashville, performing occasionally for a few years longer.
White female vocal groups such as the Fontane Sisters, the McGuire Sisters, and the Chordettes were at least as likely as their male or mixed-sex counterparts to tackle rhythm-and-blues material. The Fontane Sisters, actually surnamed Rosse, began as church singers in their native New Jersey. Performing as the Ross [sic] Trio, the two older sisters and their guitar-playing brother Frank were hired by NBC in New York and dispatched to Cleveland to do radio work. But in 1944, Frank was drafted and sent into combat, where he died. A younger Rosse sister took his place, and the all-female trio adopted a shortened version of their great-grandmother’s name, Fontaine.
In 1948, the Fontane Sisters replaced the Satisfiers as Perry Como’s backup group on his radio show, The Chesterfield Supper Club. They started accompanying Como on his RCA-Victor sessions and, beginning in 1949, recorded for the label on their own. One of their early sides was an update of Paul Whiteman’s 1928 hit “Mississippi Mud” that omits the word “darkies.” Their first hit, in 1951, was a cover of Patti Page’s huge smash “Tennessee Waltz,” itself a cover of Pee Wee King’s 1948 country hit, which was also successfully covered by several other pop and country artists. The Fontanes collaborated with the Sons of the Pioneers on “Handsome Stranger”/“Grasshopper Heart (and a Butterfly Brain),” then scored their second hit, “Let Me In,” in collaboration with the country singer Texas Jim Robertson. Their next hit, a lyricized version of Johnny Hodges’s instrumental “Castle Rock,” charted just after Frank Sinatra’s bigger-selling rendition did. Their fourth and final 1951 hit was a cover of Hank Williams’s honky-tonk classic “Cold, Cold Heart,” a No. 1 pop smash for Tony Bennett and a song since recorded by everyone from Nat “King” Cole and Dinah Washington to Frankie Laine, Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Aretha Franklin. The sisters also covered Hank Snow’s 1951 hit “Rhumba Boogie.”
But the Fontane Sisters did not have their next hit, the Christmas song “Kissing Bridge,” until 1954, after which they switched to the Dot label. Their first hit on Dot, a harmonized revival of Ruth Etting’s 1928 hit “Happy Days and Lonely Nights,” came out later in 1954. By the end of that year, the sisters had charted with their all-time best seller, a pop-style cover of the Charms’ R&B chart-toppper “Hearts of Stone.” The English historian Brian Ward comments:
The producers of white covers . . . groped uncertainly for some of the musical magic which had initially made r&b popular with whites, but also sought to deepen their penetration of that white market by paring the music to its bare, functional, rhythmic bones and fleshing it out again according to “white” musical and lyrical specifications. These agendas were clearly audible in the differences between Otis Williams and the Charms’ “Hearts of stone” [sic] on King, and the Fontane Sisters’ cover on Dot. While the basic arrangements had much in common, the King record showcased Otis Williams’ expressive lead tenor, which peeled away from the strict melody line and toyed with the basic rhythm. . . . By contrast, the Fontane Sisters abandoned the vocal and rhythmic fluidity of the original in favour of a rigid adherence to the melody and a more explicit statement of the dominant beat. A stolid male chorus sang in unison, anchoring the song to its melodic and rhythmic foundations, rather than providing the harmonic shadings offered by the Charms.[36]
Nevertheless, the Fontane Sisters’ “Hearts of Stone” has enough rock ’n’ roll feeling that its omission from the usual lists of first rock records is baffling. And the Charms’ version managed to remain on the pop charts simultaneously with the sisters’ record.
The Fontane Sisters’ next hit, “Rock Love,” was also a rhythm-and-blues cover. Written by Henry Glover and first recorded by Lula Reed for King, it charted in February 1955, a month before the movie Blackboard Jungle was released. But with lyrics such as “You got to have rock love within your heart / You got to have rock love before you start / So when temptation tries to move your soul / The rocks of love won’t let you roll,” it sounds as if the rock revolution were already in full swing. “Rock Love” was also covered by Teresa Brewer, Eddie Fontaine, Elaine Gay, Delores Gray, and Billy Farrell, all of them white. Later in 1955, the Fontanes scored the double-sided hit “Rollin’ Stone”/“Playmates.” “Rollin’ Stone” is a cover of a Top 10 R&B hit by the Marigolds, a name taken by the reorganized Prisonaires; the song is a reworded version of the Drifters’ “Honey Love” with the calypso influence emphasized further. “Playmates,” a sort of mock children’s song, is an update of Kay Kyser’s 1940 hit, which borrows its melody from Charles L. Johnson’s 1904 ragtime composition “Iola: Intermezzo Two-Step.”
Still in 1955, the sisters covered Boyd Bennett’s rockabilly-style pop hit “Seventeen,” outselling the original. Next came the double-sided hit “Daddy-O”/“Adorable,” combining a cover of Bonnie Lou’s rockabilly-style pop hit with a cover of the Drifters’ R&B-chart-topping cover of the Colts’ original. The Fontanes’ last record to chart in 1955 was “Nuttin’ for Christmas,” one of several hit versions of that song. In 1956, they had hits with covers of Fats Domino’s “I’m in Love Again” and “Please Don’t Leave Me,” the Teen Queens’ “Eddie My Love,” LaVern Baker’s “Still,” and the Tarriers’ “Banana Boat Song,” as well as the strictly pop originals “Voices” and “Lonesome Lover Blues.” Their only hit in 1957 was a cover of Jimmy Bowen’s “I’m Stickin’ with You,” originally the flip side of Buddy Knox’s “Party Doll.” They had their final hits in 1958—a cover of Art and Dotty Todd’s faux-French pop hit “Chanson D’Amour” and a cover of the country song “Jealous Heart,” which was recorded by its composer, Jenny Lou Carson, in 1944, made into a country hit by Tex Ritter in 1945, and turned into a pop hit by Al Morgan in 1949. The Fontane Sisters quit performing in 1961, although they did record a final album and single for Dot in 1963.
The three McGuire Sisters began as church singers in their native Ohio. Inspired by the Andrews Sisters and the similar-sounding Dinning Sisters, they started singing pop songs at USO shows; discovered by a local bandleader, they performed with him at a hotel in Dayton, Ohio. In 1952, they traveled to New York to audition for Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts but wound up performing on Kate Smith’s radio show; in 1953, they replaced the Chordettes on Arthur Godfrey Time, where they stayed for six years. They signed with Coral Records in 1952 but didn’t have their first hit until 1954, when they teamed with Johnny Desmond and Eileen Barton on “Pine Tree, Pine Over Me.” Most of their early records were pure pop, but they did cover Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Hey, Mister Cotton Picker” in 1953 and made the pop Top Ten in 1954 with a deracinated cover of the Spaniels’ “Goodnite Sweetheart, Goodnite.”
They had a No. 1 hit in early 1955 with a cover of Moonglows’ “Sincerely,” scrubbing the song nearly clean of doo-wop flavor; the flip side, a cover of the DeJohn Sisters’ pop hit “No More,” also charted. The McGuires’ cover of “Hearts of Stone” the same year was not a hit, but their next release, a cover of Ivory Joe Hunter’s R&B ballad “It May Sound Silly,” was. Another of their 1955 hits, “Something’s Gotta Give,” has a flip side titled “Rhythm ’n’ Blues (Mama’s Got the Rhythm • Papa’s Got the Blues),” but it’s strictly a pop song. The McGuires had eleven more hits by the end of 1956, when they charted their next R&B cover, Jesse Belvin’s ballad hit “Goodnight My Love (Pleasant Dreams).” One of their 1956 hits, “Weary Blues,” is a version of Artie Matthews’s 1915 composition with lyrics added and the boogie bass line omitted. The sisters had their second and last chart-topper in 1958 with “Sugartime,” apparently based on a Chico Marx melody known as “I’m Daffy over You” or “Lucky Little Penny,” which Chico performs to his brother Groucho’s disdain in the movie Animal Crackers (“Say, if you get near a song, play it,” Groucho cracks). Although “Sugartime” is a pop song through and through, it could almost have passed for one of the more saccharine rock songs of the day.
The McGuire Sisters enjoyed considerable popularity, with frequent television appearances that included their harmonized Coca-Cola commercials. They had their last hit as a group in 1961, although Phyllis McGuire, the lead singer, had a solo hit in 1964; Phyllis continued to perform after the group disbanded in 1968. The sisters made a comeback in 1985, playing Las Vegas and elsewhere before ultimately retiring. In 1995, a TV movie, Sugartime, was made about the romantic relationship between Phyllis McGuire and the Chicago mafia boss Sam Giancana.
The Chordettes had a more traditional background than most of the pop vocal groups of the 1950s, yet they adapted unusually well to the rise of rock ’n’ roll. The group was formed in Wisconsin in 1946 by four friends, one of whose fathers was the president of the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America. After performing locally, they won the Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts competition in 1949 and became regulars on Arthur Godfrey Time and the nighttime television show Arthur Godfrey and His Friends. They recorded several singles and albums for Columbia in barbershop style, on their own and with Godfrey. But after Godfrey’s musical director, Archie Bleyer, founded his own Cadence label, the Chordettes signed with Cadence and left Godfrey.[37]
Under Bleyer’s sway, the group turned from barbershop to mainstream pop, although Bleyer’s arrangements did make use of barbershop motifs such as the chiming arpeggios on the Chordettes’ second Cadence single, “Mr. Sandman.” A harmonized cover of a B-side by the middle-of-the-road singer Vaughn Monroe, “Mr. Sandman” was a No. 1 pop smash. After the group’s next two singles failed to chart, they cracked Billboard’s Top 100 in early 1956 with a cover of “The Wedding,” by the Harlem doo-wop group the Solitaires. Their next release, a cover of “Eddie My Love,” sold about as well as the Teen Queens’ original, though not quite as well as the Fontane Sisters’ more faithful cover, with all three versions charting simultaneously. The Chordettes’ follow-up single, “Born to Be with You,” made the pop Top 5 and was covered for a country hit a decade later by Sonny James. After a pair of double-sided hits, they had a No. 2 pop smash in 1958 with “Lollipop,” a cover of a record by the interracial duo Ronald and Ruby. Whereas the McGuire Sisters’ “Sugartime” approaches rock ’n’ roll, “Lollipop,” with its shuffling backbeat, is well over the line, both the sumptuously sweet original and the Chordettes’ close imitation, which maintains the street feel of lines such as “And when she does her shaky rockin’ dance / Man, I haven’t got a chance,” substituting “he” and “his” for “she” and “her.”
The Chordettes had a few more hits, of which the only rocker was “A Girl’s Work Is Never Done,” based on the Coasters’ “Yakety Yak” and featuring King Curtis on saxophone. Curtis also plays on the flip side, “No Wheels,” a campy jive-rock classic (“Man, like I’m way out in gaucheville”) where the Chordettes essentially sing backup for Jeff Kron and Jackie Ertel (the latter a daughter of Janet Ertel, the Chordette who married Archie Bleyer). The group also cut respectable covers of such pop-rock and R&B hits as the Coasters’ “Charlie Brown,” the Teddy Bears’ “To Know Him Is Love Him,” Paul Anka’s “Lonely Boy,” Dodie Stevens’s “Pink Shoelaces,” and Lavern Baker’s “I Cried a Tear.” They continued to release records on Cadence almost until the label folded in 1964, by which time the Chordettes had broken up.
While white singers tended to make rhythm-and-blues sound bland, Caribbean influences gave the music additional spice. Even before the Andrews Sisters topped the charts with “Rum and Coca-Cola” in 1945, calypso had entered the popular mainstream. “Sly Mongoose,” a Jamaican song that was absorbed into the Trinidadian tradition, had been recorded on Victor in 1923 by the Trinidadian violinist Cyril Monrose and by the Guyanese vaudeville singer Phil Madison; two years later, it was recorded on OKeh by the Trinidadian-born, New York–based vaudevillian Sam Manning. In 1938, Jack Sneed, seemingly an American of West Indian descent, cut “Sly Mongoose” for Decca with a band of black American jazz musicians.[38] Soon afterward, Benny Goodman performed “Sly Mongoose” on The Camel Caravan. In 1939, “Sly Mongoose” was recorded by the African American composer-arranger Edgar Sampson’s band and by the black vocal group the Quintones, accompanied by Duke Ellington and members of his band.
Although the Andrews Sisters were white—as were the singer Vaughn Monroe and the bandleader Abe Lyman, both of whom also had hits with “Rum and Coca-Cola” in 1945—calypso was associated with blacks. Most of the calypsos popularized in the United States were recorded by black artists, whether covers of Trinidadian songs such as Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan’s “Stone Cold Dead in the Market (He Had It Coming)” in 1946 and Harry Belafonte’s “Matilda, Matilda!” in 1953 (originally recorded as “Mathilda” by King Radio in 1938) or Tin Pan Alley imitations such as Nat “King” Cole’s “Calypso Blues” in 1950 (the likely inspiration for Chuck Berry’s “Havana Moon”) and the Ravens’ “Calypso Song” in 1952 (a Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer composition from the movie The Petty Girl).
Belafonte did not have a hit with “Matilda, Matilda!” but did make the pop charts in 1954 with “Hold ’Em Joe,” which had been recorded in 1926 as an instrumental titled “Hold Him Joe (My Donkey Wants Water)” by Sam Manning’s Orchestra and in 1945, with lyrics, as “My Donkey Want Water” by Gerald Clark and His Original Calypsos featuring the Trinidadian-born, Harlem-based singer Macbeth the Great. An early version of the song had been collected by an English planter in Jamaica, Walter Jekyll, who published it as “Me Donkey Want Water” in his 1907 book Jamaican Song And Story.[39]
But calypso remained a minor undercurrent on the American scene until 1956, when Belafonte released his breakthrough album, Calypso, the first LP to sell over a million copies. Belafonte was born in New York to parents from Jamaica and Martinique and spent part of his childhood in Jamaica; much of his material consisted of semi-original compositions or adaptations of Jamaican songs rather than traditional Trinidadian calypsos. Nevertheless, his album not only touched off a calypso craze but helped revive the folk-music movement that had been launched by the Weavers, prompting three aspiring folkies to call themselves the Kingston Trio.
Written by the Brooklyn-born, Juilliard-trained calypsonian Lord Burgess to a melody taken from the Jamaican mento song “Iron Bar,” “Jamaica Farewell,” the first track from Calypso to be released as a single, became a Top 20 pop hit. “Day-O,” the opening track on the album, was not released as single until after a white folk trio, the Tarriers, released a somewhat different version titled “The Banana Boat Song,” the first of half a dozen recordings of the song to chart in 1957. The Tarriers’ was the biggest seller, followed by Belafonte’s and then the Fontane Sisters’, which is plainly copied from the Tarriers’ rather than Belfonte’s version. Other versions were recorded by Steve Lawrence, Sarah Vaughan, Shirley Bassey, Stan Freberg, and Johnnie and Jack. “Banana Boat (Day-O)” originated as a Jamaican folk song, “Day Dah Light,” in the mento tradition; first recorded, in a refined manner, by the British-based Trinidadian actor-singer Edric Connor on his 1954 album Songs from Jamaica, it was redone in authentic mento style by the Jamaican poet Louise Bennett on her album Jamaican Folk Songs the same year. Unlike Belafonte’s version, the Tarriers’ interpolates another Jamaican mento song, “Hill and Gully Rider,” which is included on Songs from Jamaica but not Jamaican Folk Songs.
The calypso craze crested in 1957, when Belafonte had double-sided hits with “Mama Look at Bubu”/“Don’t Ever Love Me” and “Cocoanut Woman”/“Island in the Sun.” Originally recorded by Trinidad’s Lord Melody around 1955 as “Boo-Boo” or “Boo Boo Man,” the comic “Mama Look at Bubu” was also recorded, in an assumed Trinidadian accent, by the white actor Robert Mitchum on his 1957 album Calypso Is Like So. “Don’t Ever Love Me” borrows its melody from the nineteenth-century Haitian song “Choucoune,” as does “Yellow Bird,” recorded by the Norman Luboff Choir in 1957. “Cocoanut Woman” and “Island in the Sun” were both cowritten by Belafonte and Lord Burgess.
Also in 1957, “Marianne” became a major pop hit for Terry Gilkyson (the composer of “The Cry of the Wild Goose”) and for the Hilltoppers and a minor hit for the Lane Brothers and for Burl Ives. Originally recorded in the early 1940s as “Mary Ann” by Roaring Lion, the song was also recorded in 1947 by Xavier Cugat and in 1954 by the Charmer, later known as Louis Farrakhan.
While 1950s rock ’n’ roll was largely the province of independent labels, many calypso hits were on major labels such as RCA Victor and Columbia. According to Charlie Gillett, “The general feeling of the major companies toward rock ’n’ roll was probably expressed through their heavy promotion . . . of calypso music, which they believed—or anyway hoped—would be the new craze to replace rock ’n’ roll.” Nonetheless, as Gillett points out, “calypso was never more than a fad,” although it left a lasting mark on rhythm-and-blues and rock ’n’ roll through such calypso-influenced records as the Drifters’ “Honey Love,” from 1954; Richard Berry’s “Louie Louie,” from 1957; Little Anthony and the Imperials’ “Shimmy, Shimmy, Ko-Ko-Bop,” from 1959 (a cover of the El Capris’ “[Shimmy, Shimmy] Ko Ko Wop,” from 1956); and Gary U.S. Bonds’s “Twist, Twist Senora,” from 1962.[40]
The mambo had a deeper and more enduring influence. Cuban music had been popular in the United States since the introduction of the habanera in the nineteenth century. After the bandleader Don Azpiazú introduced “The Peanut Vender (El Manicero)” [sic] in 1930, the Cuban son, mislabeled as the rumba or rhumba, became fashionable, showcased in Broadway musicals and Hollywood movies. Both swing and sweet bands featured “rhumbas” and, later, congas (line dances adapted from Afro-Cuban carnival processions); but with such exceptions as Cab Calloway’s “Chili Con Conga,” from 1939, these mostly lacked authentic Cuban rhythms, instead substituting ersatz Latin beats such as the one on Skeets Tolbert’s “Rhumba Blues,” from 1941.
The mambo developed in Cuba out of elements originated in the late 1930s by the bands of Arsenio Rodríguez and Antonio Arcaño, but it did not take the brassy big-band form by which it is now generally recognized until the mid-1940s.[41] In 1948, the Cuban pianist Dámaso Pérez Prado organized his own big band in Mexico City, where he began recording his brash, shrill, propulsive arrangements, punctuated by loud grunts, for RCA Victor. With the release of his 1950 single “Qué Rico el Mambo,” backed with “Mambo No. 5” (a hit nearly fifty years later for Lou Bega), the mambo burst into international public consciousness.
Pérez Prado’s “Qué Rico el Mambo” did not make the U.S. charts, but the American bandleader Dave Barbour’s cover version, titled “Mambo Jambo,” did. In early 1951, Johnny Otis cut the instrumental “Mambo Boogie,” setting jump blues to a Cuban clave beat, as Louis Jordan had on his 1947 hit “Early in the Morning.” In 1952, Sonny Thompson cut “Blues Mambo,” an instrumental whose only Latin ingredient is a habanera bass line; Thompson’s “Jumping with the Rhumba” is likewise scarcely Latin, but he also plays piano on the Swallows’ doo-wopping “Roll Roll Pretty Baby,” which opens to the rhythm of a bongo drum. Perhaps the best-known rhythm-and-blues recording of the early 1950s with a Latin or Latin-like beat is Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog,” whose inauthentic rhythm is typical of the period.
The mambo craze had an impact on American pop, rhythm-and-blues, and even country music. It peaked in 1954, a year that saw the release of Perry Como’s “Papa Loves Mambo,” Vaughn Monroe’s “They Were Doin’ the Mambo,” Rosemary Clooney’s “Mambo Italiano,” Ruth Brown’s “Mambo Baby,” the Platters’ “Shake It Up Mambo,” the Charms’ “Mambo Sh-Mambo,” and Hank Snow’s “That Crazy Mambo Thing,” all featuring at least some approximation of a mambo rhythm. In January 1955, Bill Haley recorded “Mambo Rock,” a Top 20 pop hit with no Latin rhythm at all. But for the next few years, pop, rock, and R&B records by the likes of the Coasters and the Four Freshmen would pulse with habanera bass lines and faux-Latin drumbeats. The most famous example is the Diamonds’ pop hit “Little Darlin’,” a cover of the Gladiolas’ even more emphatically Latin-flavored 1957 R&B hit.
The American heyday of mambo and calypso music coincided with the eruption of rock ’n’ roll, but while rock endured, calypso was supplanted in Trinidad by soca, which didn’t make much of an impression in the United States, and mambo gave way in Cuba to the cha-cha-chá, which did. After Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, however, Cuban music fell from stateside fashion, never to regain its former status. By the 1960s, the mambo had faded, but its afterglow lingered in songs such as the Beatles’ “Twist and Shout” (a cover of the Isley Brothers’ cover of the Top Notes’ original) and the McCoys’ “Hang On Sloopy” (a cover of the Vibrations’ “My Girl Sloopy”). Other Latin-flavored rockers of that decade include the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love” and the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” Since then, Latin music has broadened its influence on American pop, rock, and R&B, as various Caribbean and Brazilian rhythms have blended with rock and funk beats to produce an assortment of fusions.
1. Michael Corcoran, “The Morse Code,” Dallas Observer, March 21, 1996, www.dallasobserver.com/1996-03-21/music/the-morse-code/.
2. Jonny Whiteside, Cry: The Johnnie Ray Story (New York: Barricade Books, 1994), 40.
3. Frankie Laine and Joseph F. Laredo, That Lucky Old Son: The Autobiography of Frankie Laine (Ventura, CA: Pathfinder Publishing, 1993), 81, 82.
4. Laine and Laredo, That Lucky Old Son, 15.
5. Laine and Laredo, That Lucky Old Son, 76, 77.
6. Laine and Laredo, That Lucky Old Son, 94, 95.
7. Will Friedwald, Jazz Singing: America’s Great Voices from Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992 [orig. Scribner’s, 1990]), 221.
8. Will Friedwald, Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer’s Art (New York: Scribner’s, 1995), 174.
9. Spencer Leigh, “Unfit for Auntie’s Airwaves: The Artists Censored by the BBC,” The Independent, December 14, 2007, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/unfit-for-aunties-airwaves-the-artists-censored-by-the-bbc-765106.html. It is widely reported, Leigh’s article being one of many examples, that the BBC banned “Answer Me, Lord Above” as “a sentimental mockery of Christian prayer,” whereupon Carl Sigman, the American songwriter responsible for the English lyrics, changed the song to “Answer Me, My Love,” which was also recorded by Whitfield and later by Laine but which had its greatest U.S. success at the hands of Nat “King” Cole in 1954.
10. Friedwald, Jazz Singing, 214.
11. Friedwald, Jazz Singing, 215.
12. Friedwald, Jazz Singing, 216.
13. “Kay Starr 1993 April Love Tour—3,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1n2PTLdmjI.
14. Whiteside, Cry, 68.
15. The tune of “It’s All in the Game” was written as “Melody in A Major” in 1911 by Charles G. Dawes, who later became vice president of the United States under Calvin Coolidge. “Melody in A Major” was popularized by the classical violinist Fritz Kreisler in the 1920s and recorded as a trombone showcase by Tommy Dorsey during World War II. The lyrics were added in 1951 by Carl Sigman (see note 9).
16. Whiteside, Cry, 102, 103, 142, 143.
17. Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, 1st pbk. ed. (Boston: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown, 1994), 131, 163. In 1951, Carson had recorded her first solo single, “Satisfied,” which has a strong handclapped backbeat at the beginning, middle, and end. Elvis Presley recorded “Satisfied” for Sun in 1954, but no disc was issued and the tape was presumably destroyed. Presley performed on the same bill as Carson in 1955 and, according to Carson, “just really idolized me.”
18. Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis, 57, 58.
19. Whiteside, Cry, 223.
20. “Court Denies Williams Claim in ‘Baby’ Case,” Billboard, December 8, 1951, 20; Tammy Lynn Kernodle, Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 150. Snub Mosley sued Mary Lou Williams in 1951, claiming that he had adapted her composition “Satchel Mouth Baby” as “Pretty Eyed Baby.” Williams responded that William Johnson, a former member of Mosley’s band, had misrepresented himself as having adapted the song, which she had neglected to copyright, and induced her to share the royalties with him. Ultimately, the composers’ credit was divided among Williams, Mosley, and Johnson.
21. Jose, “Town & Country, Bklyn.,” Night Club Reviews, Variety, December 11, 1957, 71.
22. “Pat Boone,” interview with Stephen J. Abramson, September 10, 2010, www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/pat-boone.
23. Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music, ed. Nona Willis Aronowitz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 193, 194.
24. Bill Smith, “Paramount, New York,” “Night Club-Vaude Reviews,” Billboard, May 24, 1952, 45.
25. Benoit Vanhees, “Sunny Gale: Come Go with Me (English Version/Parts One and Two),” www.retroscoop.com/popcultuur.php?artikel=77 and www.retroscoop.com/popcultuur.php?artikel=85.
26. Tony Wilkinson and Klaus Kettner, “Bunny Paul,” www.rockabilly.nl/references/messages/bunny_paul.htm.
27. Casey Stegall, “Vicki (Stegall) Young,” www.saxonyrecordcompany.com/vicki-young.html.
28. “Reviews of New Pop Records,” Billboard, May 8, 1954, 24.
29. David Ritz and Etta James, Rage to Survive: The Etta James Story, 2nd ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 2003 [orig. Villard Books, 1995]), 49, 50.
30. Gale Storm with Bill Libby, I Ain’t Down Yet: The Autobiography of My Little Margie (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1981), 81.
31. Jay Warner, American Singing Groups: A History from 1940 to Today (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2006 [orig. The Billboard Book of American Singing Groups: A History 1940–1990, New York: Billboard Books, 1992]), 51, 52 .
32. Steven Gaines, Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys, pbk. ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995 [orig. New American Library, 1986]), 51.
33. Ross Barbour, Now You Know: The Story of the Four Freshmen (Lake Geneva, WI: Balboa Books, 1995), 30–33.
34. Gary James, “Gary James’ Interview with Frank Busseri of the Four Lads,” www.classicbands.com/FourLadsInterview.html.
35. “Talent Corner,” Billboard, January 15, 1955, 46.
36. Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race (London: Routledge, 2004 [orig. University College London Press, 1998]), 48.
37. Gage Averill, Four Parts, No Waiting: A Social History of American Barbershop Harmony (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 141.
38. John Crowley, “West Indies Blues: An Historical Overview, 1920s–1950s—Blues and Music from the English-speaking West Indies,” in Nobody Knows Where the Blues Come From: Lyrics and History, ed. Robert Springer (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 240.
39. “Me Donkey Want Water,” Walter Jekyll, ed., Jamaican Song And Story: Annancy Stories, Digging Sings, Ring Tunes, and Dancing Tunes (London: David Nutt, 1907), www.gutenberg.org/files/35410/35410-h/35410-h.htm.
40. Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock ’n’ Roll, 3rd pbk. ed. (New York: Laurel/Dell, 1978 [orig. Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1970]), 76, 77.
41. Ned Sublette, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2004), 507–510.