Tag: 1950’s

“Come Go With Me” (Music I like)

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Today and tomorrow I am posting songs that I came to appreciate years after they were released. I love the “oldies” as they are called. This song is from the 50’s and came out before I was born. Tomorrow will be a song from the 60’s that I no doubt heard as a little kid. This series of posts has let me conjure up a lot of memories and talk about songs that, as I said in the introduction cut through the dominance of Elvis, The Beatles or The Rolling Stones for example. I could do a whole series that would last many months on songs I like from the 50’s and 60’s but for now I just picked one song from each decade.

If this version does not sound familiar, your ears are not deceiving you. This was the from the original audition sessions, effectively a demo version with lead vocals by Norman Wright. It was only released locally in the Pittsburgh area in late 1956 and fell off the radio station charts after two weeks.
This version of “Come Go With Me” that appeared on the American Graffiti soundtrack is the version we all know.

The Del-Vikings were formed when a fifth member joined The Four Deuces, a quartet of African American soldiers based out of the Air Force base in Pittsburgh. They were now Clarence Quick who was the composer of “Come Go With Me”, Don Jackson, Kripp Johnson, Norman Wright and David Lerchey – the new guy and only White member of the group. This was the line-up that recorded the demo songs with Barry Kaye, a local DJ and the groups Manager. As noted above it was Norman Wright singing lead vocals, though others sang lead on some of the other demo songs.

Even with the poor chart success of “Come Go With Me” they were still high on the song, in January of 1957 Don Jackson was replaced by Gus Backus. It was then they re-recorded “Come Go With Me” (Fee-Bee/Dot Records) with Backus singing lead and some overdubbed instrumentation. They had another song “Whispering Bells” that charted well and Kripp Johnson was the lead on that one. They recorded it in March of 1957. I saw that the song was also written by Clarence Quick but there was a cowriter – Fred Lowery that appeared on the 45 record. I wonder if that’s the same guy who whistled the “William Tell Overture“? Sorry I’m off track once again.

The recording of the song “Come Go With Me” was depicted in the movie American Hot Wax (1978). The film is a dramatization of Alan Freed’s Rock and Roll story that starred Tim McIntire, as well as Fran Dresher and Jay Leno. Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis are in it as well, it’s a great movie if you ever get a chance to see it. A little trivia, Larraine Newman who was at the time a staff writer for Saturday Night Live does a wonderful job with her character. Also, Cameron Crowe at 20 years old was already a famous writer for Rolling Stone Magazine and he appears in his first movie role ever as a delivery boy.

The Del-Vikings as such are portrayed by a fictious group called Professor La Plano and Planotones. Kenny Vance, who was also the Music Director, played the Professor and sang the lead vocals. At the time of the film I believe there were licensing issues with using the Del-Vikings name and the song, consequently it does not appear on the Soundtrack.

Kenny Vance as Professor La Plano provided an incredible vocal performance in this scene.

While the fictious Planotones portray Danny & the Juniors in the movie as they sing “Rock and Roll is Here to Stay” they are also in a very key scene meant to capture the spontaneous nature of the recording business at that time. The lead singer, the Professor La Plano character in this scene (above clip) was depicting the Del-Viking member Gus Backus who sang lead on the hit version of “Come Go With Me”.

Unfortunately (among a few of my concerns with the film) it portrays the rest of the group as White singers when the Del Vikings at the time had two White and the three Black original members. I believe they may have been the first racially integrated (pop) group with a hit song. “Come Go With Me” reached #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #2 on the R&B chart.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4

Bobby Darin

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It was in October of 1959 that “Mack the Knife” by Bobby Darin hit #1 on the Hot 100

Bobby Darin was born Walden Robert Cassotto on May 14, 1936 in the East Harlem part of New York City. He took to music at a young age and as a teen he was playing a number of instruments. His career would begin at the Brill Building in New York. After starting as a writer of demo songs and working with Don Kirshner and Connie Francis, when he started recording those demo songs, someone figured out this guy could sing.

Darin released some singles in 1956 and ’57 but it was not until he co-wrote and recorded “Splish Splash” in 1958 that things started to change for the better. The song came about when Darin was talking to DJ Murray the K (Murray Kaufman) who apparently said “I bet you can’t write a song that starts with “Splish, Splash, I was takin’ a bath” as suggested by his mother Jean Kaufman. Darin gave them both a part of the song credits and publishing rights as Jean Murray. Hence the Darin-Murray as seen on the record in the clip below.

The song reached #3 on the precursor chart to the Billboard Hot 100 that premiered just after on August 4,1958. The song also #2 hit on the R&B chart and #18 in the UK. Canada’s CHUM Radio in Toronto had the song at #3 for two weeks in July.

The songs to follow that year were “Early in the Morning” hit #24 and “Queen of the Hop” hit #9. In 1959 “Plain Jane” #24, “Dream Lover” #2 and as noted above his cover of “Mack the Knife” reached #1 on October 5 and stayed there for six straight weeks and then returned for another three, it would be his only #1 hit song.

In 1960 it was “Beyond the Sea” reaching #6 followed by 32 songs that entered the top 100 list up until 1973. Five of those songs reached the Top Five.

Darin would die on December 20, 1973 following heart surgery, he was just 37 years old. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.

In his short but very prolific career he recorded at least 56 original songs and covered 286. The most popularly covered songs that he wrote are “Dream Lover” with 135 versions, “Things” with 74 versions and “Splish Splash” with 73 versions. In total he wrote or co-wrote at least 46 songs, including “This Little Girl’s Gone Rockin'” by Ruth Brown. He worked with singer songwriter Tim Hardin who would record Darin’s “Simple Song of Freedom”. In 1966 they would both record the Hardin penned song “If I Were a Carpenter”, Darin’s came out first and reached #8.

Buddy Holly Part 3

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September 7, 1936-February 3, 1959.

As we draw close to the 63 year anniversary of that fateful plane crash, I am releasing the third and final instalment on Buddy Holly. Myself and many others will be reading on February 3 about that day in 1959, as well as the before and the aftermath, all I will say is that at age 22 he had left a legacy that is a crucial part of Rock and Roll history. He was there at the beginning, though he was inspired by him, he was a contemporary of Elvis Presley as well as Chuck Berry, but for the two years from his breakout song, we will never know what he could have achieved. To me he stood as an equal. Today I will talk more about the person, his music, the portrayals, and tie up any loose ends from my prior posts.

Buddy started his professional career as a teenager, he and his bandmates were still in Jr. High School. When he found his ‘voice’ with the above song in 1956, he sounded like no one else. As much as he was a gifted lyricist, singer and musician, he also had an ear for songs from other composers/artists.

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Holiday #1

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As promised I am posting a series on Billie Holiday.

There have been other names but you can connect the dots of important women in Blues and Jazz music with Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. Most of my readers will know about Holiday but since this is the first in a short series I will give you this link to her bio from BillieHoliday.com.

From Wikipedia I gathered a few things everyone should know about her. She was born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915 in Philadelphia, and to say she overcame horrendous circumstances is and understatement. She was abandoned by her father (believed to be Clarence Halliday) and then passed around by her mother to live among relatives throughout her early life. By the time she was 12 she had been sexually assaulted and was running errands for money at a brothel or scrubbing floors. She re-joined her mother who had left for Harlem by 1929. She began singing in nightclubs as a young teen and her first recordings, with the help of John Hammond were in 1933 at age 18. From there she would work with the leading names in Jazz and Blues including Count Basie and Artie Shaw.

She would rise to the highest height of success and not unlike many in the business she had her issues with alcohol and drug abuse. No doubt a combination of past trauma and getting caught up in the fast life of an entertainer she would struggle with addiction the rest of her life. At a pivotal point in her career she came to the attention of the FBI. This would lead to her incarceration on a drug charge. The song that brought her great success but also got her labeled a subversive or worse was “Strange Fruit”. From her first live performance in 1939 the evocative song about lynching and racism in the South would always stun the audience and serve as an education to many. Her insistence on recording it and continuing to sing it despite the warnings was likely the reason she came to the attention of law enforcement in the first place. Anyone singing protest songs and in this case about racism or lynching, in the late 1930’s and 1940’s attracted unwanted attention from authorities. Particularity for an outspoken Black woman.

“Strange Fruit” is a courageous recording by the legendary Billie Holiday from 1939. This song makes an appearance on my “25 of the Greatest Cover Songs #51-75” post. It is from a poem by another brave soul, Lewis Allan (Abel Meeropol) as a protest against racism and lynchings in the American South. He put the poem to a tune and his wife and others sang it at protest rallies. The lyrics are dark and disturbing. Eventually the song made its way to Holiday who first added it to close her Nightclub act. It was only recorded after her efforts to find a label willing to do it. Her delivery is haunting and deeply emotional. Covered over 100 times. Here is  Nina Simone  with an equally amazing version from 1965.

You can find my post on Nina Simone from 2019 here.

Buddy Holly Part 2

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Buddy is best remembered for his original songs, and he wrote or co-wrote most of them himself. His first single was under his new contract with Decca (1956) is “Love Me” that he co-wrote with Sue Parish from Lubbock, Texas. It was the A side of the first of two records released by Decca after those initial sessions in Nashville. On the B side was “Blue Days – Black Nights” written by Ben Hall, also from Lubbock. The other record had “Modern Don Juan” on the A side that was written by a longtime friend of Buddy and his family, Don Guess. Don’s (The Guest) Sisters recorded with Norman Petty in Clovis in the 1940’s and this provides the link to Buddy working with Petty after he left Decca. The B side was “That’s My One Desire” that was also written by Don Guess.

As we known there was a disconnect with Decca right from the beginning, they wanted a Country Singer, and Buddy wanted to do Rock and Roll. For his first recordings in Nashville, he had taken Sonny Curtis to play lead guitar, and Don Guess to play the bass. He left his friend and drummer Jerry Allison in Lubbock and Nikki Sullivan stayed in school. At that time in Nashville, Country & Western Music very rarely used drums and they did not really even know how to record them. They were banned from The Grand Ole Opry stage for many years. In the 1950’s much of the Country Music world worried that with drums it would start to sound like Rock and Roll. So Buddy could not get the sound he wanted and Decca put no effort in promoting him.

I know I posted this song recently but it was not until he worked with Norman Petty that the real Buddy Holly was heard. On “That’ll Be The Day” it was just Buddy with his jangly lead guitar, Jerry Allison on drums and from the first recording, replacing Joe Mauldin on bass it was Larry Welborn (who had also played on past Holly recordings). Nikki Sullivan (one of Buddy’s bass players) provided background vocals only, along with June Clark, Gary Tollett and Ramona Tollett. The resulting and much better version was released on Brunswick in May of 1957. This became his breakout single. It reached #1 on Billboard (this was pre-Hot 100), it went to #2 on the R&B Chart and was #1 in the UK. It was his only #1 in the US.

As I have mentioned, there are movie portrayals and many have seen some of the great theatrical performances, also the books and other tributes to Buddy Holly. There was a Tribute album “Rave On” released in 2011 that was unfortunately a critical failure with some less than stellar efforts from some respected artists. There is one standout version from My Morning Jacket on “True Love Ways“. Then there is the namesake band called The Hollies. Elvis Costello’s look was not a mistake either. As I mentioned in Part 1 and many have said, the course of (what we think of as the original) Rock and Roll changed as a result of that plane crash. I believe it was a key part of the decline of the genre but there were many other events in and around the same time that had an impact. For more on that story you can read my post, When did Rock Drop the Roll. I think the biggest loss with Holly was the direction he was moving with his music.

Buddy never thought Rock and Roll would last much longer, at least not at its current pace of the late 1950’s so he turned his focus to other styles and types of music. The move to New York was due to his desire to focus more on writing and publishing. This led to a split with The Crickets who were for the record, drummer Jerry Allison, bassist Joe B. Mauldin, and rhythm guitarist Niki Sullivan. They would form the band that toured with Buddy in 1957. If you are following with the names I have mentioned on recordings, the three were rarely together in studio.

After the move, Buddy had a bit of a cash flow problem, for reasons I won’t go into now but this led to his decision to join the Winter Dance Party tour. He put together a new band with fellow Texan Waylon Jennings, a guy Buddy had been grooming for stage performances (lead Guitar) and another Texan Carl Bunch (drums) along with Tommy Allsup (Guitar) who had also been playing in Texas. There are many accounts surrounding the events of that fateful tour. I will try and present the rest of the story as I understand it and wrap up with Buddy Holly Part 3.

Thanks to the band Weezer and this retro themed song and video from 1994 it gave many younger listeners a look back in time and perhaps some discovered the amazing Buddy Holly collection. Not to mention Mary Tyler Moore! BTW and I am sure this is no coincidence on the part of Weezer, the theme song for The Mary Tyler Moore tv show was written and sung by Buddy’s friend Sonny Curtis.

I hope you continue to enjoy my blog and as always, thanks for reading!

References: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,