Podcasts about little bitty pretty one

On this week's show, we'll explore the music of Thurston Harris, Indianapolis' first rock and roll star. He's best known for his recording of “Little Bitty Pretty One,” a Top 10 hit in 1957.  Thurston Harris was born in Indianapolis in July of 1931. He grew up in the Avenue neighborhood, and began singing gospel music in local churches, at age 9. In 1949, the R&B star Jimmy Liggins heard Harris performing in a nightclub, and invited Harris to Los Angeles. While in Los Angeles, Harris joined the Lamplighters, an exciting R&B act that scored over a dozen hits from 1953 to 1956.  In 1957, Harris had the chance to cut his first solo recordings. His debut single, “Little Bitty Pretty One” became the biggest record of his career. The song was issued by Aladdin Records. Harris cut over 20 songs for the label during the late 1950s.

In this episode, we discuss suspicious lyrics, Valentines Day, and asking for help. Order your Magic Mind productivity drinks today at https://www.magicmind.com/justblended and use our code JUSTBLENDED20 to receive a 20% discount off your purchase price! If you act quickly, Magic Mind is throwing in an extra deal that can give you up to 56% off!

In this episode, we discuss suspicious lyrics, Valentines Day, and asking for help. Order your Magic Mind productivity drinks today at https://www.magicmind.com/justblended and use our code JUSTBLENDED20 to receive a 20% discount off your purchase price! If you act quickly, Magic Mind is throwing in an extra deal that can give you up to 56% off!

Michael Jackson nació un 29 de Agosto en Gary, en el estado de Indiana, Joseph y Katherine Jackson tuvieron nueve hijos,Michael fue el séptimo, con tan solo 11 años ya compartir escenario con sus hermanos, con solo 5 ya se pudo intuir su gran talento cantando en una actuación navideña en el colegio. Corrían los años 60, la carrera artística de Michael con sus hermanos comenzaba, pero también comenzaron las presiones por vender y las disputas con sus hermanos, todo formo parte de la indisoluble niñez, que culmino cuando a los 12 años ya era considerado un estrella mundial.Playlist del programa:00 - Intro-Michael Jackson-P.Y.T..01 - The Jackson 5-I Want You Back.02 - The Jackson 5-Goin' Back To Indiana.03 - The Jackson 5-Never Can Say Goodbye.04 - The Jackson 5-Little Bitty Pretty One.05 - The Jackson 5-You Made Me What I Am.06 - The Jackson 5-Dancing Machine.07 - The Jackson 5-What You Don't Know.08 - The Jacksons-Forever Came Today.09 - The Jacksons-Think Happy.10 - The Jacksons-Goin' Places.11 - The Jacksons-All Night Dancin'.12 - The Jacksons-Can You Feel It.13 - The Jacksons-Wait.14 - The Jacksons-State Of Shock feat. Mick Jagger).15 - Blaudzun-Solar (Despedida).

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, sixties British Invasion band, The Dave Clark Five, recorded 38 full length songs totaling less than two minutes each. Here are all 38 of them, in 65 minutes & 38 seconds, in album chronological order. Enjoy!Album: GLAD ALL OVER 19641. Bits & Pieces 1:562. I Know You 1:58Album: THE DAVE CLARK FIVE RETURN! 19643. Funny 1:51Album: DAVE CLARK FIVE AMERICAN TOUR 19644. Who Does He Think He Is 1:565. I Want You Still 1:35Album: COAST TO COAST 19646. Give Me Love 1:577. I Can't Stand It 1:328. I'm Left Without You 1:479. Everybody Knows (I Still Love You) 1:4010. Say You Want Me 1:4411. Don't You Know 1:3612. To Me 1:42Album: WEEKEND IN LONDON 196513. We'll Be Running 13214. Blue Suede Shoes 1:4515. I'll Never Know 1:4516. I'm Thinking 1:3017. Little Bitty Pretty One 1:29Album: HAVING A WILD WEEKEND 196518. Having A Wild Weekend 1:3019. Dum-Dee-Dee-Dum 1:4920. Catch Us If You Can 1:54Album: I LIKE IT LIKE THAT 196521. I Like It Like That 1:3722. Pumping 1:46Album: TRY TOO HARD 196623. I Never Will 1:5424. Ever Since You've Been Away 1:3325. I Really Love You 1:5226. It Don't Feel Good 1:4127. Scared of Falling In Love 1:55Album: SATISFIED WITH YOU 196628. Satisfied With You 1:5729. I Meant You 1:5930. Please Tell Me Why 1:3131. It'll Only Hurt For a Little While 1:44Album: 5 X 5 196732. Nineteen Days 1:5033. Little Bit Strong 1:2334. Picture of You 1:53Album: YOU GOT WHAT IT TAKES 196735. I've Got To Have A Reason 1:5336. Lovin' So Good 1:4537. Play With Me 1:4038. Let Me Be 1:44

This is a bonus episode, part of Pledge Week 2021. Patreon backers get one of these with every episode of the main podcast. If you want to get those, and to support the podcast, please visit patreon.com/andrewhickey to sign up for a dollar a month or more. Click below for the transcript. Today, we're going to look at a record that, like the record we looked at in the main podcast this week, has connections to Kim Fowley and to the Beach Boys, who covered it just as they did "Moon Dawg". But we're going to look at it as a way to say goodbye to Gaynel Hodge, who has appeared in so many of our previous episodes.   Hodge played piano on "Alley Oop", which we've done a bonus podcast on before, and which is also very briefly discussed in this week's main episode, and while I was writing that, I heard from a Twitter follower that he had died. We've already covered all the records we're going to look at in which he had a major involvement, so today we're going to look at another one on which he was just a session musician. This one is actually from 1962, when we're still in 1960 in the main podcast, but it's not jumping so far ahead that it's unreasonable, and I wanted to tip my hat to him with the last record he played on which I was planning on discussing -- if you remember the Patreon episode on "Little Bitty Pretty One", I said we'd be looking at Thurston Harris' backing group when we got to 1962. So today, let's look at "Papa Oom Mow Mow" by the Rivingtons:   [Excerpt: The Rivingtons, "Papa Oom Mow Mow"]   The history of the Rivingtons is a convoluted one, as the story of so many vocal groups is. They started out as a group called the Lamplighters, who were formed by Willie Ray Rockwell, who had been an original member of the Hollywood Flames. The first lineup of the Lamplighters also included Leon Hughes, who left before they started recording, to *join* the Hollywood Flames (Hughes of course later went on to join the Coasters). Hughes was replaced by Thurston Harris, and they made their first recordings for Federal records, with Ralph Bass and Johnny Otis. "Be-Bop Wino", their second single and the most impressive of these early recordings, was by a lineup of Rockwell, Harris, Al Frazier, and Matt Nelson:   [Excerpt: The Lamplighters, "Be Bop Wino"]   They also recorded backing Jimmie Witherspoon:   [Excerpt: Jimmie Witherspoon and the Lamplighters, "Sad Life"]   Various changes happened in the lineup, as people fell out with each other, got jailed for non-payment of child support, or just generally became too difficult to work with. For a while, the group became made up of Al Frazier, Carl White, Sonny Harris, and Matthew Nelson, and were recording, still for Federal, as the Tenderfoots:   [Excerpt: The Tenderfoots, "Kissing Bug"]   After four unsuccessful singles, Thurston Harris rejoined the group, and they became the Lamplighters again, recording a few more singles, starting with "Don't Make it So Good":   [Excerpt: The Lamplighters, "Don't Make It So Good"]   Then they decided to fire Harris again, as he was extremely unreliable. They took on a new singer, Rocky Wilson -- the lineup now was Al Frazier, Carl White, Sonny Harris, and Rocky Wilson. This lineup's first recording was backing, of all people, Paul Anka, on his first ever recording, a session paid for by Anka's father:   [Excerpt: Paul Anka, "I Confess"]   Lester Sill renamed the group The Sharps, and they started making records under that name, like "Six Months, Three Weeks, Two Days, One Hour":   [Excerpt: The Sharps, "Six Months, Three Weeks, Two Days, One Hour"]   They also backed their old bandmate Thurston Harris on his big hit "Little Bitty Pretty One":   [Excerpt: Thurston Harris, "Little Bitty Pretty One"]   Lester Sill started getting them backing vocal jobs -- it's them on "Rebel Rouser" by Duane Eddy:   [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Rebel Rouser"]   They briefly renamed themselves the Crenshaws, and released a record of the old standard "Moonlight in Vermont", this was a Kim Fowley production, and their first work with him:   [Excerpt: The Crenshaws, "Moonlight in Vermont"]   They then renamed themselves the Rivingtons -- still with a lineup of Frazier, White, Harris, and Wilson, and Kim Fowley got them to start recording novelty songs, with the normal group of people that Fowley used on novelty records, like Gary Paxton and Gaynel Hodge. Their first record, "Papa Oom Mow Mow", made the top fifty on the charts:   [Excerpt: The Rivingtons, "Papa Oom Mow Mow"]   There followed a variety of records with similar backing vocals, of which my favourite is the Coasters-flavoured "Kickapoo Joy Juice":   [Excerpt: The Rivingtons, "Kickapoo Joy Juice"]   But the only one to have any success at all was "The Bird's the Word", which went to number fifty-two on the charts, and was their only R&B hit, making number twenty-seven on the R&B charts:   [Excerpt: The Rivingtons, "The Bird's The Word"]   Shortly after that, their songs moved from the world of LA R&B groups into the world of surf music, through, of all people, a white group from Minnesota. The Trashmen put together a medley of the Rivingtons' two biggest hits, and called it "Surfin' Bird". Their record originally credited their drummer as the songwriter, but a few lawyers letters later the Rivingtons got the credit they deserved, as "Surfin' Bird" made number four in 1963:   [Excerpt: The Trashmen, "Surfin' Bird"]   That brought the Rivingtons' original recordings back to mind, for those surf groups like the Beach Boys who had also been influenced by the LA R&B vocal group scene, and "Papa Oom Mow Mow" entered the Beach Boys' regular setlist, and featured on their album Beach Boys Concert, which was the Beach Boys' first number one album, as well as the first number one live album by anyone:   [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Papa Oom Mow Mow"]   The Beach Boys loved the song, and it was also included on their Beach Boys Party! album, as well as on numerous live recordings that have been released on archive sets. To this day, the current touring Beach Boys perform part of the song during their extended performances of "Barbara Ann".   The Rivingtons continued to tour for many decades in various lineups. Unfortunately, they remained so obscure that I can't find much more about them after Carl White died towards the end of the seventies, though the other three continued at least into the nineties. There are no compilation CDs of their music in print, and you can only find their hits incongruously placed on various-artists surf albums. It's a shame, as their best recordings are as good as any doo wop out there.   The Rivingtons intersected with so many of the great musicians of the period -- Johnny Otis, the Hollywood Flames, Duane Eddy -- that it's really a shame their work is never placed in that context. But at least their hits *are* remembered, and there are very few records that can be more likely to bring pure joy to listeners.   And Gaynel Hodge, the piano player on their biggest record, will be remembered too.

In this episode of the Roald Dahl Retrospective, Patricia and Arun discuss about the 1996 live action film Matilda based on the 1988 book of the same name. It stars Mara Wilson, Danny DeVito, Rhea Perlman, Embeth Davidtz, and Pam Ferris. The plot focuses on a young girl named Matilda Wormwood who is born very intelligent, independent, and clever with her love of books while her parents and her older brother pay no attention to her mostly focused on television. When Matilda is brought to school, she meets up with new friends, a lovable teacher with a tragic past, and a ruthless principal who performs unorthodox punishment to her students. Matilda has to deal with her immature family, a pair of cops who are investigating Mr. Wormwood retrieving stolen car parts, and the cruel principal while learning how to use telekinetic powers from her mind. When the movie premiered, it was a box office failure making $33 million dollars out of a $36 million dollar budget. But it was able to make double its budget due to its release overseas and its home video release. Now it's become not only a classic, but also a huge phenomenon with a special edition book showcasing Matilda at 30 released around 2018 illustrated by Quentin Blake, an online challenge involving with lights flickering on and off and moving furniture to the song "Little Bitty Pretty One" by Thurston Harris based on a scene from the movie, a Broadway musical, and an upcoming movie adaptation based on the musical. According to many Roald Dahl fans, they call Matilda the best movie adaptation next to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Do Patricia and Arun agree on this statement? Listen and find out. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/old-school-lane/support

In our 100th episode, Edgar Wright takes us on a musical journey through some of his favorite cinematic needle drops.Show Notes:Movies Referenced In This EpisodeBeyond The Valley Of The Dolls (1970)Baby Driver (2017)*Reservoir Dogs (1992)Vanishing Point (1971)*2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)Deja Vu (2006)Man On Fire (2004)The Bourne Supremacy (2004)The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)Alien (1979)The Mexican (2001)Gremlins (1984)*American Graffiti (1973)Star Wars (1977)Jaws (1975)The Exorcist (1973)Halloween (1978)The Amityville Horror (1979)*Dawn of the Dead (1978)Deep Red (1976)Suspiria (1977)Shaun of the Dead (2004)Monty Python And The Holy Grail (1975)*An American Werewolf In London (1981)The Long Goodbye (1973)The Evil Dead (1983)Face-Off (1997)The Wizard Of Oz (1939)Mandy (2018)The Hallow (2015)The Nun (2018)Mulholland Drive (2001)*Christine (1983)Blue Collar (1978)*Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)*Mauvais Sang (1986)Frances Ha (2012)Lovers On The Bridge (1991)Holy Motors (2012)Annette (TBD)*Goodfellas (1990)Mean Streets (1973)Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)Raging Bull (1980)*Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)Mad Max (1980)Babe (1995)(1973)Happy Feet (2006)Dr. Strangelove (1964)Band of Outsiders (1964)Blow-Up (1966)Bonnie And Clyde (1967)The Graduate (1967)Harold and Maude (1971)A Clockwork Orange (1971)Electra Glide In Blue (1973)The Warriors (1979)The Wanderers (1979)The Shining (1980)Trading Places (1983)Breathless (1983)Blood Simple (1984)Ghostbusters (1984)Back to the Future (1985)Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985)Blue Velvet (1986)Manhunter (1986)Something Wild (1986)Do The Right Thing (1989)Wild At Heart (1990)Miller’s Crossing (1990)Silence of the Lambs (1991)Dazed and Confused (1993)Pulp Fiction (1994)Chungking Express (1994)Bottle Rocket (1996)Trainspotting (1996)Romeo + Juliet (1996)Grosse Point Blank (1997)Boogie Nights (1997)Rushmore (1998)Buffalo ‘66 (1998)Beau Travail (1999)The Matrix (1999)Sexy Beast (2000)The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)Ocean’s Eleven (2001)Zodiac (2007)Hard Boiled (1992)Bad Lieutenant (1992)Natural Born Killers (1994)Jackie Brown (1997)Last Night In Soho (TBD)Casino (1995)The Departed (2006)Shine A Light (2008)The Age of Innocence (1993)20 Feet From Stardom (2013) Other Notable ItemsWalter HillRoger EbertRuss Meyer“Neat Neat Neat” song by The Damned (1977)Bill PopeAlex NorthEnnio MorriconeTony ScottJerry GoldsmithRidley Scott“Bell Bottoms” song by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (1994)“Also Sprach Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss (1896)“The Blue Danube” by Johann Strauss II (1867)György LigetiStanley KubrickGeorge LucasWalter MirchRobert AltmanRon HowardPaul Le MatMackenzie Phillips“All Summer Long” song by The Beach Boys (1964)Happy Days TV series (1974-1984)Scott BaioSuzi QuatroHarrison Ford“Tubular Bells” song by Mike OldfieldLalo SchifrinWilliam FriedkinThe Twilight Zone TV series (1959-1964)The Halloween score by John Carpenter (1978)George A. RomeroDawn of the Dead score by Goblin (1978)Dario ArgentoSimon PeggDawn of the Dead The Unreleased Incidental Music (2004)De Wolfe Music"The Gonk" song by Herbert Chappell (1965)“Cosmogony”  by Paul Lemel (1972)The Egyptian Theatre in HollywoodTFH Guru John LandisDavid Naughton“Blue Moon” song by Elvis Presley (1956)“Blue Moon” song by Bob Dylan (1970)“Blue Moon” song by Sam Cooke (1959)“Blue Moon” song by The Marcels (1961)“Moondance” song by Van Morrison (1970)“Bad Moon Rising” song by Creedence Clearwater Revival (1969)Jenny Agutter“The Long Goodbye” song by Clydie King (1973)John Woo“Over The Rainbow” song by Judy Garland (1939)“Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” song by Darlene Love (1963)“Do You Hear What I Hear” by Johnny Mathis (1969)Nicolas Cage“Mandy” song by Barry Manilow (1974)The Vista Theatre in HollywoodCorin HardyThe Panos Cosmatos podcast episode“We Belong Together” song by Robert & Johnny (1958)“Little Bitty Pretty One” song by Thurston Harris (1957)Keith Gordon“Harlem Nocturne” song by The Viscounts (1959)“Bad To The Bone” song by George Thorogood and the Destroyers“I Feel Good” song by James Brown (1964)The Christine soundtrack (1983)Impressions of An American Werewolf In London soundtrack by Meco (1981)John Hughes“Oh Yeah” by Yello (1985)“Twist And Shout” song by“Love Missile F1-11” song by Sigue Sigue Sputnik (1983)The Ferris Bueller’s Day Off soundtrack (1986)SparksKraftwerk“The Race” song by Yello (1988)Jeffrey JonesLeos Carax“Modern Love” song by David Bowie (1983)Denis LavantJuliette BinocheAdam DriverMarion CotillardMartin Scorsese“Be My Baby” song by The Ronettes (1963)“Tell Me” by The Rolling Stones (1964)T. RexMott The Hoople“Rags To Riches” song by Tony Bennett (1953)“Layla” song by Derek and the Dominoes (1970)“Atlantis” song by Donovan (1969)“My Way” song by Sid Vicious (1978)“Jump Into The Fire” by Harry Nilsson (1971)“What Is Life” song by George Harrison (1971)“Monkey Man” song by The Rolling Stones (1969)George MillerBen CarsonAnsel ElgortJim McBrideQuentin TarantinoThe Strokes“Stuck In The Middle With You” song by Stealers Wheel (1972)“Little Green Bag” song by the George Baker Selection (1971)Michael Madsen“Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones (1969)Mary ClaytonMick JaggerThis list is also available on Letterboxd.

Yo-Yo stay at home fun times with Annie, Popcorn, tittie-shakers and Freakbeat from Peru and Japan. Top drawer Northern Soul and influences from the Rolling Stones and The Beatles peppered throughout. This week demands multiple listens due to its magnatude, don't miss a thing. FACEBOOK: facebook.com/ontargetpodcast INSTAGRAM: instagram.com/modmarty TWITTER: twitter.com/modmarty ----------------------------------------------- The Playlist Is: "Yo-Yo" Billy Joe Royal - Columbia "Annie Get Your Yo-Yo" Little Junior Parker - Duke "Work With Me Annie" Jock Mitchell - Impact "Money (That's What I Want)" Barrett Strong - Anna "Little Bitty Pretty One" Cyde McPhatter - Mercury "Get Back" Roy Head & The Traits - Scepter "Yesterday's Game" Traffic Sound - Mag "This Bad Girl" The Golden Cups - Capitol "Jun Mayuzumi" Black Room - Capitol "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" Aretha Franklin - Atlantic "Jackie Ross" I've Got The Skill - Chess "634-5789 (Soulsville U.S.A.)" Wilson Picket - Atlantic "What Kind Of Lady" Dee Dee Sharp - Gamble "Landslide" Tony Clarke - Chess "Gonna Fix You Good" Little Anthony & The Imperials - Veep "Greazee" Billy Preston - Derby "She's The One" The Chartbusters - Quality "I Call Your Name" The Buckinghams - USA "Thigh Spy" The Persuaders - Atco "I Can't Convince My Heart" The Free Movement - Decca "Penetration" The Pyramids - Best

  Book Vs Movie  Matilda The Classic Book from Roald Dahl Vs the 1996 Film Adaptation The Margos tackle one of the most beloved children’s books of all time--Matilda by Roald Dahl. We have had so many requests over the years for this book & movie and it has certainly lived up to the hype! Dahl is a fascinating subject all on his own. Born in Wales to Norwegian immigrant parents, the 6’6” Dahl was larger than life in every imaginable way. A veteran of the Royal Air Force (RAF,) Dahl crash-landed his Gladiator in Marsa Matruh, Egypt, in 1940 and managed to crawl to safety before it blew up. He survived a skull fracture and totally smashed his nose and was blinded temporarily.  He recovered and eventually worked for the English Embassy in Washington D.C. and went to cocktail parties where he as known as a charmer & dancer. Dahl worked in Intelligence during WW2 and was friends with writers C.S. Forester and Ian Fleming.  He became a well-known adult & children’s author with several titles being viewed as masterpieces including Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The BFG, and James & the Giant Peach. 1998’s Matilda was one of Dahl’s last book and it had been included in multiple lists as one of the best children’s books of all time.  The story of the brilliant but unappreciated by her parents Matilda Wormwood is full of humor and pathos as she learns to use her psychic powers for the forces of good. Characters like Miss Honey, Miss Trunchbull, and Lavender are unforgettable and Danny DeVito’s film makes some interesting choices in the 1996 adaptation.  So between the book and the movie, which did we like better? Click on the link below to find out! In this ep the Margos discuss: The incredible life of Roald Dahl The main plot of Matilda  Trivia about the shooting of the film The cast includes Mara Wilson (Matilda,) Danny DeVito (Mr. Wormwood,) Rhea Perlman (Mrs. Wormwood,) Embeth Davidtz (Miss Honey,) Pam Ferris (Trunchbull,) Kiami Davael (Lavender,) Paul Reubens (FBI Agent) and Tracey Walter (FBI Agent.)  Clips Featured: Matilda  trailer Kate Winslet reads Matilda intro Matilda accuses her father of bad behavior Trunchbull throws the girl with pigtails Outro music: Little Bitty Pretty One written by Bobby Day & performed by Thurston Harris Join our Patreon page to help support the show! https://www.patreon.com/bookversusmovie  Book Vs. Movie podcast https://www.facebook.com/bookversusmovie/ Twitter @bookversusmovie www.bookversusmovie.com Email us at bookversusmoviepodcast@gmail.com Brought to you by Audible.com You can sign up for a FREE 30-day trial here http://www.audible.com/?source_code=PDTGBPD060314004R Margo D. @BrooklynFitChik www.brooklynfitchick.com brooklynfitchick@gmail.com Margo P. @ShesNachoMama https://coloniabook.weebly.com/   

The vocal harmony group tradition, known as Doo Wop, developed over time in the post-World War II era. It was the most popular form of rhythm and blues music among black teenagers, especially those living in the large urban centers of the eastern coast, in Chicago, and in Detroit. To those of us kids who were color-blind, it was just cool music coming from our transistor radios. That was the beauty of radio. Music wasn’t defined by a color, just by the beat and the mood you felt deep in your soul. Many groups specialized in romantic ballads that appealed to the sexual fantasies of teenagers in the late 1940s and early 1950s. By the mid-1950s, vocal harmony groups had transformed the smooth delivery of ballads into a performance style incorporating the nonsense phrase, “Doo Wop-Doo Wop” as vocalized by the bass singers, who provided rhythmic movement for an a cappella song style. Join the conversation on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712 or by email at dannymemorylane@gmail.com In this episode you’ll hear: 1) Get a Job by The Silhouettes 2) When I Woke Up This Morning by The Bop Chords 3) Cause You're Mine by The G-Clefs 4) Deserie by The Charts [Ross Buford, bass] 5) Rama Lama Ding Dong by The Edsels 6) Ivory Tower by Otis Williams & His Charms 7) Sweetest One by The Crests (w/ Johnny Maestro) 8) What's Your Name? by Don & Juan 9) Bad Boy by The Jive Bombers 10) The Glory Of Love by The Five Keys (w/ Rudy West, lead) 11) Little Bitty Pretty One by Clyde McPhatter 12) Hey Little Schoolgirl by The Marquees (w/ Marvin Gaye) 13) Honest I Do by The Innocents 14) There She Goes by The Paramours 15) The Angels Sang by The Solitaires 16) You Were Mine by The Fireflies 17) Diamonds And Pearls by The Paradons 18) The Ten Commandments of Love by Harvey & The Moonglows 19) Zoom Zoom Zoom by The Collegians 20) Oh Starlight by The Quinns 21) Unchained Melody by Vito & The Salutations 22) Believe Me by The Royal Teens 23) Island Of Love by The Sheppards 24) P.S. I Love You by The Starlets 25) Please Love Me Forever by Cathy Jean & The Roommates 26) Sixty-Minute Man by Billy Ward & The Dominoes 27) Don't Leave Me Baby by The Camelots 28) A Sunday Kind Of Love by The Del Vikings (Norman Wright, lead) 29) Love Call by The Ebonaires 30) W.P.L.J. (White Port Lemon Juice) by The Four Deuces 31) The Ballad of A Girl and Boy by The Graduates 32) Oh Baby by The Jesters 33) I Love An Angel by Little Bill & The Blue Notes 34) Tell Me Why by The Belmonts 35) Sh-Boom by The Chords 36) I Hear A Rhapsody by The Excellents 37) Dance Girl Dance by Gerry Granahan & The Five Satins 38) Chop Chop Boom by The Dandeliers [w/ Dallas Taylor, vocal) 39) The Way You Look Tonight by The Jaguars 40) Too Young by Lewis Lymon & The Teenchords 41) Mama Loochie by Marvin Gaye (w/ Harvey and the Moonglows) 42) I Only Want You by The Passions 43) Stranded In The Jungle by The Cadets 44) Please Say You Want Me by The Schoolboys 45) Save The Last Dance For Me by The Drifters (w/ Ben E. King, lead) 46) Do You Remember? (Part 2) by The Toreadors 47) Harbor Lights by The Platters 48) When You Dance by The Turbans 49) I Really Love You by The Stereos 50) I'll Be Home by The Flamingos

Episode fifty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Mr. Lee” by the Bobbettes, and at the lbirth of the girl group sound. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Little Bitty Pretty One”, by Thurston Harris.  —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   I’ve used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Marv Goldberg’s page is always the go-to for fifties R&B groups. Girl Groups: Fabulous Females Who Rocked the World by John Clemente has an article about the group with some interview material. American Singing Groups by Jay Warner also has an article on the group.  Most of the Bobbettes’ material is out of print, but handily this CD is coming out next Friday, with most of their important singles on it. I have no idea of its quality, as it’s not yet out, but it seems like it should be the CD to get if you want to hear more of their music.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Over the last few months we’ve seen the introduction to rock and roll music of almost all the elements that would characterise the music in the 1960s — we have the music slowly standardising on a lineup of guitar, bass, and drums, with electric guitar lead. We have the blues-based melodies, the backbeat, the country-inspired guitar lines. All of them are there. They just need putting together in precisely the right proportions for the familiar sound of the early-sixties beat groups to come out. But there’s one element, as important as all of these, which has not yet turned up, and which we’re about to see for the first time. And that element is the girl group. Girl groups played a vital part in the development of rock and roll music, and are never given the credit they deserve. But you just have to look at the first Beatles album to see how important they were. Of the six cover versions on “Please Please Me”, three are of songs originally recorded by girl groups — two by the Shirelles, and one by the Cookies. And the thing about the girl groups is that they were marketed as collectives, not as individuals — occasionally the lead singer would be marketed as a star in her own right, but more normally it would be the group, not the members, who were known. So it’s quite surprising that the first R&B girl group to hit the charts was one that, with the exception of one member, managed to keep their original members until they died. and where two of those members were still in the group into the middle of the current decade. So today, we’re going to have a look at the group that introduced the girl group sound to rock and roll, and how the world of music was irrevocably changed because of how a few young kids felt about their fifth-grade teacher. [Excerpt: The Bobettes, “Mister Lee”] Now, we have to make a distinction here when we’re talking about girl groups. There had, after all, been many vocal groups in the pre-rock era that consisted entirely of women — the Andrews Sisters, for example, had been hugely popular, as had the Boswell Sisters, who sang the theme song to this show. But those groups were mostly what was then called “modern harmony” — they were singing block harmonies, often with jazz chords, and singing them on songs that came straight from Tin Pan Alley. There was no R&B influence in them whatsoever. When we talk about girl groups in rock and roll, we’re talking about something that quickly became a standard lineup — you’d have one woman out front singing the lead vocal, and two or three others behind her singing answering phrases and providing “ooh” vocals. The songs they performed would be, almost without exception, in the R&B mould, but would usually have much less gospel influence than the male vocal groups or the R&B solo singers who were coming up at the same time. While doo-wop groups and solo singers were all about showing off individual virtuosity, the girl groups were about the group as a collective — with very rare exceptions, the lead singers of the girl groups would use very little melisma or ornamentation, and would just sing the melody straight. And when it comes to that kind of girl group, the Bobbettes were the first one to have any real impact. They started out as a group of children who sang after school, at church and at the glee club. The same gang of seven kids, aged between eleven and fifteen, would get together and sing, usually pop songs. After a little while, though, Reather Dixon and Emma Pought, the two girls who’d started this up, decided that they wanted to take things a bit more seriously. They decided that seven girls was too many, and so they whittled the numbers down to the five best singers — Reather and Emma, plus Helen Gathers, Laura Webb, and Emma’s sister Jannie. The girls originally named themselves the Harlem Queens, and started performing at talent shows around New York. We’ve talked before about how important amateur nights were for black entertainment in the forties and fifties, but it’s been a while, so to refresh your memories — at this point in time, black live entertainment was dominated by what was known as the Chitlin Circuit, an informal network of clubs and theatres around the US which put on largely black acts for almost exclusively black customers. Those venues would often have shows that lasted all day — a ticket for the Harlem Apollo, for example, would allow you to come and go all day, and see the same performers half a dozen times. To fill out these long bills, as well as getting the acts to perform multiple times a day, several of the chitlin circuit venues would put on talent nights, where young performers could get up on stage and have a chance to win over the audiences, who were notoriously unforgiving. Despite the image we might have in our heads now of amateur talent nights, these talent contests would often produce some of the greatest performers in the music business, and people like Johnny Otis would look to them to discover new talent. They were a way for untried performers to get themselves noticed, and while few did, some of those who managed would go on to have great success. And so in late 1956, the five Harlem Queens, two of them aged only eleven, went on stage at the Harlem Apollo, home of the most notoriously tough audiences in America. But they went down well enough that James Dailey, the manager of a minor bird group called the Ospreys, decided to take them on as well. The Ospreys were a popular group around New York who would eventually get signed to Atlantic, and release records like “Do You Wanna Jump Children”: [Excerpt: The Ospreys, “Do You Wanna Jump Children?”] Dailey thought that the Harlem Queens had the potential to be much bigger than the Ospreys, and he decided to try to get them signed to Atlantic Records. But one thing would need to change — the Harlem Queens sounded more like a motorcycle gang than the name of a vocal group. Laura’s sister had just had a baby, who she’d named Chanel Bobbette. They decided to name the group after the baby, but the Chanels sounded too much like the Chantels, a group from the Bronx who had already started performing. So they became the Bobbettes. They signed to Atlantic, where Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler encouraged them to perform their own material. The girls had been writing songs together, and they had one — essentially a playground chant — that they’d been singing together for a while, about their fifth-grade teacher Mr. Lee. Depending on who you believe — the girls gave different accounts over the years — the song was either attacking him, or merely affectionately mocking his appearance. It called him “four-eyed” and said he was “the ugliest teacher you ever did see”. Atlantic liked the feel of the song, but they didn’t want the girls singing a song that was just attacking a teacher, and so they insisted on them changing the lyrics. With the help of Reggie Obrecht, the bandleader for the session, who got a co-writing credit on the song largely for transcribing the girls’ melody and turning it into something that musicians could play, the song became, instead, a song about “the handsomest sweetie you ever did see”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Mister Lee”] Incidentally, there seems to be some disagreement about who the musicians were on the track. Jacqueline Warwick, in “Girl Groups, Girl Culture”, claims that the saxophone solo on “Mr. Lee” was played by King Curtis, who did play on many sessions for Atlantic at the time. It’s possible — and Curtis was an extremely versatile player, but he generally played with a very thick tone. Compare his playing on “Dynamite at Midnight”, a solo track he released in 1957: [Excerpt: King Curtis, “Dynamite at Midnight”] With the solo on “Mr Lee”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Mister Lee”] I think it more likely that the credit I’ve seen in other places, such as Atlantic sessionographies, is correct, and that the sax solo is played by the less-well-known player Jesse Powell, who played on, for example, “Fools Fall in Love” by the Drifters: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall In Love”] If that’s correct — and my ears tell me it is — then presumably the other credits in those sources are also correct, and the backing for “Mister Lee” was mostly provided by B-team session players, the people who Atlantic would get in for less important sessions, rather than the first-call people they would use on their major artists — so the musicians were Jesse Powell on tenor sax; Ray Ellis on piano; Alan Hanlon and Al Caiola on guitar; Milt Hinton on bass; and Joe Marshall on drums. “Mr. Lee” became a massive hit, going to number one on the R&B charts and making the top ten on the pop charts, and making the girls the first all-girl R&B vocal group to have a hit record, though they would soon be followed by others — the Chantels, whose name they had tried not to copy, charted a few weeks later. “Mr. Lee” also inspired several answer records, most notably the instrumental “Walking with Mr. Lee” by Lee Allen, which was a minor hit in 1958, thanks largely to it being regularly featured on American Bandstand: [Excerpt: Lee Allen, “Walking With Mr. Lee”] The song also came to the notice of their teacher — who seemed to have already known about the girls’ song mocking him. He called a couple of the girls out of their class at school, and checked with them that they knew the song had been made into a record. He’d recognised it as the song the girls had sung about him, and he was concerned that perhaps someone had heard the girls singing their song and stolen it from them. They explained that the record was actually them, and he was, according to Reather Dixon, “ecstatic” that the song had been made into a record — which suggests that whatever the girls’ intention with the song, their teacher took it as an affectionate one. However, they didn’t stay at that school long after the record became a hit. The girls were sent off on package tours of the Chitlin’ circuit, touring with other Atlantic artists like Clyde McPhatter and Ruth Brown, and so they were pulled out of their normal school and started attending The Professional School For Children, a school in New York that was also attended by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, among others, which would allow them to do their work while on tour and post it back to the school. On the tours, the girls were very much taken under the wing of the adult performers. Men like Sam Cooke, Clyde McPhatter, and Jackie Wilson would take on somewhat paternal roles, trying to ensure that nothing bad would happen to these little girls away from home, while women like Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker would teach them how to dress, how to behave on stage, and what makeup to wear — something they had been unable to learn from their male manager. Indeed, their manager, James Dailey, had started as a tailor, and for a long time sewed the girls’ dresses himself — which resulted in the group getting a reputation as the worst-dressed group on the circuit, one of the reasons they eventually dumped him. With “Mr. Lee” a massive success, Atlantic wanted the group to produce more of the same — catchy upbeat novelty numbers that they wrote themselves. The next single, “Speedy”, was very much in the “Mr. Lee” style, but was also a more generic song, without “Mr. Lee”‘s exuberance: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Speedy”] One interesting thing here is that as well as touring the US, the Bobbettes made several trips to the West Indies, where R&B was hugely popular. The Bobbettes were, along with Gene and Eunice and Fats Domino, one of the US acts who made an outsized impression, particularly in Jamaica, and listening to the rhythms on their early records you can clearly see the influence they would later have on reggae. We’ll talk more about reggae and ska in future episodes, but to simplify hugely, the biggest influences on those genres as they were starting in the fifties were calypso, the New Orleans R&B records made in Cosimo Matassa’s studio, and the R&B music Atlantic was putting out, and the Bobbettes were a prime part of that influence. “Mr. Lee”, in particular, was later recorded by a number of Jamaican reggae artists, including Laurel Aitken: [Excerpt: Laurel Aitken, “Mr. Lee”] And the Harmonians: [Excerpt: the Harmonians, “Music Street”] But while “Mr Lee” was having a massive impact, and the group was a huge live act, they were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the way their recording career was going. Atlantic was insisting that they keep writing songs in the style of “Mr. Lee”, but they were so busy they were having to slap the songs together in a hurry rather than spend time working on them, and they wanted to move on to making other kinds of records, especially since all the “Mr. Lee” soundalikes weren’t actually hitting the charts. They were also trying to expand by working with other artists — they would often act as the backing vocalists for other acts on the package shows they were on, and I’ve read in several sources that they performed uncredited backing vocals on some records for Clyde McPhatter and Ivory Joe Hunter, although nobody ever says which songs they sang on. I can’t find an Ivory Joe Hunter song that fits the bill during the Bobbettes’ time on Atlantic, but I think “You’ll Be There” is a plausible candidate for a Clyde McPhatter song they could have sung on — it’s one of the few records McPhatter made around this time with obviously female vocals on it, it was arranged and conducted by Ray Ellis, who did the same job on the Bobbettes’ records, and it was recorded only a few days after a Bobbettes session. I can’t identify the voices on the record well enough to be convinced it’s them, but it could well be: [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter, “You’ll Be There”] Eventually, after a couple of years of frustration at their being required to rework their one hit, they recorded a track which let us know how they really felt: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “I Shot Mr. Lee”, Atlantic version] I think that expresses their feelings pretty well. They submitted that to Atlantic, who refused to release it, and dropped the girls from their label. This started a period where they would sign with different labels for one or two singles, and would often cut the same song for different labels. One label they signed to, in 1960, was Triple-X Records, one of the many labels run by George Goldner, the associate of Morris Levy we talked about in the episode on “Why Do Fools Fall In Love”, who was known for having the musical taste of a fourteen-year-old girl. There they started what would be a long-term working relationship with the songwriter and producer Teddy Vann. Vann is best known for writing “Love Power” for the Sand Pebbles: [Excerpt: The Sand Pebbles, “Love Power”] And for his later minor novelty hit, “Santa Claus is a Black Man”: [Excerpt: Akim and Teddy Vann, “Santa Claus is a Black Man”] But in 1960 he was just starting out, and he was enthusiastic about working with the Bobbettes. One of the first things he did with them was to remake the song that Atlantic had rejected, “I Shot Mr. Lee”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “I Shot Mr. Lee”, Triple-X version] That became their biggest hit since the original “Mr. Lee”, reaching number fifty-two on the Billboard Hot One Hundred, and prompting Atlantic to finally issue the original version of “I Shot Mr. Lee” to compete with it. There were a few follow-ups, which also charted in the lower regions of the charts, most of them, like “I Shot Mr. Lee”, answer records, though answers to other people’s records. They charted with a remake of Billy Ward and the Dominos’ “Have Mercy Baby”, with “I Don’t Like It Like That”, an answer to Chris Kenner’s “I Like It Like That”, and finally with “Dance With Me Georgie”, a reworking of “The Wallflower” that referenced the then-popular twist craze. [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Dance With Me Georgie”] The Bobbettes kept switching labels, although usually working with Teddy Vann, for several years, with little chart success. Helen Gathers decided to quit — she stopped touring with the group in 1960, because she didn’t like to travel, and while she continued to record with them for a little while, eventually she left the group altogether, though they remained friendly. The remaining members continued as a quartet for the next twenty years. While the Bobbettes didn’t have much success on their own after 1961, they did score one big hit as the backing group for another singer, when in 1964 they reached number four in the charts backing Johnny Thunder on “Loop De Loop”: [Excerpt: Johnny Thunder, “Loop De Loop”] The rest of the sixties saw them taking part in all sorts of side projects, none of them hugely commercially successful, but many of them interesting in their own right. Probably the oddest was a record released in 1964 to tie in with the film Dr Strangelove, under the name Dr Strangelove and the Fallouts: [Excerpt: Dr Strangelove and the Fallouts, “Love That Bomb”] Reather and Emma, the group’s two strongest singers, also recorded one single as the Soul Angels, featuring another singer, Mattie LaVette: [Excerpt: The Soul Angels, “It’s All In Your Mind”] The Bobbettes continued working together throughout the seventies, though they appear to have split up, at least for a time, around 1974. But by 1977, they’d decided that twenty years on from “Mister Lee”, their reputation from that song was holding them back, and so they attempted a comeback in a disco style, under a new name — the Sophisticated Ladies. [Excerpt: Sophisticated Ladies, “Check it Out”] That got something of a cult following among disco lovers, but it didn’t do anything commercially, and they reverted to the Bobbettes name for their final single, “Love Rhythm”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Love Rhythm”] But then, tragedy struck — Jannie Pought was stabbed to death in the street, in a random attack by a stranger, in September 1980. She was just thirty-four. The other group members struggled on as a trio. Throughout the eighties and nineties, the group continued performing, still with three original members, though their performances got fewer and fewer. For much of that time they still held out hope that they could revive their recording career, and you see them talking in interviews from the eighties about how they were determined eventually to get a second gold record to go with “Mr. Lee”. They never did, and they never recorded again — although they did eventually get a *platinum* record, as “Mr. Lee” was used in the platinum-selling soundtrack to the film Stand By Me. Laura Webb Childress died in 2001, at which point the two remaining members, the two lead singers of the group, got in a couple of other backing vocalists, and carried on for another thirteen years, playing on bills with other fifties groups like the Flamingos, until Reather Dixon Turner died in 2014, leaving Emma Pought Patron as the only surviving member. Emma appears to have given up touring at that point and retired. The Bobbettes may have only had one major hit under their own name, but they made several very fine records, had a career that let them work together for the rest of their lives, and not only paved the way for every girl group to follow, but also managed to help inspire a whole new genre with the influence they had over reggae. Not bad at all for a bunch of schoolgirls singing a song to make fun of their teacher…

Episode fifty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Mr. Lee" by the Bobbettes, and at the lbirth of the girl group sound. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Little Bitty Pretty One", by Thurston Harris.  ----more----   Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   I've used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Marv Goldberg's page is always the go-to for fifties R&B groups. Girl Groups: Fabulous Females Who Rocked the World by John Clemente has an article about the group with some interview material. American Singing Groups by Jay Warner also has an article on the group.  Most of the Bobbettes' material is out of print, but handily this CD is coming out next Friday, with most of their important singles on it. I have no idea of its quality, as it's not yet out, but it seems like it should be the CD to get if you want to hear more of their music.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Over the last few months we've seen the introduction to rock and roll music of almost all the elements that would characterise the music in the 1960s -- we have the music slowly standardising on a lineup of guitar, bass, and drums, with electric guitar lead. We have the blues-based melodies, the backbeat, the country-inspired guitar lines. All of them are there. They just need putting together in precisely the right proportions for the familiar sound of the early-sixties beat groups to come out. But there's one element, as important as all of these, which has not yet turned up, and which we're about to see for the first time. And that element is the girl group. Girl groups played a vital part in the development of rock and roll music, and are never given the credit they deserve. But you just have to look at the first Beatles album to see how important they were. Of the six cover versions on "Please Please Me", three are of songs originally recorded by girl groups -- two by the Shirelles, and one by the Cookies. And the thing about the girl groups is that they were marketed as collectives, not as individuals -- occasionally the lead singer would be marketed as a star in her own right, but more normally it would be the group, not the members, who were known. So it's quite surprising that the first R&B girl group to hit the charts was one that, with the exception of one member, managed to keep their original members until they died. and where two of those members were still in the group into the middle of the current decade. So today, we're going to have a look at the group that introduced the girl group sound to rock and roll, and how the world of music was irrevocably changed because of how a few young kids felt about their fifth-grade teacher. [Excerpt: The Bobettes, "Mister Lee"] Now, we have to make a distinction here when we're talking about girl groups. There had, after all, been many vocal groups in the pre-rock era that consisted entirely of women -- the Andrews Sisters, for example, had been hugely popular, as had the Boswell Sisters, who sang the theme song to this show. But those groups were mostly what was then called "modern harmony" -- they were singing block harmonies, often with jazz chords, and singing them on songs that came straight from Tin Pan Alley. There was no R&B influence in them whatsoever. When we talk about girl groups in rock and roll, we're talking about something that quickly became a standard lineup -- you'd have one woman out front singing the lead vocal, and two or three others behind her singing answering phrases and providing "ooh" vocals. The songs they performed would be, almost without exception, in the R&B mould, but would usually have much less gospel influence than the male vocal groups or the R&B solo singers who were coming up at the same time. While doo-wop groups and solo singers were all about showing off individual virtuosity, the girl groups were about the group as a collective -- with very rare exceptions, the lead singers of the girl groups would use very little melisma or ornamentation, and would just sing the melody straight. And when it comes to that kind of girl group, the Bobbettes were the first one to have any real impact. They started out as a group of children who sang after school, at church and at the glee club. The same gang of seven kids, aged between eleven and fifteen, would get together and sing, usually pop songs. After a little while, though, Reather Dixon and Emma Pought, the two girls who'd started this up, decided that they wanted to take things a bit more seriously. They decided that seven girls was too many, and so they whittled the numbers down to the five best singers -- Reather and Emma, plus Helen Gathers, Laura Webb, and Emma's sister Jannie. The girls originally named themselves the Harlem Queens, and started performing at talent shows around New York. We've talked before about how important amateur nights were for black entertainment in the forties and fifties, but it's been a while, so to refresh your memories -- at this point in time, black live entertainment was dominated by what was known as the Chitlin Circuit, an informal network of clubs and theatres around the US which put on largely black acts for almost exclusively black customers. Those venues would often have shows that lasted all day -- a ticket for the Harlem Apollo, for example, would allow you to come and go all day, and see the same performers half a dozen times. To fill out these long bills, as well as getting the acts to perform multiple times a day, several of the chitlin circuit venues would put on talent nights, where young performers could get up on stage and have a chance to win over the audiences, who were notoriously unforgiving. Despite the image we might have in our heads now of amateur talent nights, these talent contests would often produce some of the greatest performers in the music business, and people like Johnny Otis would look to them to discover new talent. They were a way for untried performers to get themselves noticed, and while few did, some of those who managed would go on to have great success. And so in late 1956, the five Harlem Queens, two of them aged only eleven, went on stage at the Harlem Apollo, home of the most notoriously tough audiences in America. But they went down well enough that James Dailey, the manager of a minor bird group called the Ospreys, decided to take them on as well. The Ospreys were a popular group around New York who would eventually get signed to Atlantic, and release records like "Do You Wanna Jump Children": [Excerpt: The Ospreys, "Do You Wanna Jump Children?"] Dailey thought that the Harlem Queens had the potential to be much bigger than the Ospreys, and he decided to try to get them signed to Atlantic Records. But one thing would need to change -- the Harlem Queens sounded more like a motorcycle gang than the name of a vocal group. Laura's sister had just had a baby, who she'd named Chanel Bobbette. They decided to name the group after the baby, but the Chanels sounded too much like the Chantels, a group from the Bronx who had already started performing. So they became the Bobbettes. They signed to Atlantic, where Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler encouraged them to perform their own material. The girls had been writing songs together, and they had one -- essentially a playground chant -- that they'd been singing together for a while, about their fifth-grade teacher Mr. Lee. Depending on who you believe -- the girls gave different accounts over the years -- the song was either attacking him, or merely affectionately mocking his appearance. It called him "four-eyed" and said he was "the ugliest teacher you ever did see". Atlantic liked the feel of the song, but they didn't want the girls singing a song that was just attacking a teacher, and so they insisted on them changing the lyrics. With the help of Reggie Obrecht, the bandleader for the session, who got a co-writing credit on the song largely for transcribing the girls' melody and turning it into something that musicians could play, the song became, instead, a song about "the handsomest sweetie you ever did see": [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "Mister Lee"] Incidentally, there seems to be some disagreement about who the musicians were on the track. Jacqueline Warwick, in "Girl Groups, Girl Culture", claims that the saxophone solo on "Mr. Lee" was played by King Curtis, who did play on many sessions for Atlantic at the time. It's possible -- and Curtis was an extremely versatile player, but he generally played with a very thick tone. Compare his playing on "Dynamite at Midnight", a solo track he released in 1957: [Excerpt: King Curtis, "Dynamite at Midnight"] With the solo on "Mr Lee": [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "Mister Lee"] I think it more likely that the credit I've seen in other places, such as Atlantic sessionographies, is correct, and that the sax solo is played by the less-well-known player Jesse Powell, who played on, for example, "Fools Fall in Love" by the Drifters: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Fools Fall In Love"] If that's correct -- and my ears tell me it is -- then presumably the other credits in those sources are also correct, and the backing for "Mister Lee" was mostly provided by B-team session players, the people who Atlantic would get in for less important sessions, rather than the first-call people they would use on their major artists -- so the musicians were Jesse Powell on tenor sax; Ray Ellis on piano; Alan Hanlon and Al Caiola on guitar; Milt Hinton on bass; and Joe Marshall on drums. "Mr. Lee" became a massive hit, going to number one on the R&B charts and making the top ten on the pop charts, and making the girls the first all-girl R&B vocal group to have a hit record, though they would soon be followed by others -- the Chantels, whose name they had tried not to copy, charted a few weeks later. "Mr. Lee" also inspired several answer records, most notably the instrumental "Walking with Mr. Lee" by Lee Allen, which was a minor hit in 1958, thanks largely to it being regularly featured on American Bandstand: [Excerpt: Lee Allen, "Walking With Mr. Lee"] The song also came to the notice of their teacher -- who seemed to have already known about the girls' song mocking him. He called a couple of the girls out of their class at school, and checked with them that they knew the song had been made into a record. He'd recognised it as the song the girls had sung about him, and he was concerned that perhaps someone had heard the girls singing their song and stolen it from them. They explained that the record was actually them, and he was, according to Reather Dixon, "ecstatic" that the song had been made into a record -- which suggests that whatever the girls' intention with the song, their teacher took it as an affectionate one. However, they didn't stay at that school long after the record became a hit. The girls were sent off on package tours of the Chitlin' circuit, touring with other Atlantic artists like Clyde McPhatter and Ruth Brown, and so they were pulled out of their normal school and started attending The Professional School For Children, a school in New York that was also attended by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, among others, which would allow them to do their work while on tour and post it back to the school. On the tours, the girls were very much taken under the wing of the adult performers. Men like Sam Cooke, Clyde McPhatter, and Jackie Wilson would take on somewhat paternal roles, trying to ensure that nothing bad would happen to these little girls away from home, while women like Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker would teach them how to dress, how to behave on stage, and what makeup to wear -- something they had been unable to learn from their male manager. Indeed, their manager, James Dailey, had started as a tailor, and for a long time sewed the girls' dresses himself -- which resulted in the group getting a reputation as the worst-dressed group on the circuit, one of the reasons they eventually dumped him. With "Mr. Lee" a massive success, Atlantic wanted the group to produce more of the same -- catchy upbeat novelty numbers that they wrote themselves. The next single, "Speedy", was very much in the "Mr. Lee" style, but was also a more generic song, without "Mr. Lee"'s exuberance: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "Speedy"] One interesting thing here is that as well as touring the US, the Bobbettes made several trips to the West Indies, where R&B was hugely popular. The Bobbettes were, along with Gene and Eunice and Fats Domino, one of the US acts who made an outsized impression, particularly in Jamaica, and listening to the rhythms on their early records you can clearly see the influence they would later have on reggae. We'll talk more about reggae and ska in future episodes, but to simplify hugely, the biggest influences on those genres as they were starting in the fifties were calypso, the New Orleans R&B records made in Cosimo Matassa's studio, and the R&B music Atlantic was putting out, and the Bobbettes were a prime part of that influence. "Mr. Lee", in particular, was later recorded by a number of Jamaican reggae artists, including Laurel Aitken: [Excerpt: Laurel Aitken, "Mr. Lee"] And the Harmonians: [Excerpt: the Harmonians, "Music Street"] But while "Mr Lee" was having a massive impact, and the group was a huge live act, they were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the way their recording career was going. Atlantic was insisting that they keep writing songs in the style of "Mr. Lee", but they were so busy they were having to slap the songs together in a hurry rather than spend time working on them, and they wanted to move on to making other kinds of records, especially since all the "Mr. Lee" soundalikes weren't actually hitting the charts. They were also trying to expand by working with other artists -- they would often act as the backing vocalists for other acts on the package shows they were on, and I've read in several sources that they performed uncredited backing vocals on some records for Clyde McPhatter and Ivory Joe Hunter, although nobody ever says which songs they sang on. I can't find an Ivory Joe Hunter song that fits the bill during the Bobbettes' time on Atlantic, but I think "You'll Be There" is a plausible candidate for a Clyde McPhatter song they could have sung on -- it's one of the few records McPhatter made around this time with obviously female vocals on it, it was arranged and conducted by Ray Ellis, who did the same job on the Bobbettes' records, and it was recorded only a few days after a Bobbettes session. I can't identify the voices on the record well enough to be convinced it's them, but it could well be: [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter, "You'll Be There"] Eventually, after a couple of years of frustration at their being required to rework their one hit, they recorded a track which let us know how they really felt: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "I Shot Mr. Lee", Atlantic version] I think that expresses their feelings pretty well. They submitted that to Atlantic, who refused to release it, and dropped the girls from their label. This started a period where they would sign with different labels for one or two singles, and would often cut the same song for different labels. One label they signed to, in 1960, was Triple-X Records, one of the many labels run by George Goldner, the associate of Morris Levy we talked about in the episode on "Why Do Fools Fall In Love", who was known for having the musical taste of a fourteen-year-old girl. There they started what would be a long-term working relationship with the songwriter and producer Teddy Vann. Vann is best known for writing "Love Power" for the Sand Pebbles: [Excerpt: The Sand Pebbles, "Love Power"] And for his later minor novelty hit, "Santa Claus is a Black Man": [Excerpt: Akim and Teddy Vann, "Santa Claus is a Black Man"] But in 1960 he was just starting out, and he was enthusiastic about working with the Bobbettes. One of the first things he did with them was to remake the song that Atlantic had rejected, "I Shot Mr. Lee": [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "I Shot Mr. Lee", Triple-X version] That became their biggest hit since the original "Mr. Lee", reaching number fifty-two on the Billboard Hot One Hundred, and prompting Atlantic to finally issue the original version of “I Shot Mr. Lee” to compete with it. There were a few follow-ups, which also charted in the lower regions of the charts, most of them, like "I Shot Mr. Lee", answer records, though answers to other people's records. They charted with a remake of Billy Ward and the Dominos' "Have Mercy Baby", with "I Don't Like It Like That", an answer to Chris Kenner's "I Like It Like That", and finally with "Dance With Me Georgie", a reworking of "The Wallflower" that referenced the then-popular twist craze. [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "Dance With Me Georgie"] The Bobbettes kept switching labels, although usually working with Teddy Vann, for several years, with little chart success. Helen Gathers decided to quit -- she stopped touring with the group in 1960, because she didn't like to travel, and while she continued to record with them for a little while, eventually she left the group altogether, though they remained friendly. The remaining members continued as a quartet for the next twenty years. While the Bobbettes didn't have much success on their own after 1961, they did score one big hit as the backing group for another singer, when in 1964 they reached number four in the charts backing Johnny Thunder on "Loop De Loop": [Excerpt: Johnny Thunder, "Loop De Loop"] The rest of the sixties saw them taking part in all sorts of side projects, none of them hugely commercially successful, but many of them interesting in their own right. Probably the oddest was a record released in 1964 to tie in with the film Dr Strangelove, under the name Dr Strangelove and the Fallouts: [Excerpt: Dr Strangelove and the Fallouts, "Love That Bomb"] Reather and Emma, the group's two strongest singers, also recorded one single as the Soul Angels, featuring another singer, Mattie LaVette: [Excerpt: The Soul Angels, "It's All In Your Mind"] The Bobbettes continued working together throughout the seventies, though they appear to have split up, at least for a time, around 1974. But by 1977, they'd decided that twenty years on from "Mister Lee", their reputation from that song was holding them back, and so they attempted a comeback in a disco style, under a new name -- the Sophisticated Ladies. [Excerpt: Sophisticated Ladies, "Check it Out"] That got something of a cult following among disco lovers, but it didn't do anything commercially, and they reverted to the Bobbettes name for their final single, "Love Rhythm": [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, "Love Rhythm"] But then, tragedy struck -- Jannie Pought was stabbed to death in the street, in a random attack by a stranger, in September 1980. She was just thirty-four. The other group members struggled on as a trio. Throughout the eighties and nineties, the group continued performing, still with three original members, though their performances got fewer and fewer. For much of that time they still held out hope that they could revive their recording career, and you see them talking in interviews from the eighties about how they were determined eventually to get a second gold record to go with "Mr. Lee". They never did, and they never recorded again -- although they did eventually get a *platinum* record, as "Mr. Lee" was used in the platinum-selling soundtrack to the film Stand By Me. Laura Webb Childress died in 2001, at which point the two remaining members, the two lead singers of the group, got in a couple of other backing vocalists, and carried on for another thirteen years, playing on bills with other fifties groups like the Flamingos, until Reather Dixon Turner died in 2014, leaving Emma Pought Patron as the only surviving member. Emma appears to have given up touring at that point and retired. The Bobbettes may have only had one major hit under their own name, but they made several very fine records, had a career that let them work together for the rest of their lives, and not only paved the way for every girl group to follow, but also managed to help inspire a whole new genre with the influence they had over reggae. Not bad at all for a bunch of schoolgirls singing a song to make fun of their teacher...

Episode fifty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Mr. Lee” by the Bobbettes, and at the lbirth of the girl group sound. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Little Bitty Pretty One”, by Thurston Harris.  —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   I’ve used multiple sources to piece together the information here. Marv Goldberg’s page is always the go-to for fifties R&B groups. Girl Groups: Fabulous Females Who Rocked the World by John Clemente has an article about the group with some interview material. American Singing Groups by Jay Warner also has an article on the group.  Most of the Bobbettes’ material is out of print, but handily this CD is coming out next Friday, with most of their important singles on it. I have no idea of its quality, as it’s not yet out, but it seems like it should be the CD to get if you want to hear more of their music.  Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Over the last few months we’ve seen the introduction to rock and roll music of almost all the elements that would characterise the music in the 1960s — we have the music slowly standardising on a lineup of guitar, bass, and drums, with electric guitar lead. We have the blues-based melodies, the backbeat, the country-inspired guitar lines. All of them are there. They just need putting together in precisely the right proportions for the familiar sound of the early-sixties beat groups to come out. But there’s one element, as important as all of these, which has not yet turned up, and which we’re about to see for the first time. And that element is the girl group. Girl groups played a vital part in the development of rock and roll music, and are never given the credit they deserve. But you just have to look at the first Beatles album to see how important they were. Of the six cover versions on “Please Please Me”, three are of songs originally recorded by girl groups — two by the Shirelles, and one by the Cookies. And the thing about the girl groups is that they were marketed as collectives, not as individuals — occasionally the lead singer would be marketed as a star in her own right, but more normally it would be the group, not the members, who were known. So it’s quite surprising that the first R&B girl group to hit the charts was one that, with the exception of one member, managed to keep their original members until they died. and where two of those members were still in the group into the middle of the current decade. So today, we’re going to have a look at the group that introduced the girl group sound to rock and roll, and how the world of music was irrevocably changed because of how a few young kids felt about their fifth-grade teacher. [Excerpt: The Bobettes, “Mister Lee”] Now, we have to make a distinction here when we’re talking about girl groups. There had, after all, been many vocal groups in the pre-rock era that consisted entirely of women — the Andrews Sisters, for example, had been hugely popular, as had the Boswell Sisters, who sang the theme song to this show. But those groups were mostly what was then called “modern harmony” — they were singing block harmonies, often with jazz chords, and singing them on songs that came straight from Tin Pan Alley. There was no R&B influence in them whatsoever. When we talk about girl groups in rock and roll, we’re talking about something that quickly became a standard lineup — you’d have one woman out front singing the lead vocal, and two or three others behind her singing answering phrases and providing “ooh” vocals. The songs they performed would be, almost without exception, in the R&B mould, but would usually have much less gospel influence than the male vocal groups or the R&B solo singers who were coming up at the same time. While doo-wop groups and solo singers were all about showing off individual virtuosity, the girl groups were about the group as a collective — with very rare exceptions, the lead singers of the girl groups would use very little melisma or ornamentation, and would just sing the melody straight. And when it comes to that kind of girl group, the Bobbettes were the first one to have any real impact. They started out as a group of children who sang after school, at church and at the glee club. The same gang of seven kids, aged between eleven and fifteen, would get together and sing, usually pop songs. After a little while, though, Reather Dixon and Emma Pought, the two girls who’d started this up, decided that they wanted to take things a bit more seriously. They decided that seven girls was too many, and so they whittled the numbers down to the five best singers — Reather and Emma, plus Helen Gathers, Laura Webb, and Emma’s sister Jannie. The girls originally named themselves the Harlem Queens, and started performing at talent shows around New York. We’ve talked before about how important amateur nights were for black entertainment in the forties and fifties, but it’s been a while, so to refresh your memories — at this point in time, black live entertainment was dominated by what was known as the Chitlin Circuit, an informal network of clubs and theatres around the US which put on largely black acts for almost exclusively black customers. Those venues would often have shows that lasted all day — a ticket for the Harlem Apollo, for example, would allow you to come and go all day, and see the same performers half a dozen times. To fill out these long bills, as well as getting the acts to perform multiple times a day, several of the chitlin circuit venues would put on talent nights, where young performers could get up on stage and have a chance to win over the audiences, who were notoriously unforgiving. Despite the image we might have in our heads now of amateur talent nights, these talent contests would often produce some of the greatest performers in the music business, and people like Johnny Otis would look to them to discover new talent. They were a way for untried performers to get themselves noticed, and while few did, some of those who managed would go on to have great success. And so in late 1956, the five Harlem Queens, two of them aged only eleven, went on stage at the Harlem Apollo, home of the most notoriously tough audiences in America. But they went down well enough that James Dailey, the manager of a minor bird group called the Ospreys, decided to take them on as well. The Ospreys were a popular group around New York who would eventually get signed to Atlantic, and release records like “Do You Wanna Jump Children”: [Excerpt: The Ospreys, “Do You Wanna Jump Children?”] Dailey thought that the Harlem Queens had the potential to be much bigger than the Ospreys, and he decided to try to get them signed to Atlantic Records. But one thing would need to change — the Harlem Queens sounded more like a motorcycle gang than the name of a vocal group. Laura’s sister had just had a baby, who she’d named Chanel Bobbette. They decided to name the group after the baby, but the Chanels sounded too much like the Chantels, a group from the Bronx who had already started performing. So they became the Bobbettes. They signed to Atlantic, where Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler encouraged them to perform their own material. The girls had been writing songs together, and they had one — essentially a playground chant — that they’d been singing together for a while, about their fifth-grade teacher Mr. Lee. Depending on who you believe — the girls gave different accounts over the years — the song was either attacking him, or merely affectionately mocking his appearance. It called him “four-eyed” and said he was “the ugliest teacher you ever did see”. Atlantic liked the feel of the song, but they didn’t want the girls singing a song that was just attacking a teacher, and so they insisted on them changing the lyrics. With the help of Reggie Obrecht, the bandleader for the session, who got a co-writing credit on the song largely for transcribing the girls’ melody and turning it into something that musicians could play, the song became, instead, a song about “the handsomest sweetie you ever did see”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Mister Lee”] Incidentally, there seems to be some disagreement about who the musicians were on the track. Jacqueline Warwick, in “Girl Groups, Girl Culture”, claims that the saxophone solo on “Mr. Lee” was played by King Curtis, who did play on many sessions for Atlantic at the time. It’s possible — and Curtis was an extremely versatile player, but he generally played with a very thick tone. Compare his playing on “Dynamite at Midnight”, a solo track he released in 1957: [Excerpt: King Curtis, “Dynamite at Midnight”] With the solo on “Mr Lee”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Mister Lee”] I think it more likely that the credit I’ve seen in other places, such as Atlantic sessionographies, is correct, and that the sax solo is played by the less-well-known player Jesse Powell, who played on, for example, “Fools Fall in Love” by the Drifters: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall In Love”] If that’s correct — and my ears tell me it is — then presumably the other credits in those sources are also correct, and the backing for “Mister Lee” was mostly provided by B-team session players, the people who Atlantic would get in for less important sessions, rather than the first-call people they would use on their major artists — so the musicians were Jesse Powell on tenor sax; Ray Ellis on piano; Alan Hanlon and Al Caiola on guitar; Milt Hinton on bass; and Joe Marshall on drums. “Mr. Lee” became a massive hit, going to number one on the R&B charts and making the top ten on the pop charts, and making the girls the first all-girl R&B vocal group to have a hit record, though they would soon be followed by others — the Chantels, whose name they had tried not to copy, charted a few weeks later. “Mr. Lee” also inspired several answer records, most notably the instrumental “Walking with Mr. Lee” by Lee Allen, which was a minor hit in 1958, thanks largely to it being regularly featured on American Bandstand: [Excerpt: Lee Allen, “Walking With Mr. Lee”] The song also came to the notice of their teacher — who seemed to have already known about the girls’ song mocking him. He called a couple of the girls out of their class at school, and checked with them that they knew the song had been made into a record. He’d recognised it as the song the girls had sung about him, and he was concerned that perhaps someone had heard the girls singing their song and stolen it from them. They explained that the record was actually them, and he was, according to Reather Dixon, “ecstatic” that the song had been made into a record — which suggests that whatever the girls’ intention with the song, their teacher took it as an affectionate one. However, they didn’t stay at that school long after the record became a hit. The girls were sent off on package tours of the Chitlin’ circuit, touring with other Atlantic artists like Clyde McPhatter and Ruth Brown, and so they were pulled out of their normal school and started attending The Professional School For Children, a school in New York that was also attended by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, among others, which would allow them to do their work while on tour and post it back to the school. On the tours, the girls were very much taken under the wing of the adult performers. Men like Sam Cooke, Clyde McPhatter, and Jackie Wilson would take on somewhat paternal roles, trying to ensure that nothing bad would happen to these little girls away from home, while women like Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker would teach them how to dress, how to behave on stage, and what makeup to wear — something they had been unable to learn from their male manager. Indeed, their manager, James Dailey, had started as a tailor, and for a long time sewed the girls’ dresses himself — which resulted in the group getting a reputation as the worst-dressed group on the circuit, one of the reasons they eventually dumped him. With “Mr. Lee” a massive success, Atlantic wanted the group to produce more of the same — catchy upbeat novelty numbers that they wrote themselves. The next single, “Speedy”, was very much in the “Mr. Lee” style, but was also a more generic song, without “Mr. Lee”‘s exuberance: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Speedy”] One interesting thing here is that as well as touring the US, the Bobbettes made several trips to the West Indies, where R&B was hugely popular. The Bobbettes were, along with Gene and Eunice and Fats Domino, one of the US acts who made an outsized impression, particularly in Jamaica, and listening to the rhythms on their early records you can clearly see the influence they would later have on reggae. We’ll talk more about reggae and ska in future episodes, but to simplify hugely, the biggest influences on those genres as they were starting in the fifties were calypso, the New Orleans R&B records made in Cosimo Matassa’s studio, and the R&B music Atlantic was putting out, and the Bobbettes were a prime part of that influence. “Mr. Lee”, in particular, was later recorded by a number of Jamaican reggae artists, including Laurel Aitken: [Excerpt: Laurel Aitken, “Mr. Lee”] And the Harmonians: [Excerpt: the Harmonians, “Music Street”] But while “Mr Lee” was having a massive impact, and the group was a huge live act, they were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the way their recording career was going. Atlantic was insisting that they keep writing songs in the style of “Mr. Lee”, but they were so busy they were having to slap the songs together in a hurry rather than spend time working on them, and they wanted to move on to making other kinds of records, especially since all the “Mr. Lee” soundalikes weren’t actually hitting the charts. They were also trying to expand by working with other artists — they would often act as the backing vocalists for other acts on the package shows they were on, and I’ve read in several sources that they performed uncredited backing vocals on some records for Clyde McPhatter and Ivory Joe Hunter, although nobody ever says which songs they sang on. I can’t find an Ivory Joe Hunter song that fits the bill during the Bobbettes’ time on Atlantic, but I think “You’ll Be There” is a plausible candidate for a Clyde McPhatter song they could have sung on — it’s one of the few records McPhatter made around this time with obviously female vocals on it, it was arranged and conducted by Ray Ellis, who did the same job on the Bobbettes’ records, and it was recorded only a few days after a Bobbettes session. I can’t identify the voices on the record well enough to be convinced it’s them, but it could well be: [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter, “You’ll Be There”] Eventually, after a couple of years of frustration at their being required to rework their one hit, they recorded a track which let us know how they really felt: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “I Shot Mr. Lee”, Atlantic version] I think that expresses their feelings pretty well. They submitted that to Atlantic, who refused to release it, and dropped the girls from their label. This started a period where they would sign with different labels for one or two singles, and would often cut the same song for different labels. One label they signed to, in 1960, was Triple-X Records, one of the many labels run by George Goldner, the associate of Morris Levy we talked about in the episode on “Why Do Fools Fall In Love”, who was known for having the musical taste of a fourteen-year-old girl. There they started what would be a long-term working relationship with the songwriter and producer Teddy Vann. Vann is best known for writing “Love Power” for the Sand Pebbles: [Excerpt: The Sand Pebbles, “Love Power”] And for his later minor novelty hit, “Santa Claus is a Black Man”: [Excerpt: Akim and Teddy Vann, “Santa Claus is a Black Man”] But in 1960 he was just starting out, and he was enthusiastic about working with the Bobbettes. One of the first things he did with them was to remake the song that Atlantic had rejected, “I Shot Mr. Lee”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “I Shot Mr. Lee”, Triple-X version] That became their biggest hit since the original “Mr. Lee”, reaching number fifty-two on the Billboard Hot One Hundred, and prompting Atlantic to finally issue the original version of “I Shot Mr. Lee” to compete with it. There were a few follow-ups, which also charted in the lower regions of the charts, most of them, like “I Shot Mr. Lee”, answer records, though answers to other people’s records. They charted with a remake of Billy Ward and the Dominos’ “Have Mercy Baby”, with “I Don’t Like It Like That”, an answer to Chris Kenner’s “I Like It Like That”, and finally with “Dance With Me Georgie”, a reworking of “The Wallflower” that referenced the then-popular twist craze. [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Dance With Me Georgie”] The Bobbettes kept switching labels, although usually working with Teddy Vann, for several years, with little chart success. Helen Gathers decided to quit — she stopped touring with the group in 1960, because she didn’t like to travel, and while she continued to record with them for a little while, eventually she left the group altogether, though they remained friendly. The remaining members continued as a quartet for the next twenty years. While the Bobbettes didn’t have much success on their own after 1961, they did score one big hit as the backing group for another singer, when in 1964 they reached number four in the charts backing Johnny Thunder on “Loop De Loop”: [Excerpt: Johnny Thunder, “Loop De Loop”] The rest of the sixties saw them taking part in all sorts of side projects, none of them hugely commercially successful, but many of them interesting in their own right. Probably the oddest was a record released in 1964 to tie in with the film Dr Strangelove, under the name Dr Strangelove and the Fallouts: [Excerpt: Dr Strangelove and the Fallouts, “Love That Bomb”] Reather and Emma, the group’s two strongest singers, also recorded one single as the Soul Angels, featuring another singer, Mattie LaVette: [Excerpt: The Soul Angels, “It’s All In Your Mind”] The Bobbettes continued working together throughout the seventies, though they appear to have split up, at least for a time, around 1974. But by 1977, they’d decided that twenty years on from “Mister Lee”, their reputation from that song was holding them back, and so they attempted a comeback in a disco style, under a new name — the Sophisticated Ladies. [Excerpt: Sophisticated Ladies, “Check it Out”] That got something of a cult following among disco lovers, but it didn’t do anything commercially, and they reverted to the Bobbettes name for their final single, “Love Rhythm”: [Excerpt: The Bobbettes, “Love Rhythm”] But then, tragedy struck — Jannie Pought was stabbed to death in the street, in a random attack by a stranger, in September 1980. She was just thirty-four. The other group members struggled on as a trio. Throughout the eighties and nineties, the group continued performing, still with three original members, though their performances got fewer and fewer. For much of that time they still held out hope that they could revive their recording career, and you see them talking in interviews from the eighties about how they were determined eventually to get a second gold record to go with “Mr. Lee”. They never did, and they never recorded again — although they did eventually get a *platinum* record, as “Mr. Lee” was used in the platinum-selling soundtrack to the film Stand By Me. Laura Webb Childress died in 2001, at which point the two remaining members, the two lead singers of the group, got in a couple of other backing vocalists, and carried on for another thirteen years, playing on bills with other fifties groups like the Flamingos, until Reather Dixon Turner died in 2014, leaving Emma Pought Patron as the only surviving member. Emma appears to have given up touring at that point and retired. The Bobbettes may have only had one major hit under their own name, but they made several very fine records, had a career that let them work together for the rest of their lives, and not only paved the way for every girl group to follow, but also managed to help inspire a whole new genre with the influence they had over reggae. Not bad at all for a bunch of schoolgirls singing a song to make fun of their teacher…

Episode thirty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and at the terrible afterlife of child stardom. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Space Guitar” by Johnny “Guitar” Watson. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no books on the Teenagers, as far as I know, so as I so often do when talking about vocal groups I relied heavily on Marv Goldberg’s website. Some information also comes from Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. Some background on George Goldner was from Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz. And for more on Morris Levy, see Me, the Mob, and the Music, by Tommy James with Martin Fitzpatrick. This compilation contains every recording by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, together or separately, as well as recordings by Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, a group led by Lymon’s brother. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript The story of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers is, like so many of the stories we’re dealing with in this series, a story of heartbreak and early death, a story of young people of colour having their work become massively successful and making no money off it because of wealthy businessmen stealing their work. But it’s also a story of what happens when you get involved with the Mafia before you hit puberty, and your career peaks at thirteen. The Teenagers only had one really big hit, but it was one of the biggest hits of the fifties, and it was a song that is almost universally known to this day. So today we’re going to talk about “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” The Teenagers started when two black teenagers from New York, Jimmy Merchant and Sherman Garnes, left the vocal group they’d formed, which was named “the Earth Angels” after the Penguins song, and hooked up with two Latino neighbours, Joe Negroni and Herman Santiago. They named themselves the Ermines. Soon after, they were the support act for local vocal group the Cadillacs: [Excerpt, The Cadillacs, “Speedoo”] They were impressed enough by the Cadillacs that in honour of them they changed their name, becoming the Coup de Villes, and after that the Premiers. They used to practice in the hallway of the apartment block where Sherman Garnes lived, and eventually one of the neighbours got sick of hearing them sing the same songs over and over. The neighbour decided to bring out some love letters his girlfriend had written, some of which were in the form of poems, and say to the kids “why don’t you turn some of these into songs?” And so they did just that — they took one of the letters, containing the phrase “why do birds sing so gay?” and Santiago and Merchant worked out a ballad for Santiago to sing containing that phrase. Soon after this, the Premiers met up with a very young kid, Frankie Lymon, who sang and played percussion in a mambo group. I suppose I should pause here to talk briefly about the mambo craze. Rock and roll wasn’t the only musical style that was making inroads in the pop markets in the fifties — and an impartial observer, looking in 1953 or 1954, might easily have expected that the big musical trend that would shape the next few decades would be calypso music, which had become huge in the US for a brief period. But that wasn’t the only music that was challenging rock and roll. There were a whole host of other musics, usually those from Pacific, Latin-American and/or Caribbean cultures, which tend to get lumped together as “exotica” now, and “mambo” was one of those. This was a craze named after a song by the Cuban bandleader Perez Prado, “Mambo Jambo”: [Excerpt: Perez Prado, “Mambo Jambo”] That song was popular enough that soon everyone was jumping on the bandwagon — for example, Bill Haley and the Comets with “Mambo Rock”: [Excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets, “Mambo Rock”] The group that Frankie Lymon was performing with was one of those groups, but he was easily persuaded instead to join the Premiers. He was the young kid who hung around with them when they practiced, not the leader, and not even a major part of the group. Not yet, anyway. But everything changed for the group when Richie Barrett heard them singing on a street corner near him. These days, Barrett is best-known for his 1962 single “Some Other Guy”, which was later covered by the Beatles, among others: [Excerpt: Richie Barrett, “Some Other Guy”] But at the time he was the lead singer of a group called the Valentines: [Excerpt: The Valentines, “Tonight Kathleen”] He was also working for George Goldner at Rama Records as a talent scout and producer, doing the same kind of things that Ike Turner had been doing for Chess and Modern, or that Jesse Stone did for Atlantic — finding the acts, doing the arrangements, doing all the work involved in turning some teenage kid into someone who could become a star. Goldner was someone for whom most people in the music industry seem to have a certain amount of contempt — he was, by most accounts, a fairly weak-willed figure who got himself into great amounts of debt with dodgy people. But one thing they’re all agreed on is that he had a great ear for a hit, because as Jerry Leiber put it he had the taste of a fourteen-year-old girl. George Goldner had actually got into R&B through the mambo craze. When Goldner had started in the music industry, it had been as the owner of a chain of nightclubs which featured Latin music. The clubs became popular enough that he also started Tico Records, a label that put out Latin records, most notably early recordings by Tito Puente. [Excerpt: Tito Puente: “Vibe Mambo”] When the mambo boom hit, a lot of black teenagers started attending Goldner’s clubs, and he became interested in the other music they were listening to. He started first Rama Records, as a label for R&B singles, and then Gee records, named after the most successful record that had been put out on Rama, “Gee”, by the Crows. However, Goldner had a business partner, and his name was Morris Levy, and Levy was *not* someone you wanted involved in your business in any way. In this series we’re going to talk about a lot of horrible people — and in fact we’ve already covered more than a few of them — yet Morris Levy was one of the worst people we’re going to look at. While most of the people we’ve discussed are either terrible people in their personal life (if they were a musician) or a minor con artist who ripped off musicians and kept the money for themselves, Morris Levy was a terrible human being *and* a con artist, someone who used his Mafia connections to ensure that the artists he ripped off would never even think of suing him, because they valued their lives too much. We’ll be looking at at least one rock and roll star, in the 1960s, who died in mysterious circumstances after getting involved with Levy. Levy had been the founder of Birdland, the world-famous jazz club, in the 1940s, but when ASCAP came to him asking for the money they were meant to get for their songwriters from live performances, Levy had immediately seen the possibilities in music publishing. Levy then formed a publishing company, Patricia Music, and a record label, Roulette, and started into the business of properly exploiting young black people, not just having them work in his clubs for a night, but having them create intellectual property he could continue exploiting for the rest of his life. Indeed, Levy was so keen to make money off dubious intellectual property that he actually formed a company with his friend Alan Freed which attempted to trademark the phrase “rock and roll”, on the basis that this way any records that came out labelled as such would have to pay them for the privilege. Thankfully, the term caught on so rapidly that there was no way for them to enforce the trademark, and it became genericised. But this is who Levy was, and how he made his money — at least his more legitimate money. Where he got the rest from is a matter for the true crime podcasts. There are several people who report death threats, or having to give up their careers, or suddenly move thousands of miles away from home, to avoid Levy’s revenge on artists who didn’t do exactly what he said. So when we’re looking at a group of literal teenage kids — and black teenagers at that, with the smallest amount of institutional privilege possible, you can be sure that he was not going to treat them with the respect that they were due. Levy owned fifty percent of Goldner’s record companies, and would soon grow to own all of them, as Goldner accumulated more gambling debts and used his record labels to pay them off. But at the start of their career, the group didn’t yet have to worry about Levy. That would come later. For now, they were dealing with George Goldner. And Goldner was someone who was actually concerned with the music, and who had been producing hits consistently for the last few years. At the time the Premiers signed with him, for example, he had just produced “You Baby You” for the Cleftones. [Excerpt: The Cleftones, “You Baby You”] When Richie Barrett brought the Premiers to Goldner, he was intrigued because two of the members were Latino, and he was such a lover of Latin music. But he quickly latched on to the potential of Frankie Lymon as a star. Lymon was a captivating performer, and when you watch video footage of him now you can’t help but think of Michael Jackson, who followed almost exactly the same early career trajectory a decade later. While the other band members were the normal kind of teenage kids who joined doo-wop groups, and were clearly a little reserved, Lymon just *went for it*, working the crowd like a young James Brown with absolutely no self-consciousness at all. He also had a gorgeous falsetto voice, and knew how to use it. As we’ve heard, many of the doo-wop groups of the fifties weren’t particularly proficient singers, but Lymon did have a real vocal talent. He was clearly a potential star. Frankie Lymon wasn’t even originally meant to be the lead singer on “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” — that distinctive falsetto that makes the record so memorable was a late addition. The song was originally meant to be sung by Herman Santiago, and it was only in the studio that the song was rearranged to instead focus on the band’s youngest — and youngest-sounding — member. [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”] When the record came out, it wasn’t credited to the Premiers, but to “The Teenagers, featuring Frankie Lymon”. Goldner hadn’t liked the group’s name, and decided to focus on their big selling point — their youth, and in particular the youth of their new lead singer. Much of the work to make the record sound that good was done not by the Teenagers or by Goldner, but by the session saxophone player Jimmy Wright, who ended up doing the arrangements on all of the Teenagers’ records, and whose idea it was to start them with Sherman Garnes’ bass intros. Again, as with so many of these records, there was a white cover version that came out almost immediately — this time by the Diamonds, a group of Canadians who copied the formula of their fellow countrymen the Crew Cuts and more or less cornered the market in white remakes of doo-wop hits. [Excerpt: The Diamonds, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”] But in a sign of how the times were changing, the Diamonds’ version of the song only went to number twelve, while the Teenagers’ version went to number six, helped by a massive push from Morris Levy’s good friend Alan Freed. Partly this may have been down to the fact that all the Diamonds were adults, and they simply couldn’t compete with the novelty sound of a boy who sounded prepubescent, singing in falsetto. Falsetto had, of course, always been a part of the doo-wop vocal blend, but it had been a minor part up to this point. Lead vocals would generally be sung in a smooth high tenor, but would very rarely reach to the truly high notes. Lymon, by virtue of his voice not yet having broken, introduced a new timbre into rock and roll lead vocals, and he influenced almost every vocal group that followed. There might have been a Four Seasons or a Jan and Dean or a Beach Boys without Lymon, but I doubt it. There was also a British cover version, by Alma Cogan, a middle-of-the-road singer known as “the girl with the giggle in her voice”. [Excerpt: Alma Cogan, “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”] This sort of thing was common in Britain well into the sixties, as most US labels didn’t have distribution in the UK, and so if British people wanted to hear American rock and roll songs, they would often get them in native cover versions. Cogan was a particular source of these, often recording songs that had been R&B hits. We will see a lot more of this in future episodes, as we start to look more at the way rock and roll affected the UK. The Teenagers followed the success of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” with “I Want You to Be My Girl”: [Excerpt, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “I Want You to Be My Girl”] This one did almost as well, reaching a peak of number thirteen in the pop charts. But the singles after that did less well, although “I’m Not A Juvenile Delinquent” became a big hit in the UK. The record label soon decided that Lymon needed to become a solo star, rather than being just the lead singer of the Teenagers. Quite why they made this decision was difficult to say, as one would not normally deliberately break up a hit act. But presumably the calculation was that they would then have two hit acts — solo Frankie Lymon, and the Teenagers still recording together. It didn’t work out like that. Lymon inadvertently caused another crisis in the ongoing battle of rock and roll versus racism. Alan Freed had a new TV series, The Big Beat, which was a toned-down version of Freed’s radio show. By this point, real rock and roll was already in a temporary decline as the major labels fought back, and so Freed’s show was generally filled with the kind of pre-packaged major label act, usually named Bobby, that we’ll be talking about when we get to the later fifties. For all that Freed had a reputation as a supporter of black music, what he really was was someone with the skill to see a bandwagon and jump on it. But still, some of the black performers were still popular, and so Freed had Lymon on his showr. But his show was aimed at a white audience, and so the studio audience was white, and dancing. And Frankie Lymon started to dance as well. A black boy, dancing with a white girl. This did not go down well at all with the Southern network affiliates, and within a couple of weeks Freed’s show had been taken off the TV. And that appearance, the one that destroyed Freed’s show, was almost certainly Lymon’s very first ever solo performance. One might think that this did not augur well for his future career, and that assessment would be largely correct. Neither Lymon nor the Teenagers would ever have another hit after they split. The last few records credited to Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers were in fact Lymon solo recordings, performed with other backing singers. “Goody Goody” did manage to reach number twenty on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “Goody Goody”] Everything after that did worse. Lymon’s first solo single, “My Girl”, failed to chart: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, “My Girl”] He continued making records for another couple of years, but nothing came of any of them, and when his voice broke he stopped sounding much like himself. The last recording he made that came even close to being a hit was a remake of Bobby Day’s “Little Bitty Pretty One” from 1960. [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, “Little Bitty Pretty One”] And the Teenagers didn’t fare much better. They went through several new lead singers. There was Billy Lobrano, a white kid who according to Jimmy Merchant sounded more like Eddie Fisher than like Lymon: [Excerpt: The Teenagers, “Mama Wanna Rock”] Then there was Freddie Houston, who would go on to be the lead singer in one of the many Ink Spots lineups touring in the sixties, and then they started trying to focus on the other original group members, for example calling themselves “Sherman and the Teenagers” when performing the Leiber and Stoller song “The Draw”: [Excerpt: Sherman and the Teenagers, “The Draw”] As you can hear, none of these had the same sound as they’d had with Lymon, and they eventually hit on the idea of getting a woman into the group instead. They got in Sandra Doyle, who would later be Zola Taylor’s replacement in the Platters, and struggled on until 1961, when they finally split up. Lymon’s life after leaving the Teenagers was one of nothing but tragedy. He married three times, every time bigamously, and his only child died two days after the birth. Lymon would apparently regularly steal from Zola Taylor, who became his second wife, to feed his heroin addiction. He briefly reunited with the Teenagers in 1965, but they had little success. He spent a couple of years in the army, and appeared to have got himself clean, and even got a new record deal. But the night before he was meant to go back into the studio, he fell off the wagon, for what would be the last time. Frankie Lymon died, aged just twenty-five, and a has-been for almost half of his life, of a heroin overdose, in 1968. The other Teenagers would reunite, with Lymon’s brother joining them briefly, in the 70s. Sherman Garnes died in 1977, and Joe Negroni in 1978, but Santiago and Merchant continued, off and on, with a lineup of the Teenagers — a version of the band continues to this day, still featuring Herman Santiago, and Merchant remained with the band until his retirement a few years ago. But their first hit caused legal problems: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”] “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?” was written by Herman Santiago, with the help of Jimmy Merchant. But neither Santiago or Merchant were credited on the song when it came out. The credited songwriters for the song are Frankie Lymon — who did have some input into rewriting it in the studio — and Morris Levy, who had never even heard the song until after it was a massive hit. George Goldner was originally credited as Lymon’s co-writer, and of course Goldner never wrote it either, but at least he was in the studio when it was recorded. But when Levy bought out Goldner’s holdings in his companies, he also bought out his rights to songs he was credited for, so Levy became the legal co-writer of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” In 1992 Santiago and Merchant finally won the credit for having written “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”, but in 1996 the ruling was overturned. They’d apparently waited too long to take legal action over having their song stolen, and so the rights reverted to Lymon and Morris Levy — who had never even met the band when they wrote the song. But, of course, Lymon wasn’t alive to get the money. But his widow was. Or rather, his widows, plural, were. In the 1980s, three separate women claimed to be Lymon’s widow and thus his legitimate heir. One was his first wife, who he had married in 1964 while she was still married to her first husband. One was Zola Taylor, who Lymon supposedly married bigamously a year after his first marriage, but who couldn’t produce any evidence of this, and the third was either his second or third wife, who he married bigamously in 1967 while still married to his first, and possibly his second, wife. That third wife eventually won the various legal battles and is now in charge of the Frankie Lymon legacy. “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?” has gone on to be a standard, recorded by everyone from Joni Mitchell to the Beach Boys to Diana Ross. But Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers stand as a cautionary tale, an example that all too many people were still all too eager to follow.

Episode thirty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and at the terrible afterlife of child stardom. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Space Guitar" by Johnny "Guitar" Watson. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no books on the Teenagers, as far as I know, so as I so often do when talking about vocal groups I relied heavily on Marv Goldberg's website. Some information also comes from Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. Some background on George Goldner was from Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz. And for more on Morris Levy, see Me, the Mob, and the Music, by Tommy James with Martin Fitzpatrick. This compilation contains every recording by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, together or separately, as well as recordings by Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, a group led by Lymon's brother. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript The story of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers is, like so many of the stories we're dealing with in this series, a story of heartbreak and early death, a story of young people of colour having their work become massively successful and making no money off it because of wealthy businessmen stealing their work. But it's also a story of what happens when you get involved with the Mafia before you hit puberty, and your career peaks at thirteen. The Teenagers only had one really big hit, but it was one of the biggest hits of the fifties, and it was a song that is almost universally known to this day. So today we're going to talk about "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" The Teenagers started when two black teenagers from New York, Jimmy Merchant and Sherman Garnes, left the vocal group they'd formed, which was named "the Earth Angels" after the Penguins song, and hooked up with two Latino neighbours, Joe Negroni and Herman Santiago. They named themselves the Ermines. Soon after, they were the support act for local vocal group the Cadillacs: [Excerpt, The Cadillacs, "Speedoo"] They were impressed enough by the Cadillacs that in honour of them they changed their name, becoming the Coup de Villes, and after that the Premiers. They used to practice in the hallway of the apartment block where Sherman Garnes lived, and eventually one of the neighbours got sick of hearing them sing the same songs over and over. The neighbour decided to bring out some love letters his girlfriend had written, some of which were in the form of poems, and say to the kids "why don't you turn some of these into songs?" And so they did just that -- they took one of the letters, containing the phrase "why do birds sing so gay?" and Santiago and Merchant worked out a ballad for Santiago to sing containing that phrase. Soon after this, the Premiers met up with a very young kid, Frankie Lymon, who sang and played percussion in a mambo group. I suppose I should pause here to talk briefly about the mambo craze. Rock and roll wasn't the only musical style that was making inroads in the pop markets in the fifties -- and an impartial observer, looking in 1953 or 1954, might easily have expected that the big musical trend that would shape the next few decades would be calypso music, which had become huge in the US for a brief period. But that wasn't the only music that was challenging rock and roll. There were a whole host of other musics, usually those from Pacific, Latin-American and/or Caribbean cultures, which tend to get lumped together as "exotica" now, and "mambo" was one of those. This was a craze named after a song by the Cuban bandleader Perez Prado, "Mambo Jambo": [Excerpt: Perez Prado, "Mambo Jambo"] That song was popular enough that soon everyone was jumping on the bandwagon -- for example, Bill Haley and the Comets with "Mambo Rock": [Excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets, "Mambo Rock"] The group that Frankie Lymon was performing with was one of those groups, but he was easily persuaded instead to join the Premiers. He was the young kid who hung around with them when they practiced, not the leader, and not even a major part of the group. Not yet, anyway. But everything changed for the group when Richie Barrett heard them singing on a street corner near him. These days, Barrett is best-known for his 1962 single "Some Other Guy", which was later covered by the Beatles, among others: [Excerpt: Richie Barrett, "Some Other Guy"] But at the time he was the lead singer of a group called the Valentines: [Excerpt: The Valentines, "Tonight Kathleen"] He was also working for George Goldner at Rama Records as a talent scout and producer, doing the same kind of things that Ike Turner had been doing for Chess and Modern, or that Jesse Stone did for Atlantic -- finding the acts, doing the arrangements, doing all the work involved in turning some teenage kid into someone who could become a star. Goldner was someone for whom most people in the music industry seem to have a certain amount of contempt -- he was, by most accounts, a fairly weak-willed figure who got himself into great amounts of debt with dodgy people. But one thing they're all agreed on is that he had a great ear for a hit, because as Jerry Leiber put it he had the taste of a fourteen-year-old girl. George Goldner had actually got into R&B through the mambo craze. When Goldner had started in the music industry, it had been as the owner of a chain of nightclubs which featured Latin music. The clubs became popular enough that he also started Tico Records, a label that put out Latin records, most notably early recordings by Tito Puente. [Excerpt: Tito Puente: "Vibe Mambo"] When the mambo boom hit, a lot of black teenagers started attending Goldner's clubs, and he became interested in the other music they were listening to. He started first Rama Records, as a label for R&B singles, and then Gee records, named after the most successful record that had been put out on Rama, "Gee", by the Crows. However, Goldner had a business partner, and his name was Morris Levy, and Levy was *not* someone you wanted involved in your business in any way. In this series we're going to talk about a lot of horrible people -- and in fact we've already covered more than a few of them -- yet Morris Levy was one of the worst people we're going to look at. While most of the people we've discussed are either terrible people in their personal life (if they were a musician) or a minor con artist who ripped off musicians and kept the money for themselves, Morris Levy was a terrible human being *and* a con artist, someone who used his Mafia connections to ensure that the artists he ripped off would never even think of suing him, because they valued their lives too much. We'll be looking at at least one rock and roll star, in the 1960s, who died in mysterious circumstances after getting involved with Levy. Levy had been the founder of Birdland, the world-famous jazz club, in the 1940s, but when ASCAP came to him asking for the money they were meant to get for their songwriters from live performances, Levy had immediately seen the possibilities in music publishing. Levy then formed a publishing company, Patricia Music, and a record label, Roulette, and started into the business of properly exploiting young black people, not just having them work in his clubs for a night, but having them create intellectual property he could continue exploiting for the rest of his life. Indeed, Levy was so keen to make money off dubious intellectual property that he actually formed a company with his friend Alan Freed which attempted to trademark the phrase "rock and roll", on the basis that this way any records that came out labelled as such would have to pay them for the privilege. Thankfully, the term caught on so rapidly that there was no way for them to enforce the trademark, and it became genericised. But this is who Levy was, and how he made his money -- at least his more legitimate money. Where he got the rest from is a matter for the true crime podcasts. There are several people who report death threats, or having to give up their careers, or suddenly move thousands of miles away from home, to avoid Levy's revenge on artists who didn't do exactly what he said. So when we're looking at a group of literal teenage kids -- and black teenagers at that, with the smallest amount of institutional privilege possible, you can be sure that he was not going to treat them with the respect that they were due. Levy owned fifty percent of Goldner's record companies, and would soon grow to own all of them, as Goldner accumulated more gambling debts and used his record labels to pay them off. But at the start of their career, the group didn't yet have to worry about Levy. That would come later. For now, they were dealing with George Goldner. And Goldner was someone who was actually concerned with the music, and who had been producing hits consistently for the last few years. At the time the Premiers signed with him, for example, he had just produced "You Baby You" for the Cleftones. [Excerpt: The Cleftones, "You Baby You"] When Richie Barrett brought the Premiers to Goldner, he was intrigued because two of the members were Latino, and he was such a lover of Latin music. But he quickly latched on to the potential of Frankie Lymon as a star. Lymon was a captivating performer, and when you watch video footage of him now you can't help but think of Michael Jackson, who followed almost exactly the same early career trajectory a decade later. While the other band members were the normal kind of teenage kids who joined doo-wop groups, and were clearly a little reserved, Lymon just *went for it*, working the crowd like a young James Brown with absolutely no self-consciousness at all. He also had a gorgeous falsetto voice, and knew how to use it. As we've heard, many of the doo-wop groups of the fifties weren't particularly proficient singers, but Lymon did have a real vocal talent. He was clearly a potential star. Frankie Lymon wasn't even originally meant to be the lead singer on "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" -- that distinctive falsetto that makes the record so memorable was a late addition. The song was originally meant to be sung by Herman Santiago, and it was only in the studio that the song was rearranged to instead focus on the band's youngest -- and youngest-sounding -- member. [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?"] When the record came out, it wasn't credited to the Premiers, but to "The Teenagers, featuring Frankie Lymon". Goldner hadn't liked the group's name, and decided to focus on their big selling point -- their youth, and in particular the youth of their new lead singer. Much of the work to make the record sound that good was done not by the Teenagers or by Goldner, but by the session saxophone player Jimmy Wright, who ended up doing the arrangements on all of the Teenagers' records, and whose idea it was to start them with Sherman Garnes' bass intros. Again, as with so many of these records, there was a white cover version that came out almost immediately -- this time by the Diamonds, a group of Canadians who copied the formula of their fellow countrymen the Crew Cuts and more or less cornered the market in white remakes of doo-wop hits. [Excerpt: The Diamonds, "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?"] But in a sign of how the times were changing, the Diamonds' version of the song only went to number twelve, while the Teenagers' version went to number six, helped by a massive push from Morris Levy's good friend Alan Freed. Partly this may have been down to the fact that all the Diamonds were adults, and they simply couldn't compete with the novelty sound of a boy who sounded prepubescent, singing in falsetto. Falsetto had, of course, always been a part of the doo-wop vocal blend, but it had been a minor part up to this point. Lead vocals would generally be sung in a smooth high tenor, but would very rarely reach to the truly high notes. Lymon, by virtue of his voice not yet having broken, introduced a new timbre into rock and roll lead vocals, and he influenced almost every vocal group that followed. There might have been a Four Seasons or a Jan and Dean or a Beach Boys without Lymon, but I doubt it. There was also a British cover version, by Alma Cogan, a middle-of-the-road singer known as "the girl with the giggle in her voice". [Excerpt: Alma Cogan, "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?"] This sort of thing was common in Britain well into the sixties, as most US labels didn't have distribution in the UK, and so if British people wanted to hear American rock and roll songs, they would often get them in native cover versions. Cogan was a particular source of these, often recording songs that had been R&B hits. We will see a lot more of this in future episodes, as we start to look more at the way rock and roll affected the UK. The Teenagers followed the success of "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" with "I Want You to Be My Girl": [Excerpt, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, "I Want You to Be My Girl"] This one did almost as well, reaching a peak of number thirteen in the pop charts. But the singles after that did less well, although "I'm Not A Juvenile Delinquent" became a big hit in the UK. The record label soon decided that Lymon needed to become a solo star, rather than being just the lead singer of the Teenagers. Quite why they made this decision was difficult to say, as one would not normally deliberately break up a hit act. But presumably the calculation was that they would then have two hit acts -- solo Frankie Lymon, and the Teenagers still recording together. It didn't work out like that. Lymon inadvertently caused another crisis in the ongoing battle of rock and roll versus racism. Alan Freed had a new TV series, The Big Beat, which was a toned-down version of Freed's radio show. By this point, real rock and roll was already in a temporary decline as the major labels fought back, and so Freed's show was generally filled with the kind of pre-packaged major label act, usually named Bobby, that we'll be talking about when we get to the later fifties. For all that Freed had a reputation as a supporter of black music, what he really was was someone with the skill to see a bandwagon and jump on it. But still, some of the black performers were still popular, and so Freed had Lymon on his showr. But his show was aimed at a white audience, and so the studio audience was white, and dancing. And Frankie Lymon started to dance as well. A black boy, dancing with a white girl. This did not go down well at all with the Southern network affiliates, and within a couple of weeks Freed's show had been taken off the TV. And that appearance, the one that destroyed Freed's show, was almost certainly Lymon's very first ever solo performance. One might think that this did not augur well for his future career, and that assessment would be largely correct. Neither Lymon nor the Teenagers would ever have another hit after they split. The last few records credited to Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers were in fact Lymon solo recordings, performed with other backing singers. "Goody Goody" did manage to reach number twenty on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, "Goody Goody"] Everything after that did worse. Lymon's first solo single, "My Girl", failed to chart: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, "My Girl"] He continued making records for another couple of years, but nothing came of any of them, and when his voice broke he stopped sounding much like himself. The last recording he made that came even close to being a hit was a remake of Bobby Day's "Little Bitty Pretty One" from 1960. [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, "Little Bitty Pretty One"] And the Teenagers didn't fare much better. They went through several new lead singers. There was Billy Lobrano, a white kid who according to Jimmy Merchant sounded more like Eddie Fisher than like Lymon: [Excerpt: The Teenagers, "Mama Wanna Rock"] Then there was Freddie Houston, who would go on to be the lead singer in one of the many Ink Spots lineups touring in the sixties, and then they started trying to focus on the other original group members, for example calling themselves "Sherman and the Teenagers" when performing the Leiber and Stoller song "The Draw": [Excerpt: Sherman and the Teenagers, "The Draw"] As you can hear, none of these had the same sound as they'd had with Lymon, and they eventually hit on the idea of getting a woman into the group instead. They got in Sandra Doyle, who would later be Zola Taylor's replacement in the Platters, and struggled on until 1961, when they finally split up. Lymon's life after leaving the Teenagers was one of nothing but tragedy. He married three times, every time bigamously, and his only child died two days after the birth. Lymon would apparently regularly steal from Zola Taylor, who became his second wife, to feed his heroin addiction. He briefly reunited with the Teenagers in 1965, but they had little success. He spent a couple of years in the army, and appeared to have got himself clean, and even got a new record deal. But the night before he was meant to go back into the studio, he fell off the wagon, for what would be the last time. Frankie Lymon died, aged just twenty-five, and a has-been for almost half of his life, of a heroin overdose, in 1968. The other Teenagers would reunite, with Lymon's brother joining them briefly, in the 70s. Sherman Garnes died in 1977, and Joe Negroni in 1978, but Santiago and Merchant continued, off and on, with a lineup of the Teenagers -- a version of the band continues to this day, still featuring Herman Santiago, and Merchant remained with the band until his retirement a few years ago. But their first hit caused legal problems: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?"] "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?" was written by Herman Santiago, with the help of Jimmy Merchant. But neither Santiago or Merchant were credited on the song when it came out. The credited songwriters for the song are Frankie Lymon -- who did have some input into rewriting it in the studio -- and Morris Levy, who had never even heard the song until after it was a massive hit. George Goldner was originally credited as Lymon's co-writer, and of course Goldner never wrote it either, but at least he was in the studio when it was recorded. But when Levy bought out Goldner's holdings in his companies, he also bought out his rights to songs he was credited for, so Levy became the legal co-writer of "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" In 1992 Santiago and Merchant finally won the credit for having written "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?", but in 1996 the ruling was overturned. They'd apparently waited too long to take legal action over having their song stolen, and so the rights reverted to Lymon and Morris Levy -- who had never even met the band when they wrote the song. But, of course, Lymon wasn't alive to get the money. But his widow was. Or rather, his widows, plural, were. In the 1980s, three separate women claimed to be Lymon's widow and thus his legitimate heir. One was his first wife, who he had married in 1964 while she was still married to her first husband. One was Zola Taylor, who Lymon supposedly married bigamously a year after his first marriage, but who couldn't produce any evidence of this, and the third was either his second or third wife, who he married bigamously in 1967 while still married to his first, and possibly his second, wife. That third wife eventually won the various legal battles and is now in charge of the Frankie Lymon legacy. "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?" has gone on to be a standard, recorded by everyone from Joni Mitchell to the Beach Boys to Diana Ross. But Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers stand as a cautionary tale, an example that all too many people were still all too eager to follow.

Episode thirty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and at the terrible afterlife of child stardom. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Space Guitar” by Johnny “Guitar” Watson. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no books on the Teenagers, as far as I know, so as I so often do when talking about vocal groups I relied heavily on Marv Goldberg’s website. Some information also comes from Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. Some background on George Goldner was from Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz. And for more on Morris Levy, see Me, the Mob, and the Music, by Tommy James with Martin Fitzpatrick. This compilation contains every recording by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, together or separately, as well as recordings by Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, a group led by Lymon’s brother. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript The story of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers is, like so many of the stories we’re dealing with in this series, a story of heartbreak and early death, a story of young people of colour having their work become massively successful and making no money off it because of wealthy businessmen stealing their work. But it’s also a story of what happens when you get involved with the Mafia before you hit puberty, and your career peaks at thirteen. The Teenagers only had one really big hit, but it was one of the biggest hits of the fifties, and it was a song that is almost universally known to this day. So today we’re going to talk about “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” The Teenagers started when two black teenagers from New York, Jimmy Merchant and Sherman Garnes, left the vocal group they’d formed, which was named “the Earth Angels” after the Penguins song, and hooked up with two Latino neighbours, Joe Negroni and Herman Santiago. They named themselves the Ermines. Soon after, they were the support act for local vocal group the Cadillacs: [Excerpt, The Cadillacs, “Speedoo”] They were impressed enough by the Cadillacs that in honour of them they changed their name, becoming the Coup de Villes, and after that the Premiers. They used to practice in the hallway of the apartment block where Sherman Garnes lived, and eventually one of the neighbours got sick of hearing them sing the same songs over and over. The neighbour decided to bring out some love letters his girlfriend had written, some of which were in the form of poems, and say to the kids “why don’t you turn some of these into songs?” And so they did just that — they took one of the letters, containing the phrase “why do birds sing so gay?” and Santiago and Merchant worked out a ballad for Santiago to sing containing that phrase. Soon after this, the Premiers met up with a very young kid, Frankie Lymon, who sang and played percussion in a mambo group. I suppose I should pause here to talk briefly about the mambo craze. Rock and roll wasn’t the only musical style that was making inroads in the pop markets in the fifties — and an impartial observer, looking in 1953 or 1954, might easily have expected that the big musical trend that would shape the next few decades would be calypso music, which had become huge in the US for a brief period. But that wasn’t the only music that was challenging rock and roll. There were a whole host of other musics, usually those from Pacific, Latin-American and/or Caribbean cultures, which tend to get lumped together as “exotica” now, and “mambo” was one of those. This was a craze named after a song by the Cuban bandleader Perez Prado, “Mambo Jambo”: [Excerpt: Perez Prado, “Mambo Jambo”] That song was popular enough that soon everyone was jumping on the bandwagon — for example, Bill Haley and the Comets with “Mambo Rock”: [Excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets, “Mambo Rock”] The group that Frankie Lymon was performing with was one of those groups, but he was easily persuaded instead to join the Premiers. He was the young kid who hung around with them when they practiced, not the leader, and not even a major part of the group. Not yet, anyway. But everything changed for the group when Richie Barrett heard them singing on a street corner near him. These days, Barrett is best-known for his 1962 single “Some Other Guy”, which was later covered by the Beatles, among others: [Excerpt: Richie Barrett, “Some Other Guy”] But at the time he was the lead singer of a group called the Valentines: [Excerpt: The Valentines, “Tonight Kathleen”] He was also working for George Goldner at Rama Records as a talent scout and producer, doing the same kind of things that Ike Turner had been doing for Chess and Modern, or that Jesse Stone did for Atlantic — finding the acts, doing the arrangements, doing all the work involved in turning some teenage kid into someone who could become a star. Goldner was someone for whom most people in the music industry seem to have a certain amount of contempt — he was, by most accounts, a fairly weak-willed figure who got himself into great amounts of debt with dodgy people. But one thing they’re all agreed on is that he had a great ear for a hit, because as Jerry Leiber put it he had the taste of a fourteen-year-old girl. George Goldner had actually got into R&B through the mambo craze. When Goldner had started in the music industry, it had been as the owner of a chain of nightclubs which featured Latin music. The clubs became popular enough that he also started Tico Records, a label that put out Latin records, most notably early recordings by Tito Puente. [Excerpt: Tito Puente: “Vibe Mambo”] When the mambo boom hit, a lot of black teenagers started attending Goldner’s clubs, and he became interested in the other music they were listening to. He started first Rama Records, as a label for R&B singles, and then Gee records, named after the most successful record that had been put out on Rama, “Gee”, by the Crows. However, Goldner had a business partner, and his name was Morris Levy, and Levy was *not* someone you wanted involved in your business in any way. In this series we’re going to talk about a lot of horrible people — and in fact we’ve already covered more than a few of them — yet Morris Levy was one of the worst people we’re going to look at. While most of the people we’ve discussed are either terrible people in their personal life (if they were a musician) or a minor con artist who ripped off musicians and kept the money for themselves, Morris Levy was a terrible human being *and* a con artist, someone who used his Mafia connections to ensure that the artists he ripped off would never even think of suing him, because they valued their lives too much. We’ll be looking at at least one rock and roll star, in the 1960s, who died in mysterious circumstances after getting involved with Levy. Levy had been the founder of Birdland, the world-famous jazz club, in the 1940s, but when ASCAP came to him asking for the money they were meant to get for their songwriters from live performances, Levy had immediately seen the possibilities in music publishing. Levy then formed a publishing company, Patricia Music, and a record label, Roulette, and started into the business of properly exploiting young black people, not just having them work in his clubs for a night, but having them create intellectual property he could continue exploiting for the rest of his life. Indeed, Levy was so keen to make money off dubious intellectual property that he actually formed a company with his friend Alan Freed which attempted to trademark the phrase “rock and roll”, on the basis that this way any records that came out labelled as such would have to pay them for the privilege. Thankfully, the term caught on so rapidly that there was no way for them to enforce the trademark, and it became genericised. But this is who Levy was, and how he made his money — at least his more legitimate money. Where he got the rest from is a matter for the true crime podcasts. There are several people who report death threats, or having to give up their careers, or suddenly move thousands of miles away from home, to avoid Levy’s revenge on artists who didn’t do exactly what he said. So when we’re looking at a group of literal teenage kids — and black teenagers at that, with the smallest amount of institutional privilege possible, you can be sure that he was not going to treat them with the respect that they were due. Levy owned fifty percent of Goldner’s record companies, and would soon grow to own all of them, as Goldner accumulated more gambling debts and used his record labels to pay them off. But at the start of their career, the group didn’t yet have to worry about Levy. That would come later. For now, they were dealing with George Goldner. And Goldner was someone who was actually concerned with the music, and who had been producing hits consistently for the last few years. At the time the Premiers signed with him, for example, he had just produced “You Baby You” for the Cleftones. [Excerpt: The Cleftones, “You Baby You”] When Richie Barrett brought the Premiers to Goldner, he was intrigued because two of the members were Latino, and he was such a lover of Latin music. But he quickly latched on to the potential of Frankie Lymon as a star. Lymon was a captivating performer, and when you watch video footage of him now you can’t help but think of Michael Jackson, who followed almost exactly the same early career trajectory a decade later. While the other band members were the normal kind of teenage kids who joined doo-wop groups, and were clearly a little reserved, Lymon just *went for it*, working the crowd like a young James Brown with absolutely no self-consciousness at all. He also had a gorgeous falsetto voice, and knew how to use it. As we’ve heard, many of the doo-wop groups of the fifties weren’t particularly proficient singers, but Lymon did have a real vocal talent. He was clearly a potential star. Frankie Lymon wasn’t even originally meant to be the lead singer on “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” — that distinctive falsetto that makes the record so memorable was a late addition. The song was originally meant to be sung by Herman Santiago, and it was only in the studio that the song was rearranged to instead focus on the band’s youngest — and youngest-sounding — member. [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”] When the record came out, it wasn’t credited to the Premiers, but to “The Teenagers, featuring Frankie Lymon”. Goldner hadn’t liked the group’s name, and decided to focus on their big selling point — their youth, and in particular the youth of their new lead singer. Much of the work to make the record sound that good was done not by the Teenagers or by Goldner, but by the session saxophone player Jimmy Wright, who ended up doing the arrangements on all of the Teenagers’ records, and whose idea it was to start them with Sherman Garnes’ bass intros. Again, as with so many of these records, there was a white cover version that came out almost immediately — this time by the Diamonds, a group of Canadians who copied the formula of their fellow countrymen the Crew Cuts and more or less cornered the market in white remakes of doo-wop hits. [Excerpt: The Diamonds, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”] But in a sign of how the times were changing, the Diamonds’ version of the song only went to number twelve, while the Teenagers’ version went to number six, helped by a massive push from Morris Levy’s good friend Alan Freed. Partly this may have been down to the fact that all the Diamonds were adults, and they simply couldn’t compete with the novelty sound of a boy who sounded prepubescent, singing in falsetto. Falsetto had, of course, always been a part of the doo-wop vocal blend, but it had been a minor part up to this point. Lead vocals would generally be sung in a smooth high tenor, but would very rarely reach to the truly high notes. Lymon, by virtue of his voice not yet having broken, introduced a new timbre into rock and roll lead vocals, and he influenced almost every vocal group that followed. There might have been a Four Seasons or a Jan and Dean or a Beach Boys without Lymon, but I doubt it. There was also a British cover version, by Alma Cogan, a middle-of-the-road singer known as “the girl with the giggle in her voice”. [Excerpt: Alma Cogan, “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”] This sort of thing was common in Britain well into the sixties, as most US labels didn’t have distribution in the UK, and so if British people wanted to hear American rock and roll songs, they would often get them in native cover versions. Cogan was a particular source of these, often recording songs that had been R&B hits. We will see a lot more of this in future episodes, as we start to look more at the way rock and roll affected the UK. The Teenagers followed the success of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” with “I Want You to Be My Girl”: [Excerpt, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “I Want You to Be My Girl”] This one did almost as well, reaching a peak of number thirteen in the pop charts. But the singles after that did less well, although “I’m Not A Juvenile Delinquent” became a big hit in the UK. The record label soon decided that Lymon needed to become a solo star, rather than being just the lead singer of the Teenagers. Quite why they made this decision was difficult to say, as one would not normally deliberately break up a hit act. But presumably the calculation was that they would then have two hit acts — solo Frankie Lymon, and the Teenagers still recording together. It didn’t work out like that. Lymon inadvertently caused another crisis in the ongoing battle of rock and roll versus racism. Alan Freed had a new TV series, The Big Beat, which was a toned-down version of Freed’s radio show. By this point, real rock and roll was already in a temporary decline as the major labels fought back, and so Freed’s show was generally filled with the kind of pre-packaged major label act, usually named Bobby, that we’ll be talking about when we get to the later fifties. For all that Freed had a reputation as a supporter of black music, what he really was was someone with the skill to see a bandwagon and jump on it. But still, some of the black performers were still popular, and so Freed had Lymon on his showr. But his show was aimed at a white audience, and so the studio audience was white, and dancing. And Frankie Lymon started to dance as well. A black boy, dancing with a white girl. This did not go down well at all with the Southern network affiliates, and within a couple of weeks Freed’s show had been taken off the TV. And that appearance, the one that destroyed Freed’s show, was almost certainly Lymon’s very first ever solo performance. One might think that this did not augur well for his future career, and that assessment would be largely correct. Neither Lymon nor the Teenagers would ever have another hit after they split. The last few records credited to Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers were in fact Lymon solo recordings, performed with other backing singers. “Goody Goody” did manage to reach number twenty on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “Goody Goody”] Everything after that did worse. Lymon’s first solo single, “My Girl”, failed to chart: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, “My Girl”] He continued making records for another couple of years, but nothing came of any of them, and when his voice broke he stopped sounding much like himself. The last recording he made that came even close to being a hit was a remake of Bobby Day’s “Little Bitty Pretty One” from 1960. [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, “Little Bitty Pretty One”] And the Teenagers didn’t fare much better. They went through several new lead singers. There was Billy Lobrano, a white kid who according to Jimmy Merchant sounded more like Eddie Fisher than like Lymon: [Excerpt: The Teenagers, “Mama Wanna Rock”] Then there was Freddie Houston, who would go on to be the lead singer in one of the many Ink Spots lineups touring in the sixties, and then they started trying to focus on the other original group members, for example calling themselves “Sherman and the Teenagers” when performing the Leiber and Stoller song “The Draw”: [Excerpt: Sherman and the Teenagers, “The Draw”] As you can hear, none of these had the same sound as they’d had with Lymon, and they eventually hit on the idea of getting a woman into the group instead. They got in Sandra Doyle, who would later be Zola Taylor’s replacement in the Platters, and struggled on until 1961, when they finally split up. Lymon’s life after leaving the Teenagers was one of nothing but tragedy. He married three times, every time bigamously, and his only child died two days after the birth. Lymon would apparently regularly steal from Zola Taylor, who became his second wife, to feed his heroin addiction. He briefly reunited with the Teenagers in 1965, but they had little success. He spent a couple of years in the army, and appeared to have got himself clean, and even got a new record deal. But the night before he was meant to go back into the studio, he fell off the wagon, for what would be the last time. Frankie Lymon died, aged just twenty-five, and a has-been for almost half of his life, of a heroin overdose, in 1968. The other Teenagers would reunite, with Lymon’s brother joining them briefly, in the 70s. Sherman Garnes died in 1977, and Joe Negroni in 1978, but Santiago and Merchant continued, off and on, with a lineup of the Teenagers — a version of the band continues to this day, still featuring Herman Santiago, and Merchant remained with the band until his retirement a few years ago. But their first hit caused legal problems: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”] “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?” was written by Herman Santiago, with the help of Jimmy Merchant. But neither Santiago or Merchant were credited on the song when it came out. The credited songwriters for the song are Frankie Lymon — who did have some input into rewriting it in the studio — and Morris Levy, who had never even heard the song until after it was a massive hit. George Goldner was originally credited as Lymon’s co-writer, and of course Goldner never wrote it either, but at least he was in the studio when it was recorded. But when Levy bought out Goldner’s holdings in his companies, he also bought out his rights to songs he was credited for, so Levy became the legal co-writer of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” In 1992 Santiago and Merchant finally won the credit for having written “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”, but in 1996 the ruling was overturned. They’d apparently waited too long to take legal action over having their song stolen, and so the rights reverted to Lymon and Morris Levy — who had never even met the band when they wrote the song. But, of course, Lymon wasn’t alive to get the money. But his widow was. Or rather, his widows, plural, were. In the 1980s, three separate women claimed to be Lymon’s widow and thus his legitimate heir. One was his first wife, who he had married in 1964 while she was still married to her first husband. One was Zola Taylor, who Lymon supposedly married bigamously a year after his first marriage, but who couldn’t produce any evidence of this, and the third was either his second or third wife, who he married bigamously in 1967 while still married to his first, and possibly his second, wife. That third wife eventually won the various legal battles and is now in charge of the Frankie Lymon legacy. “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?” has gone on to be a standard, recorded by everyone from Joni Mitchell to the Beach Boys to Diana Ross. But Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers stand as a cautionary tale, an example that all too many people were still all too eager to follow.

Host Sama'an Ashrawi shares a bonus mix based on songs from the Khruangbin episode of The Nostalgia Mixtape. Music from Sudan, Morocco, Algeria, Niger, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Iran, India, plus a few dub tracks as well as some American rockabilly, blues, Jamaican soul, and Canadian disco. Listen to the Khruangbin interview on the Nostalgia Mixtape here: https://soundcloud.com/nostalgiatapes/the-khruangbin-episode Check the footnotes here: http://bit.ly/TNMKhruangbin Tracklist: 00:00 -- "Nar" by Alsarah & The Nubatones 02:50 -- "Besaha" by Kareem Isaaq (of The Devil's Anvil) 04:04 -- "Son Moi" by Chaz Bundick (Toro y Moi) Meets The Mattson 2 05:22 -- "Agadez" (live) by Bombino 06:46 -- "Thanks A Lot" by The Sea-ders 08:16 -- "People Everywhere (Still Alive)" by Khruangbin 10:27 -- "Ayetheri A L'afjare" by El-Abranis 11:24 -- "Helelyos" by Zia Atabi 15:21 -- "Zifaf Filfada" by Nama Samith 16:49 -- "Bin Bin" (live on GMTX) by Khruangbin 17:58 -- "Khuda Bhi Aasman Se" by Mohammed Rafi (movie: Dharti) 19:02 -- "Jab Jab Teri Surat Dekhun" - Sapna Mukherjee, Mahesh Gadhvi (movie: Janbaaz) 20:41 -- "Laila O Laila" by Amit Kumar, Kanchan (movie: Qurbani) 21:51 -- "Laila O Laila" - Shah Rukh Khan, Sunny Leone, Pawni Pandey, Ram Sampath (movie: Raees) 22:29 -- "Jimmy" by M.I.A. 23:58 -- "Jimmy Jimmy Ajaa Ajaa" by Parvati Khan (movie: Disco Dancer) 24:54 -- "Gud Naal Ishq Mitha" by Malaika Arora Khan, Jas Arora, Bally Sagoo & Malkit Singh 25:58 -- "Gonna Get Over You" by France Joli 29:01 -- "Let Love Flow On" by Sonya Spence 31:27 -- "Khalas" by Ziad Rahbani, Monica Asly 33:41 -- "Ayonha" by Hamid El Shaeri 35:50 -- "U.F.O." by Jim Sullivan 37:21 -- "From The Moon" by The News (written by Elias Rahbani) 38:33 -- "Shakin' All Over" by The Guess Who 39:27 -- "Baby Please Don't Go" by Them 40:29 -- "Rock Around The Clock" by Bill Haley & His Comets 41:50 -- "Baby Please Don't Go" (reprise) by Them 42:36 -- "Jailhouse Rock" by Queen (live at the Summit, Houston, TX. 1977.) 46:38 -- "No Particular Place To Go" by Chuck Berry 47:38 -- "Hi Heel Sneakers" by Tommy Tucker 49:04 -- "Little Bitty Pretty One" by Thurston Harris 50:33 -- "Rip It Up" by Little Richard 51:38 -- "Whatchya Say (I Don't Know)" by Albert Collins 52:39 -- "There's Been Some Lonely, Lonely Nights" by Johnny "Guitar" Watson 53:54 -- "At The Hop" by Danny & The Juniors 55:12 -- "Touch Me" by Tia Carrere (from Wayne's World) 56:46 -- "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" by Queen 58:49 -- "Sid Redad" by Fadoul 1:00:30 -- "I Got You" by Simon C. Edwards & His Soul Set 1:03:06 -- "Undecidedly" by The Sea-Ders 1:04:31 -- "Dance Maria" by Khruangbin (Elias Rahbani cover) 1:05:41 -- "Ramallah" by Anatolia 1:06:37 -- "Ya Kullo Ya Balash" by Stormtrap 1:08:08 -- "Gole Yakh" by Kourosh Yaghmaei 1:10:29 -- "Moon" by Deradoorian 1:11:46 -- "Ma Be Ham Nemiresim" by Khruangbin (Googoosh cover) 1:13:17 -- "Mosem-e Gol" by Parva 1:16:28 -- "Mandela Dub" by Peter Youthman 1:19:47 -- "People Everywhere (Still Alive)" by Khruangbin (Vuelo Dub)

Camille Sanzone plays DJ this episode for an entire show featuring the song stylings of Johnny Sanzone, Camille's very talented adult nephew. He sings 3 "a cappella" numbers, (without instrumental accompaniment): Little Bitty Pretty One, among them, & a dozen more songs from "Dream Lover," "Innocent Man," "Unchained Melody," "Your Song," & "What's Forever For," to "If Tomorrow Never Comes." It will take you back to another time. Sit back, select this episode & enjoy some damned good music!This show is broadcast live on Wednesday's at 1PM ET on W4WN Radio – The Women 4 Women Network (www.w4wn.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (http://www.talk4radio.com/) on the Talk 4 Media Network (http://www.talk4media.com/).

Taking a trip back to L.A. in the 50s for some West coast doo-wop. You'll hear the original Little Bitty Pretty One by Bobby Day, the duo of Bob (Bobby Day) and Earl before their fame with the Harlem Shuffle and some obscure R n B material not heard on stations since the days of old.

Discussion Topics: Eagle Creek Fire, The Best Era to Live In (50's, 60's, Prehistoric, Ancient Rome, etc.), Good Timin' Buds Investigate: Elisa Lam, "Things That Should Be Stupid, But Aren't...", Trip Report: Bored in Boardman, and much more! Hosts: Austin and Kevin Songs Featured: "Little Bitty Pretty One" - Thurston Harris, "Sunshine of Your Love" - Cream, "Go for a Soda" - Kim Mitchell, "Wild Mountain Honey" and "Jet Airliner" - Steve Miller Band NOTE: The GTB's recommend safe and responsible drug practice. Psychedelics primarily, folks. We do not officially endorse ANY drug, and you are personally responsible for what happens if you take any. Cheers.

Camille Sanzone interviews Johnny Sanzone. Nepotism aside, LOL, the guy is truly talented. A singer-songwriter, he does voice impressions, plays guitar, harmonica, & keyboard. You’ll hear him sing oldies: “Little Bitty Pretty One,” & “Daddy’s Home,” a cappella; his own “BeBop Boogie,” a fun parody he wrote: “Ain’t No Housework When She’s Gone,” & two Billy Joel songs that might make Billy himself just a wee bit jealous. Email johnnysanzone66@gmail.com to get his CD once it’s available.This show is broadcast live on W4WN Radio – The Women 4 Women Network (www.w4wn.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (http://www.talk4radio.com/) on the Talk 4 Media Network (http://www.talk4media.com/)

Host Camille Sanzone interviews Johnny Sanzone, her adult nephew. You’re probably thinking she’s biased, but the guy is truly and inordinately talented. A singer- songwriter, he also does voice impressions, plays guitar, harmonica, keyboard & drums. Frankly, the only thing he does not do instrumentally is BLOW HIS OWN HORN! So, Camille decided to do that for him. Johnny sings 2 oldies a cappella: “Little Bitty Pretty One,” & “Daddy’s Home,” doing all the harmonies himself on different tracks. He sings one of his original songs, “Bee Bop Boogie,” a fun parody he wrote: “Ain’t No Housework When She’s Gone,” as well as 2 Billy Joel songs that might make Billy himself just a wee bit jealous. If you heard Camille’s tribute show to her mother, you fell in love with her Siciliana Mama. Now you’re gonna love her nephew too. It’s a fun, light-hearted hour of laughter & music. Email Johnny at johnnysanzone66@gmail.com to be notified when his CD is ready.This show is broadcast live on W4WN Radio – The Women 4 Women Network (www.w4wn.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (http://www.talk4radio.com/) on the Talk 4 Media Network (http://www.talk4media.com/).

Episode 31Michael Jackson's MemorialMJ INTRO CLIP SONGSThis episode, I'll mention the memorial to Michael Jackson that happened early this morning New Zealand time. I'll play plenty of emotional songs, interspersed with clips from the memorial service. The intro clips were, in order, I Want You Back, I'll Be There,Aint No Sunshine,Rockin Robin,Little Bitty Pretty One,Who's Lovin' You,My GirlThis is part of an unreleased song, For All Time, it was included on Thriller 25.Today there was a public memorial, it was held in the Staples Centre in Los Angeles, 17 and a half thousand tickets were given out to lucky Michael Jackson fans to attend. A private Jackson family service was held beforehand, and then Michaels closed casket was unexpectedly taken to the Memorial, it was just in front of the stage for the event. Many famous celebrities took to the stage and talked about how much Michael Jackson meant to them, some performed his songs. Notable people included Mariah Carey, Magic Johnson, Koby Bryant, Usher, Al Sharpton, Brooke Shields, Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie, Smokey Robinson and John Mayer.This is from today Memorial, Stevie Wonder talks about Michael, and mentions a song he wrote for him that was included in the Off The Wall album, I play a clip from the song.Heres an early demo clip of Michael with his brothers, working on a Jacksons song together, notice the fighting at the end, in lots of the demo clips, recorded at the Jackson Family studio, you can hear the siblings argue. See how long it takes you to recognise the song.Ok, so thats not really fighting, but on some of the demo tracks, you can hear the jacksons yell at each other, normally Michael will be saying to turn something up or down, and one of the brothers will say something like "do it yourself", and Janet will take Michaels side. Often when musicians die, fans go through their music and find odd back masked messages, or hints about the singers death. When I heard about Michael going into Cardiac Arrest, and that he had been injected with a drug shortly before, I thought of his song Morphine, from the album Blood On The Dancefloor. They lyrics are all about Michael and his drug addictions to painkillers, Elton John was thanked as helping him off the drugs.The lyrics to Morphine are kind of scary to listen to now, He got flat babyKick in the back babyA heart attack babyOh God he's taking demerolI'll play some of the song Its kind of odd, he named a drug he was addicted to, and mentions a heart attack a decade or so before he pretty much dies from exactly that.This is one of my favourite sad songs, Someone In The Dark, it was included in the E.T soundtrack and storybook Michael recorded. Michael Jackson said of all the awards he had gotten, he was most proud of the 1984 Best Recording for Children grammy for this song.Smokey Robinson, a famous Motown artist who wrote songs for other singers, had some fond memories of Michael, he appeared at the Memorial.This next song is a Michael Jackson Tribute song, called Better On The Other Side, with Puff Daddy, The Game, Chris Brown, Boys II Men and others. It came out the day Michael died. Al Sharpton had very nice things to say about Michael today at the memorial, he got lots of applause for his message to Michaels kids, its a great quote.A song that came up at the public service was We Are The World.Almost through this episode now, I'm trying to keep this episode relatively short. Michaels brother Marlon spoke at the service today, Marlon had a stillborn identical twin brother, Brandon Jackson, who gets mentioned by Marlon at the memorial to Michael. Very touching.I'd like to play my second last song, before a clip from one of Michaels children, its very rare for one of his three children to be seen in public, he hid them away from the paparazzi.Michaels daughter, Paris Jackson was onstage with the other celebrities near the end of the public service, with Janet Jackson and other family members beside her, when she spoke, it reminded me of Steve Irwins daughter talking at her fathers public service. It breaks my heart to hear Paris Jackson talk, for the first time in public. That was janet giving her advice at the start.So far, Michael hasnt been buried, theres talk the family would like to have him buried at Neverland Ranch, possibly near the train station he used everyday to go from his house to the small zoo he had near the back of his property. Its an interesting idea, having Neverland Zoo as a Graceland type tourist attraction, I'd certainly like to visit sometime. Whatever happens to Michaels body from now on, his public memorial was very successful. I'd like to thank you very much for joining me, with episode 31 of Jay Wont dart's podcast. My outro is one last sad song. If you want to contact me, even just to say you listened, send an email to jaywontdart@gmail.com, j a y w o n t d a r t @ gmail.com, I'd appreciate it.Even though Michael Jackson has died, I know his music will live on in me personally, and his millions of other fans worldwide. Im trying not to be sad, and instead be thankful that I was lucky enough to be alive at the same time he was, and to have his music to listen to for decades to come.Have a super happy day, bye.