Podcast appearances and mentions of richard carlin

Music is often the most fondly remembered part of the 20th century, but what we don't always remember is the surreptitious dealings that were going on behind the scenes... The truth is, the mob were a huge part of some of the era's biggest stars, and the music we know and love might be known and loved thanks to corruption. To explain the eras biggest radio controversy and the mob figures behind it all, we're chatting to Richard Carlin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is made possible in part by the generous support of Broadway Nation "Backstage Pass Club" Producer Level Member, Tracy Wellans.  For information on how to join the "Backstage Pass Club" please go the show notes for this episode at www.broadway-nation.com In this episode I continue my Centennial celebration of the groundbreaking musical Shuffle Along! with the second half of my conversation with Richard Carlin & Ken Bloom who are the co-authors of Eubie Blake: Rags, Rhythm and Race – the very first full biography of Shuffle Along's legendary composer. If you missed the first part of this conversation you may want to listen to episode 49 before continuing with this one. As we ended the previous episode, Sissle & Blake and Miller & Lyles – the two black Vaudeville teams that came together to create Shuffle Along – were finally about to open their new musical on Broadway following a very challenging pre-Broadway out of town tryout. The only New York theater they could get was really just a concert hall with a very shallow stage, and located on 63rd street at the extreme northern edge of the theater district – over a mile from 42nd Street. The small stage allowed for only minimal scenery, and the only costumes they could afford were sweat stained, hand me downs from previous Broadway shows. As a result, Shuffle Along, had no visibility or profile, or expectation from anyone that it would run more than a week. However, even with all of this stacked against it, Shuffle Along immediately became a giant hit – true over-night sensation!  To celebrate Broadway Nation's 50th episode I am very pleased to announce the inauguration of the Broadway Nation “Backstage Pass Club”  If you love this podcast and want to delve even deeper into the world of Broadway musicals, I invite you to become a member of the "Broadway Nation Backstage Pass Club". For as little as $7.00 a month members will receive exclusive access to never-before-heard, unedited versions of every Season Two interview, and many from Season One as well! I often record at least twice as much conversation as ends up in the public episodes, and this includes additional in-depth conversations with my frequent co-host Albert Evans. You will also have the opportunity to ask us any questions about Broadway musicals that you would like to hear answered and propose topics you would like me to cover -- all of which I will incorporate into a special series of “Ask Me Anything About Broadway” episodes. Last, but certainly not least, you will receive special “on-air” shout-outs and acknowledgement of your vital support of this podcast. And if you are feeling especially enthusiastic about Broadway Nation there are Patron and Producer levels available as well. To join please visit our website at www. Broadway-Nation.com. and just click the link included in the show notes for this episode. THANK YOU "Backstage Pass Club" Founding Members: Roger Klorese, Neil Hoyt, Chris Moad, and Daniel Cox And Producer Level members: Bob Braun, Steve & Paula Reynolds, Tracy Wellens, Gary Fuller & Randy Everett.   Thank you all so much, and welcome to the club! Special thanks to Pauls Macs for his help in editing this episode, to KVSH 101.9 the Voice of Vashon, WA, and to the entire team at the Broadway Podcast Network.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This year marks the 100th Anniversary of Shuffle Along!, the groundbreaking musical that kicked off an entire decade of vibrant black musical theatre on Broadway which included more than a dozen shows that were created by black songwriters, black bookwriters, black producers, black directors and choreographers -- and these shows brought hundreds of black actors, singers, dancers, and musicians to Broadway. This landmark is being celebrated with the release of two wonderful new books. Earlier this season in Episodes 37 & 38, I had the great pleasure of chatting with author Cassen Gains about his book: Footnotes: The Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of the Great White Way. Today my guests are the co-authors of the first full biography of Shuffle Along's composer: Eubie Blake: Rags, Rhythm and Race. Richard Carlin is the Grammy Award-winning author of numerous books on popular music, including Country Music, The Big Book of Country, and Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways. Ken Bloom is the Grammy Award-winning author of Show and Tell: The New Book of Broadway Anecdotes, Broadway Musicals: The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time, and Broadway: An Encyclopedia. He is the co-founder of Harbinger Records, has been a Broadway correspondent for NPR and the CBC, and has directed and produced shows at Town Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, among other venues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This year marks the 100th Anniversary of Shuffle Along! The groundbreaking musical that kicked off a decade of vibrant black musical theatre on Broadway which included more than a dozen shows created by black songwriters, black bookwriters, black producers, black directors and choreographers -- and these shows brought hundreds of black actors, singers, dancers, and musicians to Broadway. This landmark event is being celebrated with the release of two wonderful new books – including the first full biography of Shuffle Along's composer titled -- Eubie Blake: Rags, Rhythm and Race by Richard Carlin & Ken Bloom And Footnotes: The Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of the Great White Way by Caseen Gaines. I have had the great pleasure of interviewing the authors of both of these books and you have the opportunity to meet all three of them in a series of upcoming episodes.  This week it is my honor to introduce you to Caseen Gaines whose extraordinary book, Footnotes, tells the story of how four young black artists -- Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles overcame poverty, racism, violence and the legacy of slavery to produce a runaway Broadway hit that ushered in both the Harlem Renascence and the “Jazz Age” on Broadway. If you pay close attention to Broadway, as I know many of my listeners do, you will remember the that in 2016, writer and director George C. Wolfe created a star-studded Broadway musical which he tittled “Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed”. As that title suggests, this was not a revival or revisal of the of the original show but instead it attempted to tell the behind-the-scenes story of the making of Shuffle Along. You will also remember that it closed rather abrubtly and unexpectedly less than 3 months after it opened. There was, however, at least one positive outcome from the early demise of that show -- and that's where my conversation with Caseen begins.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eubie Blake was a most forgiving man who functioned amid horrible racism that showed its ugly face everywhere he turned. But, genius as he was and devoted to the music, he plugged right on with full knowledge that he was a professional. Eubie Blake, son of former slaves, was born in 1887 and by the time he was about...

Today on PreserveCast, we’re talking with Richard Carlin and Ken Bloom, the co-authors of Eubie Blake: Rags, Rhythm and Race, a new biography of one of the key composers of 20th century American popular song and jazz. A gifted musician, Blake rose from performing in dance halls and bordellos of his native Baltimore to the heights of Broadway. As successful as his career and music were, racism and bad luck hampered Blake's career. Remarkably, the third act of Blake's life found him heralded in his 90s at major jazz festivals, in Broadway shows, and on television and recordings. Now, let’s get jazzy on this week’s PreserveCast!

Episode 8   This episode: Synthetic Environments   Recordings of contemplative imaginary spaces.   Playlist The Rainy Season, (1952), excerpt. Edited by Moses Asch. From the album Sounds of a Tropical Rain Forest in America(Folkways Records, US). Edited field recordings. Im Westen Nicht Neues Side A (2013). By Ian Anüll / Luigi Archetti / Lux Lindner (Ultimate Records, Switzerland). Excerpt. Edited field recordings, crickets. Im Westen Nicht Neues Side B (2013). By Ian Anüll / Luigi Archetti / Lux Lindner (Ultimate Records, Switzerland). Excerpt. Studio recording, electronic. The Sea (1975) by Brad Miller. From the album Nature's Mystic Moods: The Sounds of the Storm and the Sea (Bainbridge Records, US). Excerpt. Edited field recordings. Fish Wrap (1989) by Bernie Krause. From the EP Jungle Shoes (Ryko Analogue, US). Edited field recordings of animals and their environment. World Rhythms (1975) by Annea Lockwood. From the album New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media (1750 Arch Records, US). Edited field recordings and gong. Tintinnabulation (contemplative sound) (1970) by Syntonic Research, From the album Environments 2 (Atlantic Records, US). Computer synthesized sound played at 45 RPM. Sonic Landscapes No. 3 (1977 revision) by Barry Truax. From the album Sonic Landscapes: Electronic and Computer Music(Melbourne Records, Canada). Excerpt. “A spatial environment for four computer synthesized soundtracks.” Back Porch (2020) by Christina Vantzou. From the album Multi Natural (Edições CN, Belgium). Ambient and electronic music with instrumentalists.   The Archive Mix, in which I play two additional tracks at the same time to see what happens, included the following: Appalachian Grove I (1974) by Laurie Spiegel. From the album New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media (1750 Arch Records, US). Computer synthesized sound. Jungle Shoes (original edit) (1989) by Bernie Krause. From the EP Jungle Shoes (Ryko Analogue, US). Edited field recordings of animals and their environment.   Read my book: Electronic and Experimental Music (sixth edition), by Thom Holmes (2020).   Also of interest: Richard Carlin, Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways (2008).

Today is a new kind of episode on Backstage Babble-a book launch! I sit down with respected scholars Ken Bloom and Richard Carlin to talk about their brilliant new biography, Eubie Blake: Rags, Rhythm and Race. They talk about Sissle's many affairs, what made him the "living, breathing symbol of ragtime's vitality," the recent revival of Shuffle Along, and more. To buy the book, click here. https://www.amazon.com/Eubie-Blake-Rags-Rhythm-Race/dp/0190635932/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=eubie+blake&qid=1598109524&sr=8-2.

On the 6th episode of Backstage Babble, I am joined by one of my theatrical idols, Evan Pappas. Evan starred on Broadway in My Favorite Year, Parade, Putting it Together,  and A Chorus Line. His national tour credits have included Dreamgirls, Durante, and On Golden Pond with Tom Bosley and Michael Learned. Off-Broadway he starred in I Can Get it For You Wholesale and the world premiere of the new Strouse and Adams musical Marty. Now he is a noted director whose credits include LIberty, a letter to Harvey Milk and mire. Currently, he is the artistic director of the Argyle Theatre. Make sure to tune back in tomorrow for Ken Bloom and Richard Carlin!

Episode eighty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Shout” by the Isley Brothers, and the beginnings of a career that would lead to six decades of hit singles. 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 “Tell Laura I Love Her” by Ray Peterson. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—-  Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   Amazingly, there are no books on the Isley Brothers, unless you count a seventy-two page self-published pamphlet by Rudolph Isley’s daughter, so I’ve had to piece this together from literally dozens of different sources. The ones I relied on most were this section of a very long article on Richie Barrett, this interview with Ronald Isley, and Icons of R&B and Soul by Bob Gulla.  The information on Hugo and Luigi comes mostly from two books — Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick, and  Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy by Richard Carlin. There are many compilations of the public-domain recordings of the Isleys. This one seems the most complete. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to take one of our rare looks — at this point in the story anyway — at an act that is still touring today. Indeed, when I started writing this script back in February, I started by saying that I would soon be seeing them live in concert, as I have a ticket for an Isley Brothers show in a couple of months. Of course, events have overtaken that, and it’s extremely unlikely that anyone will be going to any shows then, but it shows a fundamental difference between the Isley Brothers and most of the other acts we’ve looked at, as even those who are still active now mostly concentrate on performing locally rather than doing international tours playing major venues. Of course, the version of the Isley Brothers touring today isn’t quite the same as the group from the 1950s, but Ronald Isley, the group’s lead singer, remains in the group — and, indeed, has remained artistically relevant, with collaborations with several prominent hip-hop artists. The Isleys had top forty hits in the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and two thousands, and as recently as 2006 they had an album go to number one on the R&B charts. But today, we’re going to look back at the group’s very first hit, from 1959. [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Shout”] The Isley Brothers were destined to be a vocal group even before they were born, indeed even before their parents were married. When O’Kelly Isley senior was discussing his marriage proposal with his future in-laws, he told his father-in-law-to-be that he intended to have four sons, and that they were going to be the next Mills Brothers. Isley Sr had been a vaudeville performer himself, and as with so many family groups the Isleys seem to have gone into the music business more to please their parents than because they wanted to do it themselves. As it turned out, O’Kelly and Sallye Isley had six children, all boys, and the eldest four of them did indeed form a vocal group. Like many black vocal groups in the early fifties, they were a gospel group, and O’Kelly Jr, Rudolph, Ronald, and Vernon Isley started performing around the churches in Cincinnati as teenagers, having been trained by their parents. They appeared on Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, the popular TV talent show which launched the careers of many entertainers, and won — their prize was a jewelled watch, which the boys would take turns wearing. But then tragedy struck. Vernon, the youngest of the four singing Isleys, and the one who was generally considered to be far and away the most talented singer in the group, was hit by a car and killed while he was riding his bike, aged only thirteen. The boys were, as one would imagine, devastated by the death of their little brother, and they also thought that that should be the end of their singing career, as Vernon had been their lead singer. It would be two years before they would perform live again. By all accounts, their parents put pressure on them during that time, telling them that it would be the only way to pay respect to Vernon. Eventually a compromise was reached between parents and brothers — Ron agreed that he would attempt to sing lead, if in turn the group could stop singing gospel music and start singing doo-wop songs, like the brothers’ favourite act Billy Ward and the Dominoes. We’ve talked before about how Billy Ward & The Dominoes were a huge influence on the music that became soul, with hit records like “Have Mercy Baby”: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “Have Mercy Baby”] Both Ward’s original lead singer Clyde McPhatter and McPhatter’s later replacement Jackie Wilson sang in a style that owed a lot to the church music that the young Isleys had also been performing, and so it was natural for them to make the change to singing in the style of the Dominoes. As soon as Ronald Isley started singing lead, people started making comparisons both to McPhatter and to Wilson. Indeed, Ronald has talked about McPhatter as being something of a mentor figure for the brothers, teaching them how to sing, although it’s never been clear exactly at what point in their career they got to know McPhatter. But their real mentor was a much less well-known singer, Beulah Bryant. The three eldest Isley brothers, O’Kelly, Rudolph, and Ronald, met Bryant on the bus to New York, where they were travelling to try and seek their fortunes. Bryant was one of the many professional blues shouters who never became hugely well known, but who managed to have a moderately successful career from the fifties through to the eighties, mostly in live performances, though she did make a handful of very listenable records: [Excerpt: Beulah Bryant, “What Am I Gonna Do?”] When they got to New York, while they had paid in advance for somewhere to stay, they were robbed on their second day in the city and had no money at all. But Bryant had contacts in the music industry, and started making phone calls for her young proteges, trying to get them bookings. At first she was unsuccessful, and the group just hung around the Harlem Apollo and occasionally performed at their amateur nights. Eventually, though, Bryant got Nat Nazzaro to listen to them over the phone. Nazzaro was known as “the monster agent” — he was one of the most important booking agents in New York, but he wasn’t exactly fair to his young clients. He would book a three-person act, but on the contracts the act would consist of four people — Nazzaro would be the fourth person, and he would get an equal share of the performance money, as well as getting his normal booking agent’s share. Nazzaro listened to the Isleys over the phone, and then he insisted they come and see him in person, because he was convinced that they had been playing a record down the phone rather than singing to him live. When he found out they really did sound like that, Nazzaro started getting them the kind of bookings they could only dream of — they went from having no money at all to playing on Broadway for $750 a week, and then playing the Apollo for $950 a week, at least according to O’Kelly Isley Jr’s later recollection. This was an astonishing sum of money to a bunch of teenagers in the late 1950s. But they still hadn’t made a record, and their sets were based on cover versions of songs by other people, things like “Rock and Roll Waltz” by Kay Starr: [Excerpt: Kay Starr, “Rock and Roll Waltz”] It was hardly the kind of material they would later become famous for. And nor was their first record. They had signed to a label called Teenage Records, a tiny label owned by two former musicians, Bill “Bass” Gordon and Ben Smith. As you might imagine, there were a lot of musicians named Ben Smith and it’s quite difficult to sort out which was which — even Marv Goldberg, who normally knows these things, seems confused about which Ben Smith this was, describing him as a singer on one page and a sax player on another page. As Ben Smith the sax player seems to have played on some records for Teenage, it was probably him, in which case this Ben Smith probably also played alto sax for Lucky Millinder’s band and wrote the hit “I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem” for Glenn Miller: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, “I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem”] It’s more certain exactly who Bill “Bass” Gordon was — he was the leader of Bill “Bass” Gordon and the Colonials, who had recorded the doo-wop track “Two Loves Have I”: [Excerpt: Bill “Bass” Gordon and the Colonials, “Two Loves Have I”] Smith and Gordon signed the Isley Brothers to Teenage Records, and in June 1957 the first Isley Brothers single, “Angels Cried”, came out: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Angels Cried”] Unfortunately, the single didn’t have any real success, and the group decided that they wanted to record for a better label. According to O’Kelly Isley they got some resistance from Teenage Records, who claimed to have them under contract — but the Isley Brothers knew better. They had signed a contract, certainly, but then the contract had just been left on a desk after they’d signed it, rather than being filed, and they’d swiped it from the desk when no-one was looking. Teenage didn’t have a copy of the contract, so had no proof that they had ever signed the Isley Brothers, and the brothers were free to move on to another label. They chose to sign to Gone Records, one of the family of labels that was owned and run by George Goldner. Goldner assigned Richie Barrett, his talent scout, producer, and arranger, to look after the Isleys, as he had previously done with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, as well as his own group the Valentines: [The Valentines, “The Woo Woo Train”] By this point, Barrett had established an almost production-line method of making records. He would block-book a studio and some backing musicians for up to twenty-four hours, get as many as ten different vocal groups into the studio, and record dozens of tracks in a row, usually songs written by either group members or by Barrett. The Isleys’ first record with Barrett, “Don’t Be Jealous”, was a fairly standard doo-wop ballad, written by Ron Isley: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Don’t Be Jealous”] There’s some suggestion that Barrett is also singing on that recording with the group — it certainly sounds like there are four voices on there, not just three. Either way, the song doesn’t show much of the style that the Isley Brothers would later make their own. Much more like their later recordings was the B-side, another Ronald Isley song, which could have been a classic in the Coasters’ mould had it not been for the lyrics, which were an attempt at a hip rewriting of “Old McDonald”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Rockin’ McDonald”] They were nearly there, but not quite. The next single, “I Wanna Know”, came closer — you can hear they were clearly trying to incorporate elements of other people’s successful records — Ronald Isley’s vocal owes a lot to Little Richard, while the piano playing has the same piano “ripping” that Jerry Lee Lewis had made his own. But you can also hear the style that would make them famous coming to the fore. But they were not selling records, and Richie Barrett was stretched very thin. A few more singles were released on Gone (often pairing a previously-released track with a new B-side) but nothing was successful enough to justify them staying on with Goldner’s label. But just as they’d moved from a micro-indie label to a large indie without having had any success, now they were going to move from a large indie to a major label, still not having had a hit. They took one of their records to Hugo and Luigi at RCA records, and the duo signed them up. Hugo and Luigi were strange, strange, figures in popular music in the 1950s. They were two cousins, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore, who were always known by their first names, and had started out making children’s records before being hired by Mercury Records, where they would produce, among other things, the cover versions by Georgia Gibbs of black records that we’ve talked about previously, and which were both ethically and musically appalling: [Excerpt: Georgia Gibbs, “Dance With Me Henry”] After a couple of years of consistently producing hits, they got tempted away from Mercury by Morris Levy, who was setting up a new label, Roulette, with George Goldner and Alan Freed. Goldner and Freed quickly dropped out of the label, but Hugo and Luigi ended up having a fifty percent stake in the new label. While they were there, they showed they didn’t really get rock and roll music at all — they produced follow-up singles by a lot of acts who’d had hits before they started working with Hugo and Luigi, but stopped as soon as the duo started producing them, like Frankie Lymon: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, “Goodie Goodie”] But they still managed to produce a string of hits like “Honeycomb” by Jimmie Rodgers (who is not either the blues singer or the country singer of the same name), which went to number one: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rogers, “Honeycomb”] And they also recorded their own tracks for Roulette, like the instrumental Cha-Hua-Hua: [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, “Cha-Hua-Hua”] After a year or so with Roulette, they were in turn poached by RCA — Morris Levy let them go so long as they gave up their shares in Roulette for far less than they were worth. At RCA they continued their own recording career, with records like “Just Come Home”: [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, “Just Come Home”] They also produced several albums for Perry Como. So you would think that they would be precisely the wrong producers for the Isley Brothers. And the first record they made with the trio would tend to suggest that there was at least some creative difference there. “I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door” was written by Aaron Schroeder and Sid Wayne, two people who are best known for writing some of the less interesting songs for Elvis’ films, and has a generic, lightweight, backing track — apart from an interestingly meaty guitar part. The vocals have some power to them, and the record is pleasant, and in some ways even ground-breaking — it doesn’t sound like a late fifties record as much as it does an early sixties one, and one could imagine, say, Gerry and the Pacemakers making a substantially identical record. But it falls between the stools of R&B and pop, and doesn’t quite convince as either: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door”] That combination of a poppy background and soulful vocals would soon bear a lot of fruit for another artist Hugo and Luigi were going to start working with, but it didn’t quite work for the Isleys yet. But their second single for RCA was far more successful. At this point the Isleys were a more successful live act than recording act, and they would mostly perform songs by other people, and one song they performed regularly was “Lonely Teardrops”, the song that Berry and Gwen Gordy and Roquel Davis had written for Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “Lonely Teardrops”] The group would perform that at the end of their shows, and they started to extend it, with Ron Isley improvising as the band vamped behind him, starting with the line “say you will” from Wilson’s song. He’d start doing a call and response with his brothers, singing a line and getting them to sing the response “Shout”. These improvised, extended, endings to the song got longer and longer, and got the crowds more and more excited, and they started incorporating elements from Ray Charles records, too, especially “What’d I Say” and “I Got a Woman”. When they got back to New York at the end of the tour, they told Hugo and Luigi how well these performances, which they still thought of as just long performances of “Lonely Teardrops”, had gone. The producers suggested that if they went down that well, what they should do is cut out the part that was still “Lonely Teardrops” and just perform the extended tag. As it turned out, they kept in a little of “Lonely Teardrops” — the “Say you will, say you will” line — and the resulting song, like Ray Charles’ similar call-and-response based “What’d I Say”, was split over two sides of a single, as “Shout (Parts One and Two)”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Shout (Parts One and Two)”] That was nothing like anything that Hugo and Luigi had ever produced before, and it became the Isley Brothers’ first chart hit, reaching number forty-seven. More importantly for them, the song was credited to the three brothers, so they made money from the cover versions of the song that charted much higher. In the USA, Joey Dee and the Starliters made number six in 1962 with their version: [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, “Shout”] In the UK, Lulu and the Luvvers made number seven in 1964: [Excerpt: Lulu and the Luvvers, “Shout”] And in Australia, Johnny O’Keefe released his version only a month after the Isleys released theirs, and reached number two: [Excerpt: Johnny O’Keefe, “Shout”] Despite all these cover versions, the Isleys’ version remains the definitive one, and itself ended up selling over a million copies, though it never broke into the top forty. It was certainly successful enough that it made sense to record an album. Unfortunately, for the album, also titled Shout!, the old Hugo and Luigi style came out, and apart from one new Isleys original, “Respectable”, which became their next single, the rest of the album was made up of old standards, rearranged in the “Shout!” style. Sometimes, this almost worked, as on “Ring-A-Ling A-Ling (Let The Wedding Bells Ring)”, whose words are close enough to Little Richard-style gibberish that Ronald Isley could scream them effectively. But when the Isleys take on Irving Berlin’s “How Deep is the Ocean” or “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”, neither the song nor the group are improved by the combination. They released several more singles on RCA, but none of them repeated the success of “Shout!”. At this point they moved across to Atlantic, where they started working with Leiber and Stoller. Leiber and Stoller kept them recording old standards as B-sides, but for the A-sides they went back to gospel-infused soul party songs, like the Leiber and Stoller song “Teach Me How To Shimmy” and the Isleys’ own “Standing On The Dance Floor”, a rewrite of an old gospel song called “Standing at the Judgment”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Standing on the Dance Floor”] But none of these songs scraped even the bottom of the charts, and the brothers ended up leaving Atlantic after a year, and signing with a tiny label, Scepter. After having moved from a tiny indie label to a large indie to a major label, they had now moved back down from their major label to a large indie to a tiny indie. They were still a great live act, but they appeared to be a one-hit wonder. But all that was about to change, when they recorded a cover version of a flop single inspired by their one hit, combined with a dance craze. The Isley Brothers were about to make one of the most important records of the 1960s, but “Twist and Shout” is a story for another time.  

Episode eighty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Shout” by the Isley Brothers, and the beginnings of a career that would lead to six decades of hit singles. 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 “Tell Laura I Love Her” by Ray Peterson. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—-  Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   Amazingly, there are no books on the Isley Brothers, unless you count a seventy-two page self-published pamphlet by Rudolph Isley’s daughter, so I’ve had to piece this together from literally dozens of different sources. The ones I relied on most were this section of a very long article on Richie Barrett, this interview with Ronald Isley, and Icons of R&B and Soul by Bob Gulla.  The information on Hugo and Luigi comes mostly from two books — Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick, and  Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy by Richard Carlin. There are many compilations of the public-domain recordings of the Isleys. This one seems the most complete. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to take one of our rare looks — at this point in the story anyway — at an act that is still touring today. Indeed, when I started writing this script back in February, I started by saying that I would soon be seeing them live in concert, as I have a ticket for an Isley Brothers show in a couple of months. Of course, events have overtaken that, and it’s extremely unlikely that anyone will be going to any shows then, but it shows a fundamental difference between the Isley Brothers and most of the other acts we’ve looked at, as even those who are still active now mostly concentrate on performing locally rather than doing international tours playing major venues. Of course, the version of the Isley Brothers touring today isn’t quite the same as the group from the 1950s, but Ronald Isley, the group’s lead singer, remains in the group — and, indeed, has remained artistically relevant, with collaborations with several prominent hip-hop artists. The Isleys had top forty hits in the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and two thousands, and as recently as 2006 they had an album go to number one on the R&B charts. But today, we’re going to look back at the group’s very first hit, from 1959. [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Shout”] The Isley Brothers were destined to be a vocal group even before they were born, indeed even before their parents were married. When O’Kelly Isley senior was discussing his marriage proposal with his future in-laws, he told his father-in-law-to-be that he intended to have four sons, and that they were going to be the next Mills Brothers. Isley Sr had been a vaudeville performer himself, and as with so many family groups the Isleys seem to have gone into the music business more to please their parents than because they wanted to do it themselves. As it turned out, O’Kelly and Sallye Isley had six children, all boys, and the eldest four of them did indeed form a vocal group. Like many black vocal groups in the early fifties, they were a gospel group, and O’Kelly Jr, Rudolph, Ronald, and Vernon Isley started performing around the churches in Cincinnati as teenagers, having been trained by their parents. They appeared on Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, the popular TV talent show which launched the careers of many entertainers, and won — their prize was a jewelled watch, which the boys would take turns wearing. But then tragedy struck. Vernon, the youngest of the four singing Isleys, and the one who was generally considered to be far and away the most talented singer in the group, was hit by a car and killed while he was riding his bike, aged only thirteen. The boys were, as one would imagine, devastated by the death of their little brother, and they also thought that that should be the end of their singing career, as Vernon had been their lead singer. It would be two years before they would perform live again. By all accounts, their parents put pressure on them during that time, telling them that it would be the only way to pay respect to Vernon. Eventually a compromise was reached between parents and brothers — Ron agreed that he would attempt to sing lead, if in turn the group could stop singing gospel music and start singing doo-wop songs, like the brothers’ favourite act Billy Ward and the Dominoes. We’ve talked before about how Billy Ward & The Dominoes were a huge influence on the music that became soul, with hit records like “Have Mercy Baby”: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “Have Mercy Baby”] Both Ward’s original lead singer Clyde McPhatter and McPhatter’s later replacement Jackie Wilson sang in a style that owed a lot to the church music that the young Isleys had also been performing, and so it was natural for them to make the change to singing in the style of the Dominoes. As soon as Ronald Isley started singing lead, people started making comparisons both to McPhatter and to Wilson. Indeed, Ronald has talked about McPhatter as being something of a mentor figure for the brothers, teaching them how to sing, although it’s never been clear exactly at what point in their career they got to know McPhatter. But their real mentor was a much less well-known singer, Beulah Bryant. The three eldest Isley brothers, O’Kelly, Rudolph, and Ronald, met Bryant on the bus to New York, where they were travelling to try and seek their fortunes. Bryant was one of the many professional blues shouters who never became hugely well known, but who managed to have a moderately successful career from the fifties through to the eighties, mostly in live performances, though she did make a handful of very listenable records: [Excerpt: Beulah Bryant, “What Am I Gonna Do?”] When they got to New York, while they had paid in advance for somewhere to stay, they were robbed on their second day in the city and had no money at all. But Bryant had contacts in the music industry, and started making phone calls for her young proteges, trying to get them bookings. At first she was unsuccessful, and the group just hung around the Harlem Apollo and occasionally performed at their amateur nights. Eventually, though, Bryant got Nat Nazzaro to listen to them over the phone. Nazzaro was known as “the monster agent” — he was one of the most important booking agents in New York, but he wasn’t exactly fair to his young clients. He would book a three-person act, but on the contracts the act would consist of four people — Nazzaro would be the fourth person, and he would get an equal share of the performance money, as well as getting his normal booking agent’s share. Nazzaro listened to the Isleys over the phone, and then he insisted they come and see him in person, because he was convinced that they had been playing a record down the phone rather than singing to him live. When he found out they really did sound like that, Nazzaro started getting them the kind of bookings they could only dream of — they went from having no money at all to playing on Broadway for $750 a week, and then playing the Apollo for $950 a week, at least according to O’Kelly Isley Jr’s later recollection. This was an astonishing sum of money to a bunch of teenagers in the late 1950s. But they still hadn’t made a record, and their sets were based on cover versions of songs by other people, things like “Rock and Roll Waltz” by Kay Starr: [Excerpt: Kay Starr, “Rock and Roll Waltz”] It was hardly the kind of material they would later become famous for. And nor was their first record. They had signed to a label called Teenage Records, a tiny label owned by two former musicians, Bill “Bass” Gordon and Ben Smith. As you might imagine, there were a lot of musicians named Ben Smith and it’s quite difficult to sort out which was which — even Marv Goldberg, who normally knows these things, seems confused about which Ben Smith this was, describing him as a singer on one page and a sax player on another page. As Ben Smith the sax player seems to have played on some records for Teenage, it was probably him, in which case this Ben Smith probably also played alto sax for Lucky Millinder’s band and wrote the hit “I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem” for Glenn Miller: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, “I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem”] It’s more certain exactly who Bill “Bass” Gordon was — he was the leader of Bill “Bass” Gordon and the Colonials, who had recorded the doo-wop track “Two Loves Have I”: [Excerpt: Bill “Bass” Gordon and the Colonials, “Two Loves Have I”] Smith and Gordon signed the Isley Brothers to Teenage Records, and in June 1957 the first Isley Brothers single, “Angels Cried”, came out: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Angels Cried”] Unfortunately, the single didn’t have any real success, and the group decided that they wanted to record for a better label. According to O’Kelly Isley they got some resistance from Teenage Records, who claimed to have them under contract — but the Isley Brothers knew better. They had signed a contract, certainly, but then the contract had just been left on a desk after they’d signed it, rather than being filed, and they’d swiped it from the desk when no-one was looking. Teenage didn’t have a copy of the contract, so had no proof that they had ever signed the Isley Brothers, and the brothers were free to move on to another label. They chose to sign to Gone Records, one of the family of labels that was owned and run by George Goldner. Goldner assigned Richie Barrett, his talent scout, producer, and arranger, to look after the Isleys, as he had previously done with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, as well as his own group the Valentines: [The Valentines, “The Woo Woo Train”] By this point, Barrett had established an almost production-line method of making records. He would block-book a studio and some backing musicians for up to twenty-four hours, get as many as ten different vocal groups into the studio, and record dozens of tracks in a row, usually songs written by either group members or by Barrett. The Isleys’ first record with Barrett, “Don’t Be Jealous”, was a fairly standard doo-wop ballad, written by Ron Isley: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Don’t Be Jealous”] There’s some suggestion that Barrett is also singing on that recording with the group — it certainly sounds like there are four voices on there, not just three. Either way, the song doesn’t show much of the style that the Isley Brothers would later make their own. Much more like their later recordings was the B-side, another Ronald Isley song, which could have been a classic in the Coasters’ mould had it not been for the lyrics, which were an attempt at a hip rewriting of “Old McDonald”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Rockin’ McDonald”] They were nearly there, but not quite. The next single, “I Wanna Know”, came closer — you can hear they were clearly trying to incorporate elements of other people’s successful records — Ronald Isley’s vocal owes a lot to Little Richard, while the piano playing has the same piano “ripping” that Jerry Lee Lewis had made his own. But you can also hear the style that would make them famous coming to the fore. But they were not selling records, and Richie Barrett was stretched very thin. A few more singles were released on Gone (often pairing a previously-released track with a new B-side) but nothing was successful enough to justify them staying on with Goldner’s label. But just as they’d moved from a micro-indie label to a large indie without having had any success, now they were going to move from a large indie to a major label, still not having had a hit. They took one of their records to Hugo and Luigi at RCA records, and the duo signed them up. Hugo and Luigi were strange, strange, figures in popular music in the 1950s. They were two cousins, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore, who were always known by their first names, and had started out making children’s records before being hired by Mercury Records, where they would produce, among other things, the cover versions by Georgia Gibbs of black records that we’ve talked about previously, and which were both ethically and musically appalling: [Excerpt: Georgia Gibbs, “Dance With Me Henry”] After a couple of years of consistently producing hits, they got tempted away from Mercury by Morris Levy, who was setting up a new label, Roulette, with George Goldner and Alan Freed. Goldner and Freed quickly dropped out of the label, but Hugo and Luigi ended up having a fifty percent stake in the new label. While they were there, they showed they didn’t really get rock and roll music at all — they produced follow-up singles by a lot of acts who’d had hits before they started working with Hugo and Luigi, but stopped as soon as the duo started producing them, like Frankie Lymon: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, “Goodie Goodie”] But they still managed to produce a string of hits like “Honeycomb” by Jimmie Rodgers (who is not either the blues singer or the country singer of the same name), which went to number one: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rogers, “Honeycomb”] And they also recorded their own tracks for Roulette, like the instrumental Cha-Hua-Hua: [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, “Cha-Hua-Hua”] After a year or so with Roulette, they were in turn poached by RCA — Morris Levy let them go so long as they gave up their shares in Roulette for far less than they were worth. At RCA they continued their own recording career, with records like “Just Come Home”: [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, “Just Come Home”] They also produced several albums for Perry Como. So you would think that they would be precisely the wrong producers for the Isley Brothers. And the first record they made with the trio would tend to suggest that there was at least some creative difference there. “I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door” was written by Aaron Schroeder and Sid Wayne, two people who are best known for writing some of the less interesting songs for Elvis’ films, and has a generic, lightweight, backing track — apart from an interestingly meaty guitar part. The vocals have some power to them, and the record is pleasant, and in some ways even ground-breaking — it doesn’t sound like a late fifties record as much as it does an early sixties one, and one could imagine, say, Gerry and the Pacemakers making a substantially identical record. But it falls between the stools of R&B and pop, and doesn’t quite convince as either: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door”] That combination of a poppy background and soulful vocals would soon bear a lot of fruit for another artist Hugo and Luigi were going to start working with, but it didn’t quite work for the Isleys yet. But their second single for RCA was far more successful. At this point the Isleys were a more successful live act than recording act, and they would mostly perform songs by other people, and one song they performed regularly was “Lonely Teardrops”, the song that Berry and Gwen Gordy and Roquel Davis had written for Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, “Lonely Teardrops”] The group would perform that at the end of their shows, and they started to extend it, with Ron Isley improvising as the band vamped behind him, starting with the line “say you will” from Wilson’s song. He’d start doing a call and response with his brothers, singing a line and getting them to sing the response “Shout”. These improvised, extended, endings to the song got longer and longer, and got the crowds more and more excited, and they started incorporating elements from Ray Charles records, too, especially “What’d I Say” and “I Got a Woman”. When they got back to New York at the end of the tour, they told Hugo and Luigi how well these performances, which they still thought of as just long performances of “Lonely Teardrops”, had gone. The producers suggested that if they went down that well, what they should do is cut out the part that was still “Lonely Teardrops” and just perform the extended tag. As it turned out, they kept in a little of “Lonely Teardrops” — the “Say you will, say you will” line — and the resulting song, like Ray Charles’ similar call-and-response based “What’d I Say”, was split over two sides of a single, as “Shout (Parts One and Two)”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Shout (Parts One and Two)”] That was nothing like anything that Hugo and Luigi had ever produced before, and it became the Isley Brothers’ first chart hit, reaching number forty-seven. More importantly for them, the song was credited to the three brothers, so they made money from the cover versions of the song that charted much higher. In the USA, Joey Dee and the Starliters made number six in 1962 with their version: [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, “Shout”] In the UK, Lulu and the Luvvers made number seven in 1964: [Excerpt: Lulu and the Luvvers, “Shout”] And in Australia, Johnny O’Keefe released his version only a month after the Isleys released theirs, and reached number two: [Excerpt: Johnny O’Keefe, “Shout”] Despite all these cover versions, the Isleys’ version remains the definitive one, and itself ended up selling over a million copies, though it never broke into the top forty. It was certainly successful enough that it made sense to record an album. Unfortunately, for the album, also titled Shout!, the old Hugo and Luigi style came out, and apart from one new Isleys original, “Respectable”, which became their next single, the rest of the album was made up of old standards, rearranged in the “Shout!” style. Sometimes, this almost worked, as on “Ring-A-Ling A-Ling (Let The Wedding Bells Ring)”, whose words are close enough to Little Richard-style gibberish that Ronald Isley could scream them effectively. But when the Isleys take on Irving Berlin’s “How Deep is the Ocean” or “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”, neither the song nor the group are improved by the combination. They released several more singles on RCA, but none of them repeated the success of “Shout!”. At this point they moved across to Atlantic, where they started working with Leiber and Stoller. Leiber and Stoller kept them recording old standards as B-sides, but for the A-sides they went back to gospel-infused soul party songs, like the Leiber and Stoller song “Teach Me How To Shimmy” and the Isleys’ own “Standing On The Dance Floor”, a rewrite of an old gospel song called “Standing at the Judgment”: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, “Standing on the Dance Floor”] But none of these songs scraped even the bottom of the charts, and the brothers ended up leaving Atlantic after a year, and signing with a tiny label, Scepter. After having moved from a tiny indie label to a large indie to a major label, they had now moved back down from their major label to a large indie to a tiny indie. They were still a great live act, but they appeared to be a one-hit wonder. But all that was about to change, when they recorded a cover version of a flop single inspired by their one hit, combined with a dance craze. The Isley Brothers were about to make one of the most important records of the 1960s, but “Twist and Shout” is a story for another time.  

Episode eighty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Shout" by the Isley Brothers, and the beginnings of a career that would lead to six decades of hit singles. 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 "Tell Laura I Love Her" by Ray Peterson. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more----  Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   Amazingly, there are no books on the Isley Brothers, unless you count a seventy-two page self-published pamphlet by Rudolph Isley's daughter, so I've had to piece this together from literally dozens of different sources. The ones I relied on most were this section of a very long article on Richie Barrett, this interview with Ronald Isley, and Icons of R&B and Soul by Bob Gulla.  The information on Hugo and Luigi comes mostly from two books -- Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick, and  Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy by Richard Carlin. There are many compilations of the public-domain recordings of the Isleys. This one seems the most complete. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to take one of our rare looks -- at this point in the story anyway -- at an act that is still touring today. Indeed, when I started writing this script back in February, I started by saying that I would soon be seeing them live in concert, as I have a ticket for an Isley Brothers show in a couple of months. Of course, events have overtaken that, and it's extremely unlikely that anyone will be going to any shows then, but it shows a fundamental difference between the Isley Brothers and most of the other acts we've looked at, as even those who are still active now mostly concentrate on performing locally rather than doing international tours playing major venues. Of course, the version of the Isley Brothers touring today isn't quite the same as the group from the 1950s, but Ronald Isley, the group's lead singer, remains in the group -- and, indeed, has remained artistically relevant, with collaborations with several prominent hip-hop artists. The Isleys had top forty hits in the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and two thousands, and as recently as 2006 they had an album go to number one on the R&B charts. But today, we're going to look back at the group's very first hit, from 1959. [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Shout"] The Isley Brothers were destined to be a vocal group even before they were born, indeed even before their parents were married. When O'Kelly Isley senior was discussing his marriage proposal with his future in-laws, he told his father-in-law-to-be that he intended to have four sons, and that they were going to be the next Mills Brothers. Isley Sr had been a vaudeville performer himself, and as with so many family groups the Isleys seem to have gone into the music business more to please their parents than because they wanted to do it themselves. As it turned out, O'Kelly and Sallye Isley had six children, all boys, and the eldest four of them did indeed form a vocal group. Like many black vocal groups in the early fifties, they were a gospel group, and O'Kelly Jr, Rudolph, Ronald, and Vernon Isley started performing around the churches in Cincinnati as teenagers, having been trained by their parents. They appeared on Ted Mack's Amateur Hour, the popular TV talent show which launched the careers of many entertainers, and won -- their prize was a jewelled watch, which the boys would take turns wearing. But then tragedy struck. Vernon, the youngest of the four singing Isleys, and the one who was generally considered to be far and away the most talented singer in the group, was hit by a car and killed while he was riding his bike, aged only thirteen. The boys were, as one would imagine, devastated by the death of their little brother, and they also thought that that should be the end of their singing career, as Vernon had been their lead singer. It would be two years before they would perform live again. By all accounts, their parents put pressure on them during that time, telling them that it would be the only way to pay respect to Vernon. Eventually a compromise was reached between parents and brothers -- Ron agreed that he would attempt to sing lead, if in turn the group could stop singing gospel music and start singing doo-wop songs, like the brothers' favourite act Billy Ward and the Dominoes. We've talked before about how Billy Ward & The Dominoes were a huge influence on the music that became soul, with hit records like "Have Mercy Baby": [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, "Have Mercy Baby"] Both Ward's original lead singer Clyde McPhatter and McPhatter's later replacement Jackie Wilson sang in a style that owed a lot to the church music that the young Isleys had also been performing, and so it was natural for them to make the change to singing in the style of the Dominoes. As soon as Ronald Isley started singing lead, people started making comparisons both to McPhatter and to Wilson. Indeed, Ronald has talked about McPhatter as being something of a mentor figure for the brothers, teaching them how to sing, although it's never been clear exactly at what point in their career they got to know McPhatter. But their real mentor was a much less well-known singer, Beulah Bryant. The three eldest Isley brothers, O'Kelly, Rudolph, and Ronald, met Bryant on the bus to New York, where they were travelling to try and seek their fortunes. Bryant was one of the many professional blues shouters who never became hugely well known, but who managed to have a moderately successful career from the fifties through to the eighties, mostly in live performances, though she did make a handful of very listenable records: [Excerpt: Beulah Bryant, "What Am I Gonna Do?"] When they got to New York, while they had paid in advance for somewhere to stay, they were robbed on their second day in the city and had no money at all. But Bryant had contacts in the music industry, and started making phone calls for her young proteges, trying to get them bookings. At first she was unsuccessful, and the group just hung around the Harlem Apollo and occasionally performed at their amateur nights. Eventually, though, Bryant got Nat Nazzaro to listen to them over the phone. Nazzaro was known as "the monster agent" -- he was one of the most important booking agents in New York, but he wasn't exactly fair to his young clients. He would book a three-person act, but on the contracts the act would consist of four people -- Nazzaro would be the fourth person, and he would get an equal share of the performance money, as well as getting his normal booking agent's share. Nazzaro listened to the Isleys over the phone, and then he insisted they come and see him in person, because he was convinced that they had been playing a record down the phone rather than singing to him live. When he found out they really did sound like that, Nazzaro started getting them the kind of bookings they could only dream of -- they went from having no money at all to playing on Broadway for $750 a week, and then playing the Apollo for $950 a week, at least according to O'Kelly Isley Jr's later recollection. This was an astonishing sum of money to a bunch of teenagers in the late 1950s. But they still hadn't made a record, and their sets were based on cover versions of songs by other people, things like "Rock and Roll Waltz" by Kay Starr: [Excerpt: Kay Starr, "Rock and Roll Waltz"] It was hardly the kind of material they would later become famous for. And nor was their first record. They had signed to a label called Teenage Records, a tiny label owned by two former musicians, Bill "Bass" Gordon and Ben Smith. As you might imagine, there were a lot of musicians named Ben Smith and it's quite difficult to sort out which was which -- even Marv Goldberg, who normally knows these things, seems confused about which Ben Smith this was, describing him as a singer on one page and a sax player on another page. As Ben Smith the sax player seems to have played on some records for Teenage, it was probably him, in which case this Ben Smith probably also played alto sax for Lucky Millinder's band and wrote the hit "I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem" for Glenn Miller: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, "I Dreamed I Dwelt in Harlem"] It's more certain exactly who Bill "Bass" Gordon was -- he was the leader of Bill "Bass" Gordon and the Colonials, who had recorded the doo-wop track "Two Loves Have I": [Excerpt: Bill "Bass" Gordon and the Colonials, "Two Loves Have I"] Smith and Gordon signed the Isley Brothers to Teenage Records, and in June 1957 the first Isley Brothers single, "Angels Cried", came out: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Angels Cried"] Unfortunately, the single didn't have any real success, and the group decided that they wanted to record for a better label. According to O'Kelly Isley they got some resistance from Teenage Records, who claimed to have them under contract -- but the Isley Brothers knew better. They had signed a contract, certainly, but then the contract had just been left on a desk after they'd signed it, rather than being filed, and they'd swiped it from the desk when no-one was looking. Teenage didn't have a copy of the contract, so had no proof that they had ever signed the Isley Brothers, and the brothers were free to move on to another label. They chose to sign to Gone Records, one of the family of labels that was owned and run by George Goldner. Goldner assigned Richie Barrett, his talent scout, producer, and arranger, to look after the Isleys, as he had previously done with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, as well as his own group the Valentines: [The Valentines, "The Woo Woo Train"] By this point, Barrett had established an almost production-line method of making records. He would block-book a studio and some backing musicians for up to twenty-four hours, get as many as ten different vocal groups into the studio, and record dozens of tracks in a row, usually songs written by either group members or by Barrett. The Isleys' first record with Barrett, "Don't Be Jealous", was a fairly standard doo-wop ballad, written by Ron Isley: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Don't Be Jealous"] There's some suggestion that Barrett is also singing on that recording with the group -- it certainly sounds like there are four voices on there, not just three. Either way, the song doesn't show much of the style that the Isley Brothers would later make their own. Much more like their later recordings was the B-side, another Ronald Isley song, which could have been a classic in the Coasters' mould had it not been for the lyrics, which were an attempt at a hip rewriting of "Old McDonald": [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Rockin' McDonald"] They were nearly there, but not quite. The next single, "I Wanna Know", came closer -- you can hear they were clearly trying to incorporate elements of other people's successful records -- Ronald Isley's vocal owes a lot to Little Richard, while the piano playing has the same piano "ripping" that Jerry Lee Lewis had made his own. But you can also hear the style that would make them famous coming to the fore. But they were not selling records, and Richie Barrett was stretched very thin. A few more singles were released on Gone (often pairing a previously-released track with a new B-side) but nothing was successful enough to justify them staying on with Goldner's label. But just as they'd moved from a micro-indie label to a large indie without having had any success, now they were going to move from a large indie to a major label, still not having had a hit. They took one of their records to Hugo and Luigi at RCA records, and the duo signed them up. Hugo and Luigi were strange, strange, figures in popular music in the 1950s. They were two cousins, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore, who were always known by their first names, and had started out making children's records before being hired by Mercury Records, where they would produce, among other things, the cover versions by Georgia Gibbs of black records that we've talked about previously, and which were both ethically and musically appalling: [Excerpt: Georgia Gibbs, "Dance With Me Henry"] After a couple of years of consistently producing hits, they got tempted away from Mercury by Morris Levy, who was setting up a new label, Roulette, with George Goldner and Alan Freed. Goldner and Freed quickly dropped out of the label, but Hugo and Luigi ended up having a fifty percent stake in the new label. While they were there, they showed they didn't really get rock and roll music at all -- they produced follow-up singles by a lot of acts who'd had hits before they started working with Hugo and Luigi, but stopped as soon as the duo started producing them, like Frankie Lymon: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon, "Goodie Goodie"] But they still managed to produce a string of hits like "Honeycomb" by Jimmie Rodgers (who is not either the blues singer or the country singer of the same name), which went to number one: [Excerpt: Jimmie Rogers, "Honeycomb"] And they also recorded their own tracks for Roulette, like the instrumental Cha-Hua-Hua: [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, "Cha-Hua-Hua"] After a year or so with Roulette, they were in turn poached by RCA -- Morris Levy let them go so long as they gave up their shares in Roulette for far less than they were worth. At RCA they continued their own recording career, with records like "Just Come Home": [Excerpt: Hugo and Luigi, "Just Come Home"] They also produced several albums for Perry Como. So you would think that they would be precisely the wrong producers for the Isley Brothers. And the first record they made with the trio would tend to suggest that there was at least some creative difference there. "I'm Gonna Knock on Your Door" was written by Aaron Schroeder and Sid Wayne, two people who are best known for writing some of the less interesting songs for Elvis' films, and has a generic, lightweight, backing track -- apart from an interestingly meaty guitar part. The vocals have some power to them, and the record is pleasant, and in some ways even ground-breaking -- it doesn't sound like a late fifties record as much as it does an early sixties one, and one could imagine, say, Gerry and the Pacemakers making a substantially identical record. But it falls between the stools of R&B and pop, and doesn't quite convince as either: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "I'm Gonna Knock on Your Door"] That combination of a poppy background and soulful vocals would soon bear a lot of fruit for another artist Hugo and Luigi were going to start working with, but it didn't quite work for the Isleys yet. But their second single for RCA was far more successful. At this point the Isleys were a more successful live act than recording act, and they would mostly perform songs by other people, and one song they performed regularly was "Lonely Teardrops", the song that Berry and Gwen Gordy and Roquel Davis had written for Jackie Wilson: [Excerpt: Jackie Wilson, "Lonely Teardrops"] The group would perform that at the end of their shows, and they started to extend it, with Ron Isley improvising as the band vamped behind him, starting with the line "say you will" from Wilson's song. He'd start doing a call and response with his brothers, singing a line and getting them to sing the response "Shout". These improvised, extended, endings to the song got longer and longer, and got the crowds more and more excited, and they started incorporating elements from Ray Charles records, too, especially "What'd I Say" and "I Got a Woman". When they got back to New York at the end of the tour, they told Hugo and Luigi how well these performances, which they still thought of as just long performances of "Lonely Teardrops", had gone. The producers suggested that if they went down that well, what they should do is cut out the part that was still "Lonely Teardrops" and just perform the extended tag. As it turned out, they kept in a little of "Lonely Teardrops" -- the "Say you will, say you will" line -- and the resulting song, like Ray Charles' similar call-and-response based "What'd I Say", was split over two sides of a single, as "Shout (Parts One and Two)": [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Shout (Parts One and Two)"] That was nothing like anything that Hugo and Luigi had ever produced before, and it became the Isley Brothers' first chart hit, reaching number forty-seven. More importantly for them, the song was credited to the three brothers, so they made money from the cover versions of the song that charted much higher. In the USA, Joey Dee and the Starliters made number six in 1962 with their version: [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, "Shout"] In the UK, Lulu and the Luvvers made number seven in 1964: [Excerpt: Lulu and the Luvvers, "Shout"] And in Australia, Johnny O'Keefe released his version only a month after the Isleys released theirs, and reached number two: [Excerpt: Johnny O'Keefe, "Shout"] Despite all these cover versions, the Isleys' version remains the definitive one, and itself ended up selling over a million copies, though it never broke into the top forty. It was certainly successful enough that it made sense to record an album. Unfortunately, for the album, also titled Shout!, the old Hugo and Luigi style came out, and apart from one new Isleys original, "Respectable", which became their next single, the rest of the album was made up of old standards, rearranged in the "Shout!" style. Sometimes, this almost worked, as on "Ring-A-Ling A-Ling (Let The Wedding Bells Ring)", whose words are close enough to Little Richard-style gibberish that Ronald Isley could scream them effectively. But when the Isleys take on Irving Berlin's "How Deep is the Ocean" or "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands", neither the song nor the group are improved by the combination. They released several more singles on RCA, but none of them repeated the success of "Shout!". At this point they moved across to Atlantic, where they started working with Leiber and Stoller. Leiber and Stoller kept them recording old standards as B-sides, but for the A-sides they went back to gospel-infused soul party songs, like the Leiber and Stoller song "Teach Me How To Shimmy" and the Isleys' own "Standing On The Dance Floor", a rewrite of an old gospel song called "Standing at the Judgment": [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Standing on the Dance Floor"] But none of these songs scraped even the bottom of the charts, and the brothers ended up leaving Atlantic after a year, and signing with a tiny label, Scepter. After having moved from a tiny indie label to a large indie to a major label, they had now moved back down from their major label to a large indie to a tiny indie. They were still a great live act, but they appeared to be a one-hit wonder. But all that was about to change, when they recorded a cover version of a flop single inspired by their one hit, combined with a dance craze. The Isley Brothers were about to make one of the most important records of the 1960s, but "Twist and Shout" is a story for another time.  

  Episode sixty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Maybe” by the Chantels, and covers child stardom, hymns in Latin, and how to get discovered twice in one day. 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 “Don’t You Just Know It” by Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The only book actually about the Chantels is barely a book — Maybe, Renee Minus White’s self-published memoir, is more of a pamphlet, and it only manages even to get to that length with a ton of padding — things like her fruit cake recipe. Don’t expect much insight from this one. A big chunk of the outline of the story comes from Girl Groups; Fabulous Females Who Rocked the World by John Clemente, which has  a chapter on the Chantels.  This article on Richie Barrett’s career filled in much of the detail.  My opinions of George Goldner come mostly from reading two books — Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz, which talks about Leiber and Stoller’s attempts to go into business with Goldner, and Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy by Richard Carlin. There are innumerable collections of the small number of recordings the Chantels released — this one is as good as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? ERRATUM: I refer to “Summer Love” rather than “Summer’s Love”   Transcript We’ve already seen one girl group, when we looked at “Mr Lee” by the Bobbettes, but already within a few months of the Bobbettes’ breakout hit, other groups were making waves with the public. The Chantels were one such group, and one of the best. They were pretty much exact contemporaries of the Bobbettes – so much so that when the Bobbettes were forming, they decided against calling themselves the Chanels, because it would be too similar. The Chantels, too, changed their name early on. They were formed by a group of girls at a Catholic school – St Anthony of Padua school in the Bronx – and were originally named “the Crystals”, but they found that another group in the area had already named themselves that, and so they changed it. (This other group was not the same one as the famous Crystals, who didn’t form until 1961). They decided to name themselves after St Francis de Chantal after their school won a basketball game against St. Francis de Chantal school – when they discovered that the Chantal in the saint’s name was from the same root as the French word for singing, it seemed to be too perfect for them. Originally there were around a dozen members of the group, but they slowly whittled themselves down to five girls, between the ages of fourteen and seventeen – Arlene Smith, Lois Harris, Sonia Goring, Jackie Landry, and Renee Minus. According to Renee (who now goes by her married name Renee Minus White) the group’s name came from a brainstorming session between her, Lois, Jackie, and Sonia, with Arlene agreeing to it later – this may, though, have more to do with ongoing disputes between Arlene and the other group members than with what actually happened. They were drawn together by their mutual love of R&B vocal groups – a particular favourite record of theirs was “In Paradise” by the Cookies, a New York-based girl group who had started recording a few years earlier, and whose records were produced by Jesse Stone, but who wouldn’t have any major chart successes for several years yet: [Excerpt: The Cookies, “In Paradise”] So they were R&B singers, but the fact that these were Catholic schoolgirls, specifically, points to something about the way their music developed, and about early rock and roll more generally. We’ve talked about the influence of religious music on rock and roll before, but the type of religious music that had influenced it up until this point had generally come from two sources – either the black gospel music that was created by and for worshippers in African-American Pentecostal denominations, or the euphemistically-named “Southern Gospel” that is usually made by white Pentecostals, and by Southern Baptists. These denominations, in 2020, have a certain amount of institutional power – especially the Southern Baptists, who are now one of the most important power blocs within the Republican Party. But in the 1950s, those were the churches of the poorest, most despised, people. By geography, class, and race, the people who attended those churches were overwhelmingly those who would be looked down on by the people who had actual power in the USA. The churches that people with power overwhelmingly went to at the time were those which had been established in Western Europe – the so-called mainline Protestant churches – and, to a lesser extent, the Catholic Church. The music of those churches had very little influence on rock and roll. It makes sense that this would be the case – obviously underprivileged people’s music would be influenced by the churches that underprivileged people went to, rather than the ones that privileged people attended, and rock and roll was, at this point, still a music made almost solely by people who were underprivileged on one or more axis – but it’s still worth pointing out, because for the first time we’re going to look at a group who – while they were also underprivileged, being black – were influenced by Catholic liturgical music, rather than gospel or spiritual music. Because there’s always been a geographical variation, as well as one based on class and race, in what religions dominate in the US. While evangelical churches predominate in the southern states, in the North-East there were, especially at the time we’re talking about, far more mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jewish people. The Chantels were a New York group, and it’s notable that New York groups were far more likely to have been influenced by Catholic or Episcopalian liturgical music, and choral music in general, than vocal groups from other areas. This may go some way towards explaining Johnny Otis’ observation that all the LA vocal groups he knew had pitching problems, while the New York groups could sing in tune – choir practice may have made the New York groups more technically adept (though to my own ears, the New York groups tend to make much less interesting music than the LA groups). Certainly when it comes to the Chantels, the girls had all sung in the choir, and had been taught to read music and play the piano, although a couple of them had eventually been kicked out of the choir for singing “that skip and jump music”, as the nuns referred to rock and roll. Indeed, at their very first appearance at the Apollo, after getting a record contract, one of the two songs they performed was a Catholic hymn, in Latin – “Terra Tremuit”. That piece remains in the group’s repertoire to this day, and while they’ve never formally recorded it, there are videos on YouTube of them performing it: [Excerpt: The Chantels, “Terra Tremuit”, soundcheck recording] The story of how the Chantels were discovered, as it’s usually told, is one that leaves one asking more questions than it answers. The group were walking down the street, when they passed a rehearsal room. A young man spotted them on the street and asked them if they were singers, since they were dressed identically. When they said “yes”, he took them up to a rehearsal studio to hear them. The rehearsal studio happened to be in the Brill Building. We’ve not mentioned the Brill Building so far, because we’re only just getting to the point where it started to have an impact on rock and roll music, but it was a building on Broadway – 1619 Broadway to be exact – which was the home of dozens, even hundreds at times, of music publishers, record labels, and talent agencies. There were a few other nearby buildings, most notably 1650 Broadway, which became the home of Aldon Music, which often get lumped in with the Brill Building when most people talk about it, and when I refer to the Brill Building in future episodes I’ll be referring to the whole ecosystem of music industries that sprang up on Broadway in the fifties and early sixties. But in this case, they were invited into the main Brill Building itself. They weren’t just being invited into some random room, but into the heart of the music industry on the East Coast of America. This was the kind of thing that normally only happens in films – and relatively unrealistic films at that. So far, so cliched, though it’s hard to believe that that kind of thing ever really happened. But then something happened that isn’t in any of the cliches – the girls noticed, through the window, that three members of the Valentines, one of their favourite groups, were walking past. We’ve mentioned the Valentines a few months ago, when talking about Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and we talked about how Richie Barrett, as well as being a singer and songwriter in the group, was also a talent scout for George Goldner’s record labels. The Valentines had released several records, but none of them had had anything but local success, though records like “The Woo Woo Train” have since become cult favourites among lovers of 1950s vocal group music: [Excerpt: The Valentines, “The Woo Woo Train”] The girls loved the Valentines, and they also knew that Barrett was important in the industry. They decided to run out of the rehearsal room and accost the group members. They told Richie Barrett that they were a singing group, and when he didn’t believe them, they burst into song, singing what would later become the B-side of their first record, “The Plea”: [Excerpt: The Chantels, “The Plea”] That song was one they’d written themselves, sort of. It was actually based on a song that a group of boys they knew, who sang in a street-corner group, had made up. That song had been called “Baby”, but the Chantels had taken it and reworked it into their own song. The version that they finally recorded, which we just heard, was further revamped by Barrett. Barrett was impressed, and said he’d be in touch. But then he never bothered to get in contact with them again, until Jackie Landry managed to obtain his home address and get in touch with him. She got the address through a friend of hers, a member of the Teenchords, a vocal group fronted by Frankie Lymon’s brother Lewis, who recorded for one of George Goldner’s labels, releasing tracks like “Your Last Chance”: [Excerpt: Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, “Your Last Chance”] They tracked down Barrett, and he agreed to try to get them signed to a record deal. That story has many, many, problems, and frankly doesn’t make any kind of sense, but it’s the accepted history you’ll find in books that deal with the group. According to Renee Minus White’s autobiography, though, each of the girls has a different recollection of how they first met Barrett – in her version, they simply waited at the stage door to get autographs, and told him they were a singing group. My guess is that the accepted story is an attempt to reconcile a bunch of irreconcilable versions of the story. Whatever the true facts as to how they started to work with Richie Barrett, the important thing is that they did end up working with him. Barrett was impressed by their ability not just to sing the “oohs” and “aahs”, but the complex polyphonic parts that they sang in choir. For the most part, doo-wop groups either sang simple block chords behind a lead singer, or they all sang their own moving parts that worked more or less in isolation – the bass singer would sing his part, the falsetto singer his, and so on. I say “his” because pretty much all doo-wop groups at this point were male. They were all singing the same song, but doing their own thing. The Chantels were different – they were singing block harmonies, but they weren’t singing simple chords, but interlocking moving lines. What they were doing ended up being closer to the so-called “modern harmony” of jazz vocal groups like the Four Freshmen: [Excerpt: The Four Freshmen, “It’s a Blue World”] But where other groups singing in that style had no R&B background, the Chantels were able to sing a rhythm and blues song with the best of them. Barrett signed the group to End Records, one of George Goldner’s stable of record labels. But before recording them, he spent weeks rehearsing them, and teaching them how to perform on stage. The first record they made, when they finally went into the studio, was a song primarily written by Arlene Smith, who also sang lead, though the composition is credited to the girls as a group. And listening to it, you have in this record for the first time the crystallisation of the girl-group sound, the sound that would later become a hallmark of people like Phil Spector. [Excerpt: The Chantels, “He’s Gone”] It’s a song about adolescent anguish, written by and for adolescents, and it has a drama and angst to it that none of the other records by girl groups had had before – it’s obviously inspired by groups like the Penguins and the Platters, but there’s a near-hysteria to the performance that hadn’t really been heard before. That strained longing is something that would appear in almost every girl-group record of the early sixties, and you can hear very clear echoes of the Chantels in records by people like the Ronettes, the Crystals, and the Shangri-Las. It’s a far cry from “Mr. Lee”. Most of the time, when people talk about the Chantels’ vocals, they – rightly – draw attention to Arlene Smith’s leads, which are astonishing. But listen to the a capella intro, which is repeated as the outro, and you can hear those choir-trained voices – this was a vocal group, not just a singer and some cooing background vocalists: [Excerpt: the Chantels, “He’s Gone”] As well as being pioneers in the girl-group sound, the Chantels were also one of the first self-contained vocal groups to play their own instruments on stage. This was not something that they did at first, but something that Barrett encouraged them to do. Some of them had instrumental training already, and those who didn’t were taught how to play by Barrett. Sonia and Jackie played guitar, Arlene bass, Lois piano, and Renee the drums. They even, according to Renee’s autobiography, recorded an instrumental by themselves, called “The Chantels’ Rock”. Almost immediately, the girls were pulled out of Catholic school and instead sent to Quintano’s School for Young Professionals, the same school that the Teenagers went to, which was set up to accommodate children who had to go on tour. But there was one exception. Lois’ mother would not let her transfer schools, or go on tour with the group. She could sing with them in the studio, and when they were performing in New York, but until she graduated high school that was all. In many ways her mother was right to be worried, or at least Richie Barrett believed she had good reason to be. They started touring as soon as “He’s Gone” came out, but the girls, at the time, resented Barrett, who came along on tour with them, because he would lock them in the dressing rooms and only let them out for the show itself, not allowing them to socialise with the other acts. In retrospect, given that they were girls in their teens, and they were touring with large numbers of male musicians, many of them with reputations as sexual predators, Barrett’s protectiveness (and his apparent threats to several of these men) was probably justified. For example, in early 1958, the girls were sent out on a tour that became legendary – and given its lineup it’s easy to see why. As well as the Chantels, the tour had Frankie Lymon, Danny & the Juniors, the Diamonds, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Larry Williams, Buddy Holly, and as alternating headliners Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. We’ll talk more about that tour in the next couple of episodes, but aside from the undoubted musical quality of the performers, that was simply not a group of people who young women were going to be safe around (though several of the individuals there were harmless enough). One could, of course, argue that young girls shouldn’t be put in that situation at all, but that never seems to have occurred to anyone involved. By the time of that tour, they’d recorded what would become by far their biggest hit, their second single, “Maybe”: [Excerpt: The Chantels, “Maybe”] “Maybe” was a song that was originally co-credited to George Goldner and an unknown “Casey”, but for which Richie Barrett later sued and won co-writing credit. Barrett was presumably the sole writer, though some have claimed that Arlene Smith was an uncredited co-writer – something the other Chantels deny. It was very much in the mould of “He’s Gone”, and concentrated even more on Smith’s lead vocal, and that lead vocal took an immense amount of work to obtain. In total they recorded fifty-two takes of the song before they got one that sounded right, and Smith was crying in frustration when she recorded the last take. “Maybe” reached number fifteen on the pop charts, and number two on the R&B charts, and it became a classic that has been covered by everyone from Janis Joplin to the Three Degrees. The group’s next two records, “Every Night (I Pray)” and “I Love You So”, both charted as well, though neither of them was a massive hit in the way that “Maybe” was. But after this point, the hits dried up – something that wasn’t helped by the fact that George Goldner went through a phase of having his artists perform old standards, which didn’t really suit the Chantels’ voices. But they’d had four hit records in a row, which was enough for them to get an album released. The album, which just featured the A- and B-sides of their first six singles, was originally released with a photo of the group on the front. That version was quickly withdrawn and replaced with a stock image of two white teenagers at a jukebox, just in case you’ve forgotten how appallingly racist the music industry was at this point. They continued releasing singles, but they were also increasingly being used as backing vocalists for other artists produced by Barrett. He had them backing Jimmy Pemberton on “Rags to Riches”: [Excerpt: Jimmy Pemberton, “Rags to Riches”] And they also backed Barrett himself on “Summer Love”, which got to the lower reaches of the top one hundred in pop, and made the top thirty in the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Richie Barrett and the Chantels, “Summer Love”] There had also been some attempts to give Arlene a separate career outside the Chantels, as she duetted with Willie Wilson on “I’ve Lied”: [Excerpt: Willie Wilson and the Tunemasters, “I’ve Lied”] Unfortunately, after a year of success followed by another year of comparative failure, the group discovered that their career was at an end, thanks to George Goldner. We’ve talked about Goldner before, most significantly in the episode on “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”, but he had an almost unique combination of strong points and flaws as a record executive. His strongest point was his musical taste. Nobody who knew him respected his taste, but everyone respected his ability to pick a hit, and both of these things sprang from the same basic reason – he had exactly the same musical tastes as a typical teenage girl from the period. Now, it’s an unfortunate fact that the tastes of teenage girls are looked down upon by almost anyone with any power in the music industry, because of the almost universal misogyny in the industry, but the fact remains that teenage girls were becoming a powerful demographic as customers, and anyone who could accurately predict the music that they were going to buy would have a tremendous advantage when it came to making money in the music industry. And Goldner definitely made himself enough money over the years, because he engaged in all the usual practices of ripping off his artists – who were, very often, teenagers themselves. He would credit himself as the writer of their songs, he would engage in shady accounting practices, and all the rest. But Goldner’s real problem was his gambling addiction, and so there’s a pattern that happens over and again throughout the fifties and sixties. Goldner starts up a new record label, discovers some teenage and/or black act, and makes them into overnight stars. Goldner then starts getting vast amounts of money, because he’s ripping off his new discoveries. Goldner starts gambling with that money, loses badly, gets into debt with the mob, and goes to Morris Levy for a loan in order to keep his business going. Levy and his Mafia friends end up taking over the whole company, in exchange for writing off the debts. Levy replaces Goldner’s writing credits on the hits with his own name, stops paying the artists anything at all, and collects all the money from the hits for the rest of his life, while Goldner is left with nothing and goes off to find another bunch of teenagers. And so End Records met the same fate as all of Goldner’s other labels. It went bankrupt, and closed down, owing the Chantels a great deal of money. After End records closed, the Chantels wanted to carry on – but Arlene Smith decided she wanted to go solo instead. She recorded a couple of singles with a new producer, Phil Spector: [Excerpt: Arlene Smith, “Love, Love, Love”] And she also recorded another single with Richie Barrett as producer: [Excerpt: Arlene Smith, “Everything”] At first, that looked like it would be the end of the Chantels, but then a year or so later Richie Barrett got back in touch with the girls. He had some ideas for records that would use the Chantels sound. By this point, Lois had decided that she was going to retire from the music business, but Jackie, Renee, and Sonia agreed to restart their career. There was a problem, though – they weren’t sure what to do without their lead singer. Barrett told them he would sort it out for them. Barrett had been working with another girl group, the Veneers, for a couple of years. They’d released a few singles on Goldner-owned labels, like “Believe Me (My Angel)”: [Excerpt: The Veneers, “Believe Me (My Angel)”] And they’d also been the regular backing group Barrett used for sessions for male vocalists like Titus Turner: [Excerpt: Titus Turner, “The Return of Stagolee”] But they’d never had a huge amount of success. So Barrett got their lead singer, Annette Swinson, to replace Arlene. To make it up to the Veneers, he got the rest of them a job as Jackie Wilson’s backing vocalists. He changed Annette’s name to Annette Smith, and the new lineup of the group had a few more hits, with “Look in My Eyes”, which went to number six on the R&B charts and number fourteen on the pop charts: [Excerpt: The Chantels, “Look in My Eyes”] They also backed Richie Barrett on an answer record to Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road Jack”, titled “Well I Told You”, which made the top thirty on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Richie Barrett and the Chantels, “Well I Told You”] This second phase of the Chantels’ career was successful enough that Goldner, who no longer had the girls under contract, got one of his record labels to put out a new Chantels album, featuring a few tracks he owned by them that hadn’t been on their first album. To fill out the album, and make it sound more like the current group, he also took a few of the Veneers’ singles and stuck them on it under the Chantels’ name. Annette would stay with the group for a while, but the sixties saw several lineup changes, as the group stopped having chart successes, and members temporarily dropped out to have children or pursue careers. However, Sonia and Renee remained in place throughout, as the two constant members of the group (though Sonia also moonlit for a while in the sixties with another group Richie Barrett was looking after at the time, the Three Degrees). By the mid-nineties, they had reformed with all of the original members except Arlene, who was replaced by Ami Ortiz, who can do a very creditable imitation of Arlene’s lead vocals. Sadly Jackie Landry died in 1997, but the other four continued to tour, though only intermittently in between holding down day jobs. Almost uniquely, the Chantels are still touring with the majority of their original members. Sonia Goring Wilson, Renee Minus White, and Lois Harris Powell still tour with the group, and they have several tour dates booked in for 2020, mostly on the east coast of the US. Arlene Smith spent many years touring solo and performing with her own rival “Chantels” group. She has very occasionally reunited with the rest of the Chantels for one-off performances, but there appears to be bad blood between them. She kept performing into the middle of the last decade, and as of 2018, her Facebook page said she was planning a comeback, but no further details have emerged. The Chantels never received either the money or the acclaim that they deserved, given their run of chart successes and the way that they pioneered the girl group sound. But more than sixty years on from their biggest hits, four of the five of them are still alive, and apparently healthy, happy, and performing when the opportunity arises, and three of them are still good friends. Given the careers of most other stars of the era, especially the other child stars, that’s as close to a happy ending as a group gets.

  Episode sixty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Maybe” by the Chantels, and covers child stardom, hymns in Latin, and how to get discovered twice in one day. 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 “Don’t You Just Know It” by Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The only book actually about the Chantels is barely a book — Maybe, Renee Minus White’s self-published memoir, is more of a pamphlet, and it only manages even to get to that length with a ton of padding — things like her fruit cake recipe. Don’t expect much insight from this one. A big chunk of the outline of the story comes from Girl Groups; Fabulous Females Who Rocked the World by John Clemente, which has  a chapter on the Chantels.  This article on Richie Barrett’s career filled in much of the detail.  My opinions of George Goldner come mostly from reading two books — Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz, which talks about Leiber and Stoller’s attempts to go into business with Goldner, and Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy by Richard Carlin. There are innumerable collections of the small number of recordings the Chantels released — this one is as good as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? ERRATUM: I refer to “Summer Love” rather than “Summer’s Love”   Transcript We’ve already seen one girl group, when we looked at “Mr Lee” by the Bobbettes, but already within a few months of the Bobbettes’ breakout hit, other groups were making waves with the public. The Chantels were one such group, and one of the best. They were pretty much exact contemporaries of the Bobbettes – so much so that when the Bobbettes were forming, they decided against calling themselves the Chanels, because it would be too similar. The Chantels, too, changed their name early on. They were formed by a group of girls at a Catholic school – St Anthony of Padua school in the Bronx – and were originally named “the Crystals”, but they found that another group in the area had already named themselves that, and so they changed it. (This other group was not the same one as the famous Crystals, who didn’t form until 1961). They decided to name themselves after St Francis de Chantal after their school won a basketball game against St. Francis de Chantal school – when they discovered that the Chantal in the saint’s name was from the same root as the French word for singing, it seemed to be too perfect for them. Originally there were around a dozen members of the group, but they slowly whittled themselves down to five girls, between the ages of fourteen and seventeen – Arlene Smith, Lois Harris, Sonia Goring, Jackie Landry, and Renee Minus. According to Renee (who now goes by her married name Renee Minus White) the group’s name came from a brainstorming session between her, Lois, Jackie, and Sonia, with Arlene agreeing to it later – this may, though, have more to do with ongoing disputes between Arlene and the other group members than with what actually happened. They were drawn together by their mutual love of R&B vocal groups – a particular favourite record of theirs was “In Paradise” by the Cookies, a New York-based girl group who had started recording a few years earlier, and whose records were produced by Jesse Stone, but who wouldn’t have any major chart successes for several years yet: [Excerpt: The Cookies, “In Paradise”] So they were R&B singers, but the fact that these were Catholic schoolgirls, specifically, points to something about the way their music developed, and about early rock and roll more generally. We’ve talked about the influence of religious music on rock and roll before, but the type of religious music that had influenced it up until this point had generally come from two sources – either the black gospel music that was created by and for worshippers in African-American Pentecostal denominations, or the euphemistically-named “Southern Gospel” that is usually made by white Pentecostals, and by Southern Baptists. These denominations, in 2020, have a certain amount of institutional power – especially the Southern Baptists, who are now one of the most important power blocs within the Republican Party. But in the 1950s, those were the churches of the poorest, most despised, people. By geography, class, and race, the people who attended those churches were overwhelmingly those who would be looked down on by the people who had actual power in the USA. The churches that people with power overwhelmingly went to at the time were those which had been established in Western Europe – the so-called mainline Protestant churches – and, to a lesser extent, the Catholic Church. The music of those churches had very little influence on rock and roll. It makes sense that this would be the case – obviously underprivileged people’s music would be influenced by the churches that underprivileged people went to, rather than the ones that privileged people attended, and rock and roll was, at this point, still a music made almost solely by people who were underprivileged on one or more axis – but it’s still worth pointing out, because for the first time we’re going to look at a group who – while they were also underprivileged, being black – were influenced by Catholic liturgical music, rather than gospel or spiritual music. Because there’s always been a geographical variation, as well as one based on class and race, in what religions dominate in the US. While evangelical churches predominate in the southern states, in the North-East there were, especially at the time we’re talking about, far more mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jewish people. The Chantels were a New York group, and it’s notable that New York groups were far more likely to have been influenced by Catholic or Episcopalian liturgical music, and choral music in general, than vocal groups from other areas. This may go some way towards explaining Johnny Otis’ observation that all the LA vocal groups he knew had pitching problems, while the New York groups could sing in tune – choir practice may have made the New York groups more technically adept (though to my own ears, the New York groups tend to make much less interesting music than the LA groups). Certainly when it comes to the Chantels, the girls had all sung in the choir, and had been taught to read music and play the piano, although a couple of them had eventually been kicked out of the choir for singing “that skip and jump music”, as the nuns referred to rock and roll. Indeed, at their very first appearance at the Apollo, after getting a record contract, one of the two songs they performed was a Catholic hymn, in Latin – “Terra Tremuit”. That piece remains in the group’s repertoire to this day, and while they’ve never formally recorded it, there are videos on YouTube of them performing it: [Excerpt: The Chantels, “Terra Tremuit”, soundcheck recording] The story of how the Chantels were discovered, as it’s usually told, is one that leaves one asking more questions than it answers. The group were walking down the street, when they passed a rehearsal room. A young man spotted them on the street and asked them if they were singers, since they were dressed identically. When they said “yes”, he took them up to a rehearsal studio to hear them. The rehearsal studio happened to be in the Brill Building. We’ve not mentioned the Brill Building so far, because we’re only just getting to the point where it started to have an impact on rock and roll music, but it was a building on Broadway – 1619 Broadway to be exact – which was the home of dozens, even hundreds at times, of music publishers, record labels, and talent agencies. There were a few other nearby buildings, most notably 1650 Broadway, which became the home of Aldon Music, which often get lumped in with the Brill Building when most people talk about it, and when I refer to the Brill Building in future episodes I’ll be referring to the whole ecosystem of music industries that sprang up on Broadway in the fifties and early sixties. But in this case, they were invited into the main Brill Building itself. They weren’t just being invited into some random room, but into the heart of the music industry on the East Coast of America. This was the kind of thing that normally only happens in films – and relatively unrealistic films at that. So far, so cliched, though it’s hard to believe that that kind of thing ever really happened. But then something happened that isn’t in any of the cliches – the girls noticed, through the window, that three members of the Valentines, one of their favourite groups, were walking past. We’ve mentioned the Valentines a few months ago, when talking about Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and we talked about how Richie Barrett, as well as being a singer and songwriter in the group, was also a talent scout for George Goldner’s record labels. The Valentines had released several records, but none of them had had anything but local success, though records like “The Woo Woo Train” have since become cult favourites among lovers of 1950s vocal group music: [Excerpt: The Valentines, “The Woo Woo Train”] The girls loved the Valentines, and they also knew that Barrett was important in the industry. They decided to run out of the rehearsal room and accost the group members. They told Richie Barrett that they were a singing group, and when he didn’t believe them, they burst into song, singing what would later become the B-side of their first record, “The Plea”: [Excerpt: The Chantels, “The Plea”] That song was one they’d written themselves, sort of. It was actually based on a song that a group of boys they knew, who sang in a street-corner group, had made up. That song had been called “Baby”, but the Chantels had taken it and reworked it into their own song. The version that they finally recorded, which we just heard, was further revamped by Barrett. Barrett was impressed, and said he’d be in touch. But then he never bothered to get in contact with them again, until Jackie Landry managed to obtain his home address and get in touch with him. She got the address through a friend of hers, a member of the Teenchords, a vocal group fronted by Frankie Lymon’s brother Lewis, who recorded for one of George Goldner’s labels, releasing tracks like “Your Last Chance”: [Excerpt: Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, “Your Last Chance”] They tracked down Barrett, and he agreed to try to get them signed to a record deal. That story has many, many, problems, and frankly doesn’t make any kind of sense, but it’s the accepted history you’ll find in books that deal with the group. According to Renee Minus White’s autobiography, though, each of the girls has a different recollection of how they first met Barrett – in her version, they simply waited at the stage door to get autographs, and told him they were a singing group. My guess is that the accepted story is an attempt to reconcile a bunch of irreconcilable versions of the story. Whatever the true facts as to how they started to work with Richie Barrett, the important thing is that they did end up working with him. Barrett was impressed by their ability not just to sing the “oohs” and “aahs”, but the complex polyphonic parts that they sang in choir. For the most part, doo-wop groups either sang simple block chords behind a lead singer, or they all sang their own moving parts that worked more or less in isolation – the bass singer would sing his part, the falsetto singer his, and so on. I say “his” because pretty much all doo-wop groups at this point were male. They were all singing the same song, but doing their own thing. The Chantels were different – they were singing block harmonies, but they weren’t singing simple chords, but interlocking moving lines. What they were doing ended up being closer to the so-called “modern harmony” of jazz vocal groups like the Four Freshmen: [Excerpt: The Four Freshmen, “It’s a Blue World”] But where other groups singing in that style had no R&B background, the Chantels were able to sing a rhythm and blues song with the best of them. Barrett signed the group to End Records, one of George Goldner’s stable of record labels. But before recording them, he spent weeks rehearsing them, and teaching them how to perform on stage. The first record they made, when they finally went into the studio, was a song primarily written by Arlene Smith, who also sang lead, though the composition is credited to the girls as a group. And listening to it, you have in this record for the first time the crystallisation of the girl-group sound, the sound that would later become a hallmark of people like Phil Spector. [Excerpt: The Chantels, “He’s Gone”] It’s a song about adolescent anguish, written by and for adolescents, and it has a drama and angst to it that none of the other records by girl groups had had before – it’s obviously inspired by groups like the Penguins and the Platters, but there’s a near-hysteria to the performance that hadn’t really been heard before. That strained longing is something that would appear in almost every girl-group record of the early sixties, and you can hear very clear echoes of the Chantels in records by people like the Ronettes, the Crystals, and the Shangri-Las. It’s a far cry from “Mr. Lee”. Most of the time, when people talk about the Chantels’ vocals, they – rightly – draw attention to Arlene Smith’s leads, which are astonishing. But listen to the a capella intro, which is repeated as the outro, and you can hear those choir-trained voices – this was a vocal group, not just a singer and some cooing background vocalists: [Excerpt: the Chantels, “He’s Gone”] As well as being pioneers in the girl-group sound, the Chantels were also one of the first self-contained vocal groups to play their own instruments on stage. This was not something that they did at first, but something that Barrett encouraged them to do. Some of them had instrumental training already, and those who didn’t were taught how to play by Barrett. Sonia and Jackie played guitar, Arlene bass, Lois piano, and Renee the drums. They even, according to Renee’s autobiography, recorded an instrumental by themselves, called “The Chantels’ Rock”. Almost immediately, the girls were pulled out of Catholic school and instead sent to Quintano’s School for Young Professionals, the same school that the Teenagers went to, which was set up to accommodate children who had to go on tour. But there was one exception. Lois’ mother would not let her transfer schools, or go on tour with the group. She could sing with them in the studio, and when they were performing in New York, but until she graduated high school that was all. In many ways her mother was right to be worried, or at least Richie Barrett believed she had good reason to be. They started touring as soon as “He’s Gone” came out, but the girls, at the time, resented Barrett, who came along on tour with them, because he would lock them in the dressing rooms and only let them out for the show itself, not allowing them to socialise with the other acts. In retrospect, given that they were girls in their teens, and they were touring with large numbers of male musicians, many of them with reputations as sexual predators, Barrett’s protectiveness (and his apparent threats to several of these men) was probably justified. For example, in early 1958, the girls were sent out on a tour that became legendary – and given its lineup it’s easy to see why. As well as the Chantels, the tour had Frankie Lymon, Danny & the Juniors, the Diamonds, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Larry Williams, Buddy Holly, and as alternating headliners Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. We’ll talk more about that tour in the next couple of episodes, but aside from the undoubted musical quality of the performers, that was simply not a group of people who young women were going to be safe around (though several of the individuals there were harmless enough). One could, of course, argue that young girls shouldn’t be put in that situation at all, but that never seems to have occurred to anyone involved. By the time of that tour, they’d recorded what would become by far their biggest hit, their second single, “Maybe”: [Excerpt: The Chantels, “Maybe”] “Maybe” was a song that was originally co-credited to George Goldner and an unknown “Casey”, but for which Richie Barrett later sued and won co-writing credit. Barrett was presumably the sole writer, though some have claimed that Arlene Smith was an uncredited co-writer – something the other Chantels deny. It was very much in the mould of “He’s Gone”, and concentrated even more on Smith’s lead vocal, and that lead vocal took an immense amount of work to obtain. In total they recorded fifty-two takes of the song before they got one that sounded right, and Smith was crying in frustration when she recorded the last take. “Maybe” reached number fifteen on the pop charts, and number two on the R&B charts, and it became a classic that has been covered by everyone from Janis Joplin to the Three Degrees. The group’s next two records, “Every Night (I Pray)” and “I Love You So”, both charted as well, though neither of them was a massive hit in the way that “Maybe” was. But after this point, the hits dried up – something that wasn’t helped by the fact that George Goldner went through a phase of having his artists perform old standards, which didn’t really suit the Chantels’ voices. But they’d had four hit records in a row, which was enough for them to get an album released. The album, which just featured the A- and B-sides of their first six singles, was originally released with a photo of the group on the front. That version was quickly withdrawn and replaced with a stock image of two white teenagers at a jukebox, just in case you’ve forgotten how appallingly racist the music industry was at this point. They continued releasing singles, but they were also increasingly being used as backing vocalists for other artists produced by Barrett. He had them backing Jimmy Pemberton on “Rags to Riches”: [Excerpt: Jimmy Pemberton, “Rags to Riches”] And they also backed Barrett himself on “Summer Love”, which got to the lower reaches of the top one hundred in pop, and made the top thirty in the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Richie Barrett and the Chantels, “Summer Love”] There had also been some attempts to give Arlene a separate career outside the Chantels, as she duetted with Willie Wilson on “I’ve Lied”: [Excerpt: Willie Wilson and the Tunemasters, “I’ve Lied”] Unfortunately, after a year of success followed by another year of comparative failure, the group discovered that their career was at an end, thanks to George Goldner. We’ve talked about Goldner before, most significantly in the episode on “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”, but he had an almost unique combination of strong points and flaws as a record executive. His strongest point was his musical taste. Nobody who knew him respected his taste, but everyone respected his ability to pick a hit, and both of these things sprang from the same basic reason – he had exactly the same musical tastes as a typical teenage girl from the period. Now, it’s an unfortunate fact that the tastes of teenage girls are looked down upon by almost anyone with any power in the music industry, because of the almost universal misogyny in the industry, but the fact remains that teenage girls were becoming a powerful demographic as customers, and anyone who could accurately predict the music that they were going to buy would have a tremendous advantage when it came to making money in the music industry. And Goldner definitely made himself enough money over the years, because he engaged in all the usual practices of ripping off his artists – who were, very often, teenagers themselves. He would credit himself as the writer of their songs, he would engage in shady accounting practices, and all the rest. But Goldner’s real problem was his gambling addiction, and so there’s a pattern that happens over and again throughout the fifties and sixties. Goldner starts up a new record label, discovers some teenage and/or black act, and makes them into overnight stars. Goldner then starts getting vast amounts of money, because he’s ripping off his new discoveries. Goldner starts gambling with that money, loses badly, gets into debt with the mob, and goes to Morris Levy for a loan in order to keep his business going. Levy and his Mafia friends end up taking over the whole company, in exchange for writing off the debts. Levy replaces Goldner’s writing credits on the hits with his own name, stops paying the artists anything at all, and collects all the money from the hits for the rest of his life, while Goldner is left with nothing and goes off to find another bunch of teenagers. And so End Records met the same fate as all of Goldner’s other labels. It went bankrupt, and closed down, owing the Chantels a great deal of money. After End records closed, the Chantels wanted to carry on – but Arlene Smith decided she wanted to go solo instead. She recorded a couple of singles with a new producer, Phil Spector: [Excerpt: Arlene Smith, “Love, Love, Love”] And she also recorded another single with Richie Barrett as producer: [Excerpt: Arlene Smith, “Everything”] At first, that looked like it would be the end of the Chantels, but then a year or so later Richie Barrett got back in touch with the girls. He had some ideas for records that would use the Chantels sound. By this point, Lois had decided that she was going to retire from the music business, but Jackie, Renee, and Sonia agreed to restart their career. There was a problem, though – they weren’t sure what to do without their lead singer. Barrett told them he would sort it out for them. Barrett had been working with another girl group, the Veneers, for a couple of years. They’d released a few singles on Goldner-owned labels, like “Believe Me (My Angel)”: [Excerpt: The Veneers, “Believe Me (My Angel)”] And they’d also been the regular backing group Barrett used for sessions for male vocalists like Titus Turner: [Excerpt: Titus Turner, “The Return of Stagolee”] But they’d never had a huge amount of success. So Barrett got their lead singer, Annette Swinson, to replace Arlene. To make it up to the Veneers, he got the rest of them a job as Jackie Wilson’s backing vocalists. He changed Annette’s name to Annette Smith, and the new lineup of the group had a few more hits, with “Look in My Eyes”, which went to number six on the R&B charts and number fourteen on the pop charts: [Excerpt: The Chantels, “Look in My Eyes”] They also backed Richie Barrett on an answer record to Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road Jack”, titled “Well I Told You”, which made the top thirty on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Richie Barrett and the Chantels, “Well I Told You”] This second phase of the Chantels’ career was successful enough that Goldner, who no longer had the girls under contract, got one of his record labels to put out a new Chantels album, featuring a few tracks he owned by them that hadn’t been on their first album. To fill out the album, and make it sound more like the current group, he also took a few of the Veneers’ singles and stuck them on it under the Chantels’ name. Annette would stay with the group for a while, but the sixties saw several lineup changes, as the group stopped having chart successes, and members temporarily dropped out to have children or pursue careers. However, Sonia and Renee remained in place throughout, as the two constant members of the group (though Sonia also moonlit for a while in the sixties with another group Richie Barrett was looking after at the time, the Three Degrees). By the mid-nineties, they had reformed with all of the original members except Arlene, who was replaced by Ami Ortiz, who can do a very creditable imitation of Arlene’s lead vocals. Sadly Jackie Landry died in 1997, but the other four continued to tour, though only intermittently in between holding down day jobs. Almost uniquely, the Chantels are still touring with the majority of their original members. Sonia Goring Wilson, Renee Minus White, and Lois Harris Powell still tour with the group, and they have several tour dates booked in for 2020, mostly on the east coast of the US. Arlene Smith spent many years touring solo and performing with her own rival “Chantels” group. She has very occasionally reunited with the rest of the Chantels for one-off performances, but there appears to be bad blood between them. She kept performing into the middle of the last decade, and as of 2018, her Facebook page said she was planning a comeback, but no further details have emerged. The Chantels never received either the money or the acclaim that they deserved, given their run of chart successes and the way that they pioneered the girl group sound. But more than sixty years on from their biggest hits, four of the five of them are still alive, and apparently healthy, happy, and performing when the opportunity arises, and three of them are still good friends. Given the careers of most other stars of the era, especially the other child stars, that’s as close to a happy ending as a group gets.

  Episode sixty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Maybe" by the Chantels, and covers child stardom, hymns in Latin, and how to get discovered twice in one day. 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 "Don't You Just Know It" by Huey "Piano" Smith and the Clowns.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The only book actually about the Chantels is barely a book -- Maybe, Renee Minus White's self-published memoir, is more of a pamphlet, and it only manages even to get to that length with a ton of padding -- things like her fruit cake recipe. Don't expect much insight from this one. A big chunk of the outline of the story comes from Girl Groups; Fabulous Females Who Rocked the World by John Clemente, which has  a chapter on the Chantels.  This article on Richie Barrett's career filled in much of the detail.  My opinions of George Goldner come mostly from reading two books -- Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz, which talks about Leiber and Stoller's attempts to go into business with Goldner, and Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy by Richard Carlin. There are innumerable collections of the small number of recordings the Chantels released -- this one is as good as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? ERRATUM: I refer to “Summer Love” rather than “Summer's Love”   Transcript We've already seen one girl group, when we looked at “Mr Lee” by the Bobbettes, but already within a few months of the Bobbettes' breakout hit, other groups were making waves with the public. The Chantels were one such group, and one of the best. They were pretty much exact contemporaries of the Bobbettes – so much so that when the Bobbettes were forming, they decided against calling themselves the Chanels, because it would be too similar. The Chantels, too, changed their name early on. They were formed by a group of girls at a Catholic school – St Anthony of Padua school in the Bronx – and were originally named “the Crystals”, but they found that another group in the area had already named themselves that, and so they changed it. (This other group was not the same one as the famous Crystals, who didn't form until 1961). They decided to name themselves after St Francis de Chantal after their school won a basketball game against St. Francis de Chantal school – when they discovered that the Chantal in the saint's name was from the same root as the French word for singing, it seemed to be too perfect for them. Originally there were around a dozen members of the group, but they slowly whittled themselves down to five girls, between the ages of fourteen and seventeen – Arlene Smith, Lois Harris, Sonia Goring, Jackie Landry, and Renee Minus. According to Renee (who now goes by her married name Renee Minus White) the group's name came from a brainstorming session between her, Lois, Jackie, and Sonia, with Arlene agreeing to it later – this may, though, have more to do with ongoing disputes between Arlene and the other group members than with what actually happened. They were drawn together by their mutual love of R&B vocal groups – a particular favourite record of theirs was “In Paradise” by the Cookies, a New York-based girl group who had started recording a few years earlier, and whose records were produced by Jesse Stone, but who wouldn't have any major chart successes for several years yet: [Excerpt: The Cookies, "In Paradise"] So they were R&B singers, but the fact that these were Catholic schoolgirls, specifically, points to something about the way their music developed, and about early rock and roll more generally. We've talked about the influence of religious music on rock and roll before, but the type of religious music that had influenced it up until this point had generally come from two sources – either the black gospel music that was created by and for worshippers in African-American Pentecostal denominations, or the euphemistically-named “Southern Gospel” that is usually made by white Pentecostals, and by Southern Baptists. These denominations, in 2020, have a certain amount of institutional power – especially the Southern Baptists, who are now one of the most important power blocs within the Republican Party. But in the 1950s, those were the churches of the poorest, most despised, people. By geography, class, and race, the people who attended those churches were overwhelmingly those who would be looked down on by the people who had actual power in the USA. The churches that people with power overwhelmingly went to at the time were those which had been established in Western Europe – the so-called mainline Protestant churches – and, to a lesser extent, the Catholic Church. The music of those churches had very little influence on rock and roll. It makes sense that this would be the case – obviously underprivileged people's music would be influenced by the churches that underprivileged people went to, rather than the ones that privileged people attended, and rock and roll was, at this point, still a music made almost solely by people who were underprivileged on one or more axis – but it's still worth pointing out, because for the first time we're going to look at a group who – while they were also underprivileged, being black – were influenced by Catholic liturgical music, rather than gospel or spiritual music. Because there's always been a geographical variation, as well as one based on class and race, in what religions dominate in the US. While evangelical churches predominate in the southern states, in the North-East there were, especially at the time we're talking about, far more mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jewish people. The Chantels were a New York group, and it's notable that New York groups were far more likely to have been influenced by Catholic or Episcopalian liturgical music, and choral music in general, than vocal groups from other areas. This may go some way towards explaining Johnny Otis' observation that all the LA vocal groups he knew had pitching problems, while the New York groups could sing in tune – choir practice may have made the New York groups more technically adept (though to my own ears, the New York groups tend to make much less interesting music than the LA groups). Certainly when it comes to the Chantels, the girls had all sung in the choir, and had been taught to read music and play the piano, although a couple of them had eventually been kicked out of the choir for singing “that skip and jump music”, as the nuns referred to rock and roll. Indeed, at their very first appearance at the Apollo, after getting a record contract, one of the two songs they performed was a Catholic hymn, in Latin - “Terra Tremuit”. That piece remains in the group's repertoire to this day, and while they've never formally recorded it, there are videos on YouTube of them performing it: [Excerpt: The Chantels, "Terra Tremuit", soundcheck recording] The story of how the Chantels were discovered, as it's usually told, is one that leaves one asking more questions than it answers. The group were walking down the street, when they passed a rehearsal room. A young man spotted them on the street and asked them if they were singers, since they were dressed identically. When they said “yes”, he took them up to a rehearsal studio to hear them. The rehearsal studio happened to be in the Brill Building. We've not mentioned the Brill Building so far, because we're only just getting to the point where it started to have an impact on rock and roll music, but it was a building on Broadway – 1619 Broadway to be exact – which was the home of dozens, even hundreds at times, of music publishers, record labels, and talent agencies. There were a few other nearby buildings, most notably 1650 Broadway, which became the home of Aldon Music, which often get lumped in with the Brill Building when most people talk about it, and when I refer to the Brill Building in future episodes I'll be referring to the whole ecosystem of music industries that sprang up on Broadway in the fifties and early sixties. But in this case, they were invited into the main Brill Building itself. They weren't just being invited into some random room, but into the heart of the music industry on the East Coast of America. This was the kind of thing that normally only happens in films – and relatively unrealistic films at that. So far, so cliched, though it's hard to believe that that kind of thing ever really happened. But then something happened that isn't in any of the cliches – the girls noticed, through the window, that three members of the Valentines, one of their favourite groups, were walking past. We've mentioned the Valentines a few months ago, when talking about Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and we talked about how Richie Barrett, as well as being a singer and songwriter in the group, was also a talent scout for George Goldner's record labels. The Valentines had released several records, but none of them had had anything but local success, though records like “The Woo Woo Train” have since become cult favourites among lovers of 1950s vocal group music: [Excerpt: The Valentines, "The Woo Woo Train"] The girls loved the Valentines, and they also knew that Barrett was important in the industry. They decided to run out of the rehearsal room and accost the group members. They told Richie Barrett that they were a singing group, and when he didn't believe them, they burst into song, singing what would later become the B-side of their first record, “The Plea”: [Excerpt: The Chantels, "The Plea"] That song was one they'd written themselves, sort of. It was actually based on a song that a group of boys they knew, who sang in a street-corner group, had made up. That song had been called “Baby”, but the Chantels had taken it and reworked it into their own song. The version that they finally recorded, which we just heard, was further revamped by Barrett. Barrett was impressed, and said he'd be in touch. But then he never bothered to get in contact with them again, until Jackie Landry managed to obtain his home address and get in touch with him. She got the address through a friend of hers, a member of the Teenchords, a vocal group fronted by Frankie Lymon's brother Lewis, who recorded for one of George Goldner's labels, releasing tracks like “Your Last Chance”: [Excerpt: Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, "Your Last Chance"] They tracked down Barrett, and he agreed to try to get them signed to a record deal. That story has many, many, problems, and frankly doesn't make any kind of sense, but it's the accepted history you'll find in books that deal with the group. According to Renee Minus White's autobiography, though, each of the girls has a different recollection of how they first met Barrett – in her version, they simply waited at the stage door to get autographs, and told him they were a singing group. My guess is that the accepted story is an attempt to reconcile a bunch of irreconcilable versions of the story. Whatever the true facts as to how they started to work with Richie Barrett, the important thing is that they did end up working with him. Barrett was impressed by their ability not just to sing the “oohs” and “aahs”, but the complex polyphonic parts that they sang in choir. For the most part, doo-wop groups either sang simple block chords behind a lead singer, or they all sang their own moving parts that worked more or less in isolation – the bass singer would sing his part, the falsetto singer his, and so on. I say “his” because pretty much all doo-wop groups at this point were male. They were all singing the same song, but doing their own thing. The Chantels were different – they were singing block harmonies, but they weren't singing simple chords, but interlocking moving lines. What they were doing ended up being closer to the so-called "modern harmony" of jazz vocal groups like the Four Freshmen: [Excerpt: The Four Freshmen, "It's a Blue World"] But where other groups singing in that style had no R&B background, the Chantels were able to sing a rhythm and blues song with the best of them. Barrett signed the group to End Records, one of George Goldner's stable of record labels. But before recording them, he spent weeks rehearsing them, and teaching them how to perform on stage. The first record they made, when they finally went into the studio, was a song primarily written by Arlene Smith, who also sang lead, though the composition is credited to the girls as a group. And listening to it, you have in this record for the first time the crystallisation of the girl-group sound, the sound that would later become a hallmark of people like Phil Spector. [Excerpt: The Chantels, "He's Gone"] It's a song about adolescent anguish, written by and for adolescents, and it has a drama and angst to it that none of the other records by girl groups had had before – it's obviously inspired by groups like the Penguins and the Platters, but there's a near-hysteria to the performance that hadn't really been heard before. That strained longing is something that would appear in almost every girl-group record of the early sixties, and you can hear very clear echoes of the Chantels in records by people like the Ronettes, the Crystals, and the Shangri-Las. It's a far cry from “Mr. Lee”. Most of the time, when people talk about the Chantels' vocals, they – rightly – draw attention to Arlene Smith's leads, which are astonishing. But listen to the a capella intro, which is repeated as the outro, and you can hear those choir-trained voices – this was a vocal group, not just a singer and some cooing background vocalists: [Excerpt: the Chantels, "He's Gone"] As well as being pioneers in the girl-group sound, the Chantels were also one of the first self-contained vocal groups to play their own instruments on stage. This was not something that they did at first, but something that Barrett encouraged them to do. Some of them had instrumental training already, and those who didn't were taught how to play by Barrett. Sonia and Jackie played guitar, Arlene bass, Lois piano, and Renee the drums. They even, according to Renee's autobiography, recorded an instrumental by themselves, called “The Chantels' Rock”. Almost immediately, the girls were pulled out of Catholic school and instead sent to Quintano’s School for Young Professionals, the same school that the Teenagers went to, which was set up to accommodate children who had to go on tour. But there was one exception. Lois' mother would not let her transfer schools, or go on tour with the group. She could sing with them in the studio, and when they were performing in New York, but until she graduated high school that was all. In many ways her mother was right to be worried, or at least Richie Barrett believed she had good reason to be. They started touring as soon as “He's Gone” came out, but the girls, at the time, resented Barrett, who came along on tour with them, because he would lock them in the dressing rooms and only let them out for the show itself, not allowing them to socialise with the other acts. In retrospect, given that they were girls in their teens, and they were touring with large numbers of male musicians, many of them with reputations as sexual predators, Barrett's protectiveness (and his apparent threats to several of these men) was probably justified. For example, in early 1958, the girls were sent out on a tour that became legendary – and given its lineup it's easy to see why. As well as the Chantels, the tour had Frankie Lymon, Danny & the Juniors, the Diamonds, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Larry Williams, Buddy Holly, and as alternating headliners Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. We'll talk more about that tour in the next couple of episodes, but aside from the undoubted musical quality of the performers, that was simply not a group of people who young women were going to be safe around (though several of the individuals there were harmless enough). One could, of course, argue that young girls shouldn't be put in that situation at all, but that never seems to have occurred to anyone involved. By the time of that tour, they'd recorded what would become by far their biggest hit, their second single, “Maybe”: [Excerpt: The Chantels, "Maybe"] “Maybe” was a song that was originally co-credited to George Goldner and an unknown “Casey”, but for which Richie Barrett later sued and won co-writing credit. Barrett was presumably the sole writer, though some have claimed that Arlene Smith was an uncredited co-writer – something the other Chantels deny. It was very much in the mould of “He's Gone”, and concentrated even more on Smith's lead vocal, and that lead vocal took an immense amount of work to obtain. In total they recorded fifty-two takes of the song before they got one that sounded right, and Smith was crying in frustration when she recorded the last take. “Maybe” reached number fifteen on the pop charts, and number two on the R&B charts, and it became a classic that has been covered by everyone from Janis Joplin to the Three Degrees. The group's next two records, “Every Night (I Pray)” and “I Love You So”, both charted as well, though neither of them was a massive hit in the way that “Maybe” was. But after this point, the hits dried up – something that wasn't helped by the fact that George Goldner went through a phase of having his artists perform old standards, which didn't really suit the Chantels' voices. But they'd had four hit records in a row, which was enough for them to get an album released. The album, which just featured the A- and B-sides of their first six singles, was originally released with a photo of the group on the front. That version was quickly withdrawn and replaced with a stock image of two white teenagers at a jukebox, just in case you've forgotten how appallingly racist the music industry was at this point. They continued releasing singles, but they were also increasingly being used as backing vocalists for other artists produced by Barrett. He had them backing Jimmy Pemberton on “Rags to Riches”: [Excerpt: Jimmy Pemberton, “Rags to Riches”] And they also backed Barrett himself on "Summer Love", which got to the lower reaches of the top one hundred in pop, and made the top thirty in the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Richie Barrett and the Chantels, “Summer Love”] There had also been some attempts to give Arlene a separate career outside the Chantels, as she duetted with Willie Wilson on “I've Lied”: [Excerpt: Willie Wilson and the Tunemasters, "I've Lied"] Unfortunately, after a year of success followed by another year of comparative failure, the group discovered that their career was at an end, thanks to George Goldner. We've talked about Goldner before, most significantly in the episode on “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”, but he had an almost unique combination of strong points and flaws as a record executive. His strongest point was his musical taste. Nobody who knew him respected his taste, but everyone respected his ability to pick a hit, and both of these things sprang from the same basic reason – he had exactly the same musical tastes as a typical teenage girl from the period. Now, it's an unfortunate fact that the tastes of teenage girls are looked down upon by almost anyone with any power in the music industry, because of the almost universal misogyny in the industry, but the fact remains that teenage girls were becoming a powerful demographic as customers, and anyone who could accurately predict the music that they were going to buy would have a tremendous advantage when it came to making money in the music industry. And Goldner definitely made himself enough money over the years, because he engaged in all the usual practices of ripping off his artists – who were, very often, teenagers themselves. He would credit himself as the writer of their songs, he would engage in shady accounting practices, and all the rest. But Goldner's real problem was his gambling addiction, and so there's a pattern that happens over and again throughout the fifties and sixties. Goldner starts up a new record label, discovers some teenage and/or black act, and makes them into overnight stars. Goldner then starts getting vast amounts of money, because he's ripping off his new discoveries. Goldner starts gambling with that money, loses badly, gets into debt with the mob, and goes to Morris Levy for a loan in order to keep his business going. Levy and his Mafia friends end up taking over the whole company, in exchange for writing off the debts. Levy replaces Goldner's writing credits on the hits with his own name, stops paying the artists anything at all, and collects all the money from the hits for the rest of his life, while Goldner is left with nothing and goes off to find another bunch of teenagers. And so End Records met the same fate as all of Goldner's other labels. It went bankrupt, and closed down, owing the Chantels a great deal of money. After End records closed, the Chantels wanted to carry on – but Arlene Smith decided she wanted to go solo instead. She recorded a couple of singles with a new producer, Phil Spector: [Excerpt: Arlene Smith, "Love, Love, Love"] And she also recorded another single with Richie Barrett as producer: [Excerpt: Arlene Smith, "Everything"] At first, that looked like it would be the end of the Chantels, but then a year or so later Richie Barrett got back in touch with the girls. He had some ideas for records that would use the Chantels sound. By this point, Lois had decided that she was going to retire from the music business, but Jackie, Renee, and Sonia agreed to restart their career. There was a problem, though – they weren't sure what to do without their lead singer. Barrett told them he would sort it out for them. Barrett had been working with another girl group, the Veneers, for a couple of years. They'd released a few singles on Goldner-owned labels, like “Believe Me (My Angel)”: [Excerpt: The Veneers, "Believe Me (My Angel)"] And they'd also been the regular backing group Barrett used for sessions for male vocalists like Titus Turner: [Excerpt: Titus Turner, "The Return of Stagolee"] But they'd never had a huge amount of success. So Barrett got their lead singer, Annette Swinson, to replace Arlene. To make it up to the Veneers, he got the rest of them a job as Jackie Wilson's backing vocalists. He changed Annette's name to Annette Smith, and the new lineup of the group had a few more hits, with “Look in My Eyes”, which went to number six on the R&B charts and number fourteen on the pop charts: [Excerpt: The Chantels, "Look in My Eyes"] They also backed Richie Barrett on an answer record to Ray Charles' “Hit the Road Jack”, titled “Well I Told You”, which made the top thirty on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Richie Barrett and the Chantels, "Well I Told You"] This second phase of the Chantels' career was successful enough that Goldner, who no longer had the girls under contract, got one of his record labels to put out a new Chantels album, featuring a few tracks he owned by them that hadn't been on their first album. To fill out the album, and make it sound more like the current group, he also took a few of the Veneers' singles and stuck them on it under the Chantels' name. Annette would stay with the group for a while, but the sixties saw several lineup changes, as the group stopped having chart successes, and members temporarily dropped out to have children or pursue careers. However, Sonia and Renee remained in place throughout, as the two constant members of the group (though Sonia also moonlit for a while in the sixties with another group Richie Barrett was looking after at the time, the Three Degrees). By the mid-nineties, they had reformed with all of the original members except Arlene, who was replaced by Ami Ortiz, who can do a very creditable imitation of Arlene's lead vocals. Sadly Jackie Landry died in 1997, but the other four continued to tour, though only intermittently in between holding down day jobs. Almost uniquely, the Chantels are still touring with the majority of their original members. Sonia Goring Wilson, Renee Minus White, and Lois Harris Powell still tour with the group, and they have several tour dates booked in for 2020, mostly on the east coast of the US. Arlene Smith spent many years touring solo and performing with her own rival “Chantels” group. She has very occasionally reunited with the rest of the Chantels for one-off performances, but there appears to be bad blood between them. She kept performing into the middle of the last decade, and as of 2018, her Facebook page said she was planning a comeback, but no further details have emerged. The Chantels never received either the money or the acclaim that they deserved, given their run of chart successes and the way that they pioneered the girl group sound. But more than sixty years on from their biggest hits, four of the five of them are still alive, and apparently healthy, happy, and performing when the opportunity arises, and three of them are still good friends. Given the careers of most other stars of the era, especially the other child stars, that's as close to a happy ending as a group gets.

"Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways" -- author Richard Carlin discusses his book and the life of Moses Asch.

"Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways" -- author Richard Carlin discusses his book and the life of Moses Asch.

Aaron invites music historian Richard Carlin to drop in for the hour. Richard has written the book, “Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways,” and he shares some great recordings of legendary performers like folk hero Woody Guthrie, jazz trail-blazer Mary Lou Williams, and banjo balladeer Dock Boggs.