One Hit No More, Chapter 8: "Party Doll" Was the Life of the Party for Buddy Knox

Early branding issues (& Knox is 3rd from left.)

One of the more relatable bands in the sample, honestly. They sound like the ones I came up watching.

The Hit
If I’d ever heard Buddy Knox’s “Party Doll” before working on this chapter, it slipped my mind. Despite being something of a groundbreaking tune – which I’ll get to – it doesn't sound so different from everything else you hear from the early rock of the late 1950s. And yet it was a little risque for its time: the King of American Bandstand, Dick Clark, refused to pick up Knox’s single due to the signature line in its chorus: “I want to make love to you.”

That racy line surprises less once you know that Knox fronted the Rhythm Orchids, a band that became all the rage at West Texas State College. Despite getting inspiration to record from two straight-up legends - they hardly get bigger than Roy Orbison or Elvis Presley (Knox recalls Presley telling him after he met him after a show, “Man, if you've got a band and some good songs, get into a recording studio cause something is fixing to happen”) – the Rhythm Orchids didn’t have visions of fame dancing in their heads when they stepped into “the recording studio.” They cut the singles – “Party Doll” b/w “I’m Sticking With You” – to pass on as “souvenirs” for their fans at WTSC and beyond. They were lucky to get that:

“Norman was an electrician who had built his own studio. His echo chamber was in the top of his dad's garage with a speaker at one end and a microphone at the other. Every time a truck passed by, it sounded like it was in the studio with us.”

The “Norman” referred to above was Norman Petty. Anyone who knows that name is a couple steps ahead on one of the Points of Interest (see below).

In any case, Knox and his bandmates paid $60 bucks for three days’ worth of recording time at a studio that had no interest in operating as a professional outfit. The recording sessions ran from midnight to 6:00 a.m. so they wouldn’t have to share the microphones with those trucks. That flyer scored them a No. 1 hit that ultimately 15 million copies and went gold within its first year.

Not bad for a kid from Happy, Texas, who was surely the most famous of his high school graduating class of 26 kids.

One Hit No More, Chapter 7: Mickey, Sylvia and Their Strange Love

Mickey & Sylvia

Thanks to research done during an earlier (*and yet later) chapter in this series, I knew how one story ended going in. [*Ed. - I've pushed the first iteration of this series to the early 1980s, but I'm rebooting to fill in some gaps.] You may too, depending on your own travels....

The Hit
It neither lasted all that long nor rose all that high – just two weeks atop Billboard’s R&B charts, and only to No. 11 on the Pop charts – Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange” has enjoyed a long, lingering run in pop culture. Movies that want to hearken to a certain time, place and/or mood in the length of an snippet of a song – the short-list includes Badlands, Casino and, most famously, Dirty Dancing – have used it, but it also lives on in reinterpretations by Paul McCartney, the Everly Brothers (gave ‘em a UK hit), and Peaches & Herb...and I recommend sticking with the original, for what it's worth.

The plucked, twanging, yet rich and variegated guitar stands out, along with the shuffling Latin beat and undertones and the vocals, which pine almost theatrically. They go back and forth in a playful call-and-response in the single’s bridge, but it’s mostly a dreamy duet with the two of them singing like two lovestruck kids holding hands...as they explore the pain and ecstasy of love in song. Despite being released in 1957 and has rock-guitar tones all over it, “Love Is Strange” listens more like a spin rock-influenced pop tune than rock-‘n’ roll. And what’s that than another way of saying Mickey & Sylvia’s most famous single grew from different roots. To borrow a quote from 2014 retrospective on Sylvia in Dazed Digital:

“Mickey and I were working at the Howard Theatre in Washington. Bo Diddley was on the same bill and he would play this chant where Jerome Green, his maraca player would say to him, 'Bo? How do you call your woman?' And Bo would say, 'C'mere woman!' And it went on like that until Bo finally says, 'Baby, my sweet baby'. I told Bo that he should record that tune, but when he took it to Leonard Chess, he told him it was nothin'.” Undeterred, and with Bo's approval, Sylvia rearranged the song to fit into the Mickey and Sylvia mode and then took the track to RCA subsidiary, Groove. That label too was unimpressed and it was only when Sylvia threatened to leave them all together, that they let her record ‘Love Is Strange.’ The result was a sensual, latin-flavoured call and response groove that became an overnight jukebox and radio sensation. All of a sudden they were the number one pop band in America.”

Another source, She Shreds, tightened the back-story into this thesis:

One Hit No More, Chapter 6: Dale Hawkins, Swamp Boogie, and "Susie Q"

I see you.

If you thought Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Susie Q” was an original, but never felt 100% sure about that, raise your hand.

The Hit
There’s definitely something sexy about it. The trance-like groove of the guitar figure, the blues-inspired lyric that borders on romantic mantra, the steady (unflagging) rhythm: put it all together and you get something damn close to a metaphor in musical form.

To stick with a persistent theme in this series’ early chapters, Dale Hawkins’ label (Checker Records) totally slept on his “Susie Q,” sitting on it for months before they released. Somewhere in the middle of stewing in his frustrations, Hawkins complained about it to a friendly DJ from Shreveport, Louisiana. The DJ rose to the occasion with a passive-aggressive masterpiece:

“Hawkins credits Shreveport disc-jockey Chuck Dunaway with helping Chess see the light. ‘I had sat there for three months waiting for 'em to put it out and [Dunaway] said, “Dale, let's just send it up to [Jerry] Wexler.” We sent a copy up to Atlantic and a few days later Jerry called and said, “I love it. I'll take it.” Then I explained to him, “Mr Wexler, Mr. Chess has got the thing and he hasn't released it. I had signed the papers with him.” He said, “What? You call him and tell him that he should either sh** or get off the pot.” “You want me to say it just like that?” He said, “That's all you got to say.” I called Mr. Chess and told him that. There was a little pause--and to hear Leonard pause during a conversation was something to talk about--and he said, “I'll call you back tomorrow.” Three days later, it was on the street. That's how fast it worked.’”

To their credit, Chess kept Hawkins’ single aloft once it took off by way of a “rolling marketing” strategy that involved pushing it in one market, and then moving on to the next one before that first market dried all the way up. While that stroke of genius didn’t come all the way off (Philistines), “Susie-Q” never became a monster hit. It topped the R&B charts – something that’s relevant to the larger story – but never went higher than No. 11 on the Pop charts and it didn’t stay long. And yet, it lingered in the musical culture for a couple decades...not unlike Dale Hawkins.

One Hit No More, Chapter 4: "Be-Bop-a-Lula," aka, Gene Vincent's Happiest Moment

Yeah, no. Not even he could be drunk enough...

Some discrepancies betwixt the sources in this one. And some guns...

The Hit
I have a personal connection to Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-a-Lula”: my dad used to wake me for Sunday school with renditions of old rock ‘n’ roll songs, all of them flat as they were loud.

Vincent sang his signature song differently, obviously (again, that was my dad waking me for Sunday school), with pinched, passionate phrasing that hinted at a man on the edge of ecstasy and a far from accidental dash of Elvis. The backing music – heavy on twang, surprisingly muted, but steady, steady, steady – lacks the sound and fury of some of the early rock records, and it turns out that’s the drummer, Dickie Harrell, screaming in the background because he wanted to prove to his mom that was him playing on the single.

Sources disagree how the song came together, but they all agree on where: in the U.S. Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, Virginia, where Vincent spent about half a year recovering from the motorcycle accident that shattered his leg (and almost saw it amputated). As for the how, a couple sources hold that a fellow patient named Don Graves wrote the words – with one source crediting a local stripper for the inspiration – while Vincent filled in the music. Other sources say Vincent bought the song, another says Vincent’s future manager, “Sheriff Tex” Davis, bought it while another has Davis claiming he wrote it with Vincent. Wikipedia’s entry on the song seconds a secondary theory in another source in saying that the inspiration came from the old Little Lulu comic strip, but that came from Vincent who admitted to rescuing that story from a blackout. Of which Vincent had many. So, let’s talk about how that happened...

The Rest of the Story, Briefly
He was born Vincent Eugene Craddock to Mary Louise and Ezekiah Jackson Craddock in Norfolk, Virginia in February of 1935, but his formative experiences happened in a small Virginia town called Munden Point. Vincent’s parents ran a general store in the town that did well enough that they could buy young Vincent a guitar. His first taste of music came from the old Grand Ole Opry mega broadcasts, but the move to Munden Point introduced him to black musical styles like gospel and blues. Once he had that guitar, he’d sit at the front of the store learning as he played; some of the locals egged him on by asking him to play.

His struggles in school, both socially (scrawny kid) and scholastically, led him to drop out at age 17 to join the U.S. Navy (his dad signed the papers). He served during the Korean War, without seeing any action, but liked either Navy life enough, or the money, to re-enlist for another five-year hitch in 1955. Vincent traded his re-enlistment bonus for the Triumph motorcycle that would get nailed by a car (possibly driven by a drunk) in short order and, more or less, destroy his leg. This is another place where sources disagree, but most of them agree he started wearing the “heavy metal brace” everyone mentions after this vehicular accident, as opposed to the later one. Something else that came with that brace: Vincent’s booze and pain pill habit.

One Hit No More, Chapter 3: The Chords (Literally) Go "Sh-Boom"!

A little who's who for ya.

My all-time favorite doo wop song. Hands down.

The Hit
“’Sh-Boom’ is supposed to have been titled after the threat of an atom bomb explosion which, in the midst of Cold War posturing in 1954, was a very real topic on the public's mind. However, this demented ditty also included the surreally optimistic message that everything was ultimately fine and as the rest of the lyrics suggested, ‘life could be a dream.’”
- Allmusic.com

I wish this was true with all my heart. But...

“It had nothing to do with the A-Bomb particularly. It was just a thing that happened to happen.... Jimmy was a great one for telling stories and he may have embellished it in that direction.”
- Buddy McRae (the once last-living Chord, New York Daily News)

Choose your universe, people...

Much like what happened with The Penguins and “Earth Angel,” the Chords brought their label with an original song called “Sh-Boom” and the label couldn’t give less of a shit about it. What excited them? A cover of the Patti Page tune, “Cross Over the Bridge.” The similarities don’t stop with the label guessing wrong – e.g., the same DJ (LA’s Dick “Huggy Boy” Hugg) flipped over the 45 and found the real hit, the crossover from R&B to the Pop charts, the goddamn Crew Cuts cashing in on another act’s single – and they kept going in the big picture (e.g., singing second banana to another group their manager liked/valued more). The doo wop craze had a real gold-rush quality to it, at least in the first (mostly Black) wave.

The single itself is all energy, bright and irrepressible – and the return to the regular vocals after a bass-led bridge, in particular, really stands up that line in Allmusic.com’s history about a “demented ditty [that] also included the surreally optimistic message hat everything was ultimately fine.” Into my veins, etc. Which isn’t bad for a single written by a bunch of kids in a ’54 Buick convertible. The public ate it up after its July 3, 1954 release, lifting it to No. 2 on the R&B charts (The Drifters’ “Honey Love” kept it out) and keeping it on the same for 15 weeks. It climbed as high as No. 5 on the Pop charts, the first Top 10 hit by an R&B act since Louis Jordan’s (profiled here) long-time domination of over the 1940s.

One Hit No More, Chapter 2: The Penguins Dancing with an Earth Angel

You're motoring/what's your price for flight?

Always liked this tune. Sounds like a slow-jam embrace feels...

The Hit
“’Earth Angel’ -- like so many '50s doo-wop ballads -- was structured on the chord changes of Rodgers & Hart's ‘Blue Moon,’ in a progression commonly known as ‘ice cream changes’ or ‘Blue Moon changes.’ Because so many '50s ballads use the same structure, oldies groups can string together seamless medleys of doo-wop classics.”
- Honolulu Star Bulletin featured, September 14, 2001

That takes care of the structure, now the story. As with The Crows’ “Gee,” the Penguins’ “Earth Angel” wasn’t the A-side of its 45. That was “Hey Senorita” (better song, for me) and their label pushed that one, only to have radio DJs flip the 45 and find the real hit. It never reached No. 1 – their version only climbed to No. 9 on the pop charts (hold that thought) – but, by way of some creative math, Songfacts.com dubbed “Earth Angel” the “top R&B record of all time in terms of continuous popularity.” [Ed. – They arrived there by counting every version of the song (there many), which yielded a total of 30 million copies sold.]

Personally, it takes me back to big dances that happened twenty years before I was born, scenes stolen from high school dances from movies and TV shows set in the 1950s. And the intimacy of the song – the slow, swaying rhythm, perfect for the side-shuffling clutch of teenage slow dancing, the lead vocals that float over it, as if lifted by the backing harmonies – has a way of making two people feel like the only people in the world in a crowded room. A nice song, in other words, but one that kicked off one hell of a legal tussle.

Legal battles over the publishing and authorship rights to the song kicked off in April of 1955, about six months after it came out. As with a lot of civil suits, it didn’t have to happen and at least one of the wrong people won. Worse, it was just one piece in a larger falling out.

The Rest of the Story, Briefly
The Penguins started late in 1953, when two recent graduates from Los Angeles’ Fremont High School, Cleveland Duncan and Curtis Williams, bumped into one another at a California Club talent show. Williams was in a group called the Hollywood Flames at the time (who come up again in the soon-to-be renumbered chapter in this series on Bobby Day), but still struggling to figure out where he fit in (the rest of the band called him “too independent”). He had been working on “Earth Angel” with another member, Gaynel Hodge, under the tutelage of an up-and-coming songwriter named Jesse Belvin. According to everything I read for this chapter, that kind of collaboration happened all the time in this scene – i.e., open, people trading ideas, doing a little borrowing, etc. After the show, Williams pitched the song to Duncan, telling him his voice fit it. Duncan caught the pitch and went with it, all the way down to rewriting the melody.

One Hit No More, Chapter 1: The Short Flight of The Crows, aka, "Gee"

Not pictured: Mark Jackson. Still.

There was no other Volume 1 to this series. Shhhhh...shhhh...shhhh....

The Hit
The Crows’ “Gee” took a while to find its legs. Their label and the radio pushed the A-side of the 45, “I Love You So,” for several months while “Gee” bumped a long in its modest shadow. The group recorded both in the same June 1953 session and that single counts as The Crows’ first bid at the nation’s airwaves. They arrived at the beginning of doo wop’s second wave and both could have easily got lost in the noise of all the bird-themed quartets and quintets, but fate stepped in.

"It looks like ‘Huggy Boy’ was the cause. Dick Hugg was one of the DJs who broadcast from the front window of John Dolphin's record store in Los Angeles. He had played 'Gee,' months before, and decided he didn't like it much. The disc ended up with his girlfriend, who really loved it. One night they got into a fight and, to make up, Huggy Boy played the song over and over on the air for her. For some reason, that episode triggered an explosion of sales in LA. Kids who were lukewarm to the song when they heard it once in a while, went nuts for it when it was played non-stop.”

“Gee” may sound like an unremarkable pop/doo wop single, but even with the six-month delay in its breakout, it came early in doo wop’s second wave. More significantly, some (or at least Wikipedia) recognize it as the first rock ‘n’ roll hit by a rock and roll group. It also crossed over into the pop charts (it climbed to No. 14) at a time when distributor pipelines did not. One source (Marv Goldberg’s R&B Notebook) floated the plausible theory that white kids heard “Gee” on the radio and pestered their neighborhood record store owners until they ordered it.

On the musical side, the accompaniment is there, no question – you hear the double bass, the simple rhythm of the piano line, and the gentle shuffle beat of the drum, a reedy, jazzy guitar solo that sounds like the times – but the vocals and harmonizing do the bulk of the lifting, all the way down to the “doop-do-de-doop-do-de-doop-do-de-do-do-de-doop” (or something like that).

The Rest of the Story, Briefly
“Our story begins around 1951, in Harlem (on 142nd Street, to be exact), at a time when R&B vocal groups seemed to be springing up on every street corner, alleyway, and subway station in the city.”