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| What? So they didn't get billing... |
For the record, the concept beyond this series is the thought that inspired A Project of Self Indulgence.
The simple existence of the One-Hit Wonder just doesn’t sit right with me. If a band/artist got famous enough to make that one massive hit, surely, they did something before that and kept trying until they got there, right? This series looks beyond that one slim (massive) hit to check in on the hopes/dreams of the people who made them. I drew the list of candidates come from (where else?) a Wikipedia page devoted to these artists and I’ll be using Spotify for the research. (Love it or hate it, Spotify definitely made me a little crazy. But I digress…)
Bobby Day, born Robert James Byrd, 1930, came up in the greater Fort Worth, Texas metropolitan area. Wikipedia lists 1958’s “Rockin’ Robin” as his signature hit, but Day wrote three famous songs. The other versions eclipsed his originals in each case, but he garnered enough attention to play major, miles-out-of-market gigs and with a handful of artists whose names stuck to their famous songs for the long haul - e.g., The Penguins, with “Earth Angel.” Even if his name didn’t follow all of the songs he wrote, Day enjoyed a decade-plus career in the Los Angeles music scene bouncing between this act and that, typically as the starring member.
Day left Texas for Los Angeles fame at the young age of 15 (which, for context, puts his move at 1945). Day came in and out of an act called The Hollywood Flames for most of his career, but he had a complicated relationship with that anchor act. The group chased fame in a remarkably “throw-it-at-the-wall” spirit, including a number of name changes* and creative alliances that shifted as other performers came in and flew out of The Hollywood Flames’ orbit. (* Some treated the backing band as so many inter-changeable parts - The Turks became The Jets became The Sounds - while others treated the front-man as an after-thought. For instance, when Day led the group, they went with Bobby Day & the Satellites, but that switched to Earl Nelson & The Pelicans when his future collaborator in Bob & Earl, Earl Nelson, took lead vocals.) Day managed to stay on top of that shifting pile long enough to record a couple dozen songs as a solo artist. That same period also happened to be his most fruitful as a songwriter.
The fact Day borrowed “Rockin’ Robin” from a man named Leon Rene (writing, perhaps unsurprisingly, as Jimmie Thomas) makes his career into something like a karmic cycle. Day wrote songs that made other bands famous several times over his career, e.g., The Dave Clark Five for “Over and Over” and Thurston Harris for “Little Bitty Pretty One.” A fun footnote about the latter: “Little Bitty Pretty One” was a loving nickname for Day's wife, Jackie.
Over the course of the past week, I dove into a diverting handful of things both about and loosely associated with Day, and I listened to a couple of his greatest hits albums, plus a compilation of his work with The Hollywood Flames. For all the things I read and music I listened to, it took forever to see the words “doo” and “wop.” I first saw them in the cover art to The Hollywood Flames album I listened to on Spotify (Buzz Buzz Buzz! Doo Wop Classics); while they did show up on The Hollywood Flames’ Wikipedia page, it was never in context, just the “categories” for the post. Here’s how that gets weird…
The Hollywood Flames played shows for three(?) successive years (1958-60) at Harlem’s (famous) Apollo Theater. He played at least two of those playing as “Dr. Jive” (magical name). Because I’d gone through Wikipedia’s “Doo Wop” page before seeing that, a bunch of names jumped out at me - e.g., The Flamingos, The Cadillacs, Little Anthony & The Imperials (and those are just the bird and car names) - but Day, Bob & Earl, and The Hollywood Flames were nowhere to be found. I don't mind that for Bob & Earl, at least based on the six songs I've heard by them, but I wouldn't know what to call Day's stuff except doo wop. About that...
Doo wop hit its peak the year after The Hollywood Flames’ third appearance at The Apollo (circa 1961?) – and maybe that accounts for the oversight. At the same time, doo wop has some deep roots. The Mills Brothers shoved the genre into the mainstream in the 1930s, and the “bird” and “car” groups alluded to above carried the “doo wop torch” to through the 1940s and 50s. All that happened well before Day’s career. It continued after his flash in the pan too, and with more familiar names - e.g., Dion and the Belmonts “Runaround Sue” and “The Wanderer”), Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers singing (“Why Do Fools Fall in Love”), and The Platters (“Only You” and “The Great Pretender”), In the end, it seems like Bobby Day doesn’t show in the lists of famous doo wop acts because people forget to put him there.
That sells Day’s claim to respect shorter than it deserves. Even if people know his songs through more famous versions - in the case of “Rockin’ Robin,” it carries forward to the Jackson Five – Day wrote those songs, they came out of his head, and he’s got three of ‘em, three still-(semi-)famous songs, that most people have a fair chance of hearing accidentally. The Hollywood Flames had a firm handle on how to write two of my favorite kinds of songs from this era: one, a group that sounds something like “I’ll Get By” (or “Romance in the Dark”), aka, slow jams with innuendo-laden lyrics, the others, upbeat numbers with the signature swing of doo-wop tunes, e.g., “So Good” and “Much Too Much.” Overall, though, Bobby Day wrote good pop music – hook-crazy, fun, and with a tune that lingers in your head.
Day had even more tricks up his sleeve. The way “Teenage Philosopher” taps into my fandom for storyteller song-writing, and “Slow Pokey Joe” puts a quirky spin into the same formula. He had an ear for the classics too - e.g., his doo-wop spin on a (very) old tune like “Blue Heaven..”He was very good at what he did, and at that regular-human-life-to-hit ratio, he had a great run. He might not have lived off his realities, but how many of us do?
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