 |
| The, um, important line-up. |
This chapter aims to reveal the two-step bridge between the Mills Brothers (covered in his chapter) and the doo wop groups of the late 1950s/early 1960s by way of a quick study of two of the most successful groups to carry it forward. I’ve already picked at this in one of the earliest chapters in the One Hit No More series (the chapter on Don & Juan), but this post will go a little deeper. One group came before the other and influenced themr as well. Finally, as if ordained by fate, each band led from the opposite end of the pitch spectrum. To borrow a frame from Marv Goldberg’s exhaustive history of the later band (Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3):
“To Bart, the Ravens must have seemed like the anti-Ink Spots. Instead of having a lead singer with an impossibly high voice, the Ravens had a lead singer with an impossibly low one.”
And I’ll get to who “Bart” is eventually. But first...
The Ink Spots
The Ink Spots came up in the Indianapolis, Indiana area in the early 1930s. The two original members, Jerry Daniels and Charlie Fuqua, started performing as a duo called “Jerry and Charlie,” but they soon folded in two more members from a quartet called “The Four Riff Brothers,” Orville Jones and Deek Watson – or at least that’s Wikipedia’s quick summary. A short history in posted for their Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction (you have to hit the pdf to see it) has all four members bouncing indiscriminately singing under a succession of names – e.g., the Peanut Boys, the Percolating Puppies, the Swinging Gate Brothers, King, Jack and the Jesters (Wikipedia has that as King, Jack and Jester with only Daniels, Fuqua and Watson present and as a singing/comedy act). Regardless of the name they performed under, they took inspiration from the “big-name jazz bands and old-time vaudeville acts and, with an assist from regular air-play on Cincinnati’s WLW radio station, they built a large enough regional following that they started probing the New York City market by the mid-1940s.
They landed a night at Harlem’s famous Apollo Theater in the summer of 1934. They’d already changed their name to the Ink Spots by then thanks to legal notice from attorneys connected to the very famous Paul Whiteman Orchestra (covered in this chapter) had a singing group called “the King’s Jesters.” The Apollo show (with Tiny Bradshaw!) gave them enough juice to land them a tour of England, a path already opened by the Mills Brothers. (Just to note it, and because it’s a good story, the Ink Spots owed some amount of their success to the fact that the outbreak of World War II wound up stranding the Mills Brothers abroad for some a years.). After returning home (circa 1935), they recorded their first sides for Victor Records. Their first singles, “Swingin’ on the Strings” and “Your Feet’s Too Big” (which gives a feel for their comedy stylings), among them, failed to sell well. It took replacing Daniels for them to find full success and their sound.
None of the few online sources I found [Ed. – And I’ve got this thing with avoiding podcasts and video interviews; I can read faster] explain how the change happened or who arranged it, but a guy named Bill Kenny, aka, the “singer was the impossibly high voice,” was called on to replace Daniels in 1936. The Ink Spots’ success grew from 1936 till they called it quits – and it came with cross-over appeal (which, here, means white people liked it too). Nothing I read maps their upward trajectory, but an anecdote from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame piece gives some sense of how high it would go. In 1948, a Miami venue called the Monte Carlo Club booked the Ink Spots as headliners and with white acts on the bill. A contemporary write-up in Billboard quoted in that history speaks to how groundbreaking that was:
“Format is a radical departure for tis territory, for even if Jim Crow laws are largely unwritten and there is no law prohibiting Negro entertainers from working in white places or with white acts, no operator in the Deep South has ever had the nerve to try it.”
Success didn’t follow immediately after Kenny signed on; that took two years and an innovation they called “Top & Bottom.” First tried with the song “Tune in on My Heart” on a 1938 radio broadcast, it was an arrangement that head Kenny sing the chorus in his pristine tenor followed by Jones speaking the chorus in a rich bass voice. Once they got the same formula on vinyl (or was it still acetate then?) with their massively successful single, “If I Didn’t Care,” the Ink Spots’ fame went through the rough and kept flying higher (i.e., 19 million copies sold, the 8th best-selling single of all-time). They became insanely in-demand by the beginning of the 1940s; even the movies came calling before long, inviting them to play themselves and sing some hits in movies like 1941’s The Great American Broadcast (1941) and Abbott & Costello’s Pardon My Sarong (apart from the hit, they sang “Alabamy Bound” in the former and “Do I Worry” in the latter). On top of making just a shit-load more money (see, the 100-fold raise after “If I Didn’t Care” moved 200K units), they landed 30 hits on the U.S. Pop Charts, 18 of them in the Top 10, and, even if their first big hit never reached No. 1 (it stalled at No. 2), they only had to wait till 1939 for “Address Unknown” to take them to the top.
“To Bart, the Ravens must have seemed like the anti-Ink Spots. Instead of having a lead singer with an impossibly high voice, the Ravens had a lead singer with an impossibly low one.”
And I’ll get to who “Bart” is eventually. But first...
The Ink Spots
The Ink Spots came up in the Indianapolis, Indiana area in the early 1930s. The two original members, Jerry Daniels and Charlie Fuqua, started performing as a duo called “Jerry and Charlie,” but they soon folded in two more members from a quartet called “The Four Riff Brothers,” Orville Jones and Deek Watson – or at least that’s Wikipedia’s quick summary. A short history in posted for their Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction (you have to hit the pdf to see it) has all four members bouncing indiscriminately singing under a succession of names – e.g., the Peanut Boys, the Percolating Puppies, the Swinging Gate Brothers, King, Jack and the Jesters (Wikipedia has that as King, Jack and Jester with only Daniels, Fuqua and Watson present and as a singing/comedy act). Regardless of the name they performed under, they took inspiration from the “big-name jazz bands and old-time vaudeville acts and, with an assist from regular air-play on Cincinnati’s WLW radio station, they built a large enough regional following that they started probing the New York City market by the mid-1940s.
They landed a night at Harlem’s famous Apollo Theater in the summer of 1934. They’d already changed their name to the Ink Spots by then thanks to legal notice from attorneys connected to the very famous Paul Whiteman Orchestra (covered in this chapter) had a singing group called “the King’s Jesters.” The Apollo show (with Tiny Bradshaw!) gave them enough juice to land them a tour of England, a path already opened by the Mills Brothers. (Just to note it, and because it’s a good story, the Ink Spots owed some amount of their success to the fact that the outbreak of World War II wound up stranding the Mills Brothers abroad for some a years.). After returning home (circa 1935), they recorded their first sides for Victor Records. Their first singles, “Swingin’ on the Strings” and “Your Feet’s Too Big” (which gives a feel for their comedy stylings), among them, failed to sell well. It took replacing Daniels for them to find full success and their sound.
None of the few online sources I found [Ed. – And I’ve got this thing with avoiding podcasts and video interviews; I can read faster] explain how the change happened or who arranged it, but a guy named Bill Kenny, aka, the “singer was the impossibly high voice,” was called on to replace Daniels in 1936. The Ink Spots’ success grew from 1936 till they called it quits – and it came with cross-over appeal (which, here, means white people liked it too). Nothing I read maps their upward trajectory, but an anecdote from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame piece gives some sense of how high it would go. In 1948, a Miami venue called the Monte Carlo Club booked the Ink Spots as headliners and with white acts on the bill. A contemporary write-up in Billboard quoted in that history speaks to how groundbreaking that was:
“Format is a radical departure for tis territory, for even if Jim Crow laws are largely unwritten and there is no law prohibiting Negro entertainers from working in white places or with white acts, no operator in the Deep South has ever had the nerve to try it.”
Success didn’t follow immediately after Kenny signed on; that took two years and an innovation they called “Top & Bottom.” First tried with the song “Tune in on My Heart” on a 1938 radio broadcast, it was an arrangement that head Kenny sing the chorus in his pristine tenor followed by Jones speaking the chorus in a rich bass voice. Once they got the same formula on vinyl (or was it still acetate then?) with their massively successful single, “If I Didn’t Care,” the Ink Spots’ fame went through the rough and kept flying higher (i.e., 19 million copies sold, the 8th best-selling single of all-time). They became insanely in-demand by the beginning of the 1940s; even the movies came calling before long, inviting them to play themselves and sing some hits in movies like 1941’s The Great American Broadcast (1941) and Abbott & Costello’s Pardon My Sarong (apart from the hit, they sang “Alabamy Bound” in the former and “Do I Worry” in the latter). On top of making just a shit-load more money (see, the 100-fold raise after “If I Didn’t Care” moved 200K units), they landed 30 hits on the U.S. Pop Charts, 18 of them in the Top 10, and, even if their first big hit never reached No. 1 (it stalled at No. 2), they only had to wait till 1939 for “Address Unknown” to take them to the top.
 |
| The original line-up. |
And now feels like a good time to segue to the other vocal harmony group in this chapter, the Ravens:
“The baritone, bass and second tenor would harmonize an accompaniment to the primary vocal line, which relied chiefly on a tenor lead...It was but one of the elements in black group singing, which became known a rhythm & blues in the 1950s and, more so than any other black group of the time [the Ink Spots] initiated a stream of development which led in turn to the Ravens, the Orioles, the Dominoes and the Drifters.”
Wikipedia’s separate entries call the Ink Spots “vocal jazz” while the Ravens’ goes with rhythm & blues, a restrictive view that Marv Goldberg rejects:
“The Ravens' material isn't difficult to classify; it was anything that they could sing: R&B ballads, R&B uptempo, Pop standards (done as Pop), Pop standards (done as R&B), novelty numbers. You name it, they tried it. And they were generally superb.”
The Ravens didn’t actually form until 1946. Despite coming up in completely different parts of the country and, probably more significantly, in different times and circumstances, the bands actually crossed paths by virtue of being drawn to the then-U.S. media Mecca, New York City. But the direct connection to the Ink Spots came about because one of the original (and most renowned) member of the Ravens, Jimmy “Ricky” Ricks, performed or a short time in a vocal group called the Melodeers with a guy named Herb Kenny. For those noting the surname, yes, Herb Kenny was Bill Kenny’s brother, but Herb only left the Ink Spots through a succession of accidents: it starts with Jones dying from a (year’s worth of) hemorrhage(s), and then his replacement, Cliff Givens, not working out; then the Melodeers landed a show in St. Louis, which landed on a date that happened to coincide with Bill Kenny holding auditions to replace Givens, only when Herb stopped by and listened, he stepped in to give advice to a guy who was auditioning, and it was then that everyone understood Herb made a great replacement for Jones/Givens. That’s here because I couldn’t figure out how else to get it on. Now, back to how and where the Ravens got started...
Ricks and Warren “Birdland” Suttles, the other original member of the Ravens, grew up in the South. Ricks learned singing from working cotton fields with his father; who taught him to how harmonize but never sold him on the line of work; Suttles, who hailed from Alabama, left the South on returning home from World War II because the Jim Crow regime pissed him off: they met waiting tables at New York’s Four Hundred Tavern. When they had “lean-time” during their shifts, they’d turn on the jukebox and work on harmonizing with the songs they heard. And it’s a story of accumulation from there (and, I can’t emphasize this enough, for anyone interested in a granular history of the Ravens, just go to Marv Goldberg’s series; it’s very dense/thorough).
Ricks and Suttles hired/had a vocal coach named Joe Thomas (who used to play saxophone for Jelly Roll Morton), who knew a guy a worked as a treasurer for the agency that handled the Ink Spots named Ben Bart. Bart, who’d decided to set up a shop of his own under the name Hub Recording Company, thought Thomas had something - he saw the then-very fledging Ravens as an “anti-Ink-Spots” – and worked with Thomas to get an accompanist/arranger (Howard Biggs) on board to write songs. A guy named Jimy Edwards (who, like Bart, worked for the Gale Agency) found a winner of an Apollo Theater talent contest named Leonard “Zeke” Puzey and a guy named Ollie Jones to make the Ravens a quartet. In the context of everything above, doesn’t sound so different from what the labels would do every time a band broke out in some random city during the rock era.
The Ravens’ management got them into the studio in short order and released a set of recordings – their first was “Lullaby” b/w “Honey” and the second “Out of a Dream” b/w “My Sugar Is So Refined" – but the group would always find their most ready markets in live shows and on the jukebox. Goldberg pegs through breakthrough moment at an early show at the Apollo where they followed Stan Kenton and Nat “King” Cole at the Apollo. To lift (again) from Goldberg:
“Their first song was, once again, ‘My Sugar Is So Refined.’ Leonard did the lead, up to ‘And you should see/ How she holds a cup of tea’ at which point Ricks' booming bass line (‘With just two fingers/ While she sticks out three’) brought down the house.”
In a pop culture moment where “bird bands” – e.g., the Orioles, the Crows, the Larks, the Robins and the Penguins – vied to dominate the R&B vocal market, the Ravens stood out by virtue of fronting a bass on lead vocals. Fascinatingly, some of that happened by accident: RCA Victor, the label that managed the Delta Rhythm Boys, and therefore their bass singer, Lee Gaines, who happened to be a major influence on Ricks, forbade Gaines from singing as low as he could due to the way lower notes widened the groove on an LP, thereby leading to skips. The Ravens’ label, National Records, didn’t give a shit (they wanted to move units, listening experience be damned), thereby clearing the field for Ricks to become, to pull a quote from Wikipedia, “the standard against which every rhythm and blues bass was measured for the next generation.”
At some point, the rest of the group and management landed on the theory that it was Jones that was holding them back, so they replaced him with a bartender (and, factually, paid singer) that Ricks had met prior named Maithe Marshall. Credit to all around, all this happened with no visible animosity: the group wanted a “stronger” tenor to counter Ricks’ leading bass and Jones accepted it, went on to form another vocal group called the Blenders (and to write “Send for Me” for Cole), and the Ravens helped out the Blenders by recommending them for any show they couldn’t get to.
For all their success, the Ravens only got so far and never matched the longtime/broad success of the Ink Spots. With the (near as I can tell) lone exception of 1947’s “Write Me a Letter,” they scored all their hits on the “race” (aka, R&B) charts – and that included everything from their first hit (“Ol’ Man River”) to their Christmas songs (“White Christmas” and “Silent Night”), all sung in their inimitable style. The Ravens’ scored their last real hit with 1952’s “Rock Me All Night Long” (pretty damn close to a rock song, fwiw), but they already lost members (Marshall and Puzey, both in 1951) and jumped labels at least three times (National to Columbia to Okeh (1950) to Mercury (1951) by then, and they’d been plagued by another future curse of the recording industry throughout: getting screwed over by management. After years of threats, Suttles finally left the group in 1954, while Ricks held on until 1956 before he went solo. The tenor who replaced Marshall, Joe Van Loan, carried the Ravens’ name with the help of his brothers Paul and James until 1958, but the group formally folded in 1958 - i.e., right as doo-wop took full flight as one of the major popular genres. The Ravens couldn’t keep up, despite their flexibility, but their career ended a lot more quietly than the Ink Spots.
Things got ugly shortly after Jones’ death in 1944, particularly between Kenny, the man who made their name, and Watson, an original member. Wikipedia actually quotes Marv Goldberg to explain the unraveling:
“According to writer Marv Goldberg: ‘The original group was a partnership, not a corporation, and that influenced [Judge Isidore Wasservogel] to say, in 1955, that when Hoppy Jones died in 1944, it effectively served to terminate the partnership and that no one could truthfully use the name after that.’ From 1954 to the present, more than 100 groups have used the name ‘The Ink Spots.’ In 1967 US federal judge Emmet C. Choate ruled that since so many groups had been using the name ‘Ink Spots’ it had become ‘public domain’ and was free for anyone to use.”
Even if that shies away from the full ugliness of the collapse – Kenny actually bought Watson’s “share” of the group for a slim $10K and proceeded to tour as the Ink Spots without him – the end of the Ink Spots tale goes on for many, many years and even the number of “legitimate members” makes for a massive roll call:
“Legitimate members of the Ink Spots included Bill Kenny, Jerry Daniels, Deek Watson, Charlie Fuqua, Hoppy Jones, Bernie Mackey, Huey Long, Cliff Givens, Billy Bowen, Herb Kenny, Adriel McDonald, Jimmy Cannady, Ernie Brown, Henry Braswell, Teddy Williams and Everett Barksdale. Pianists and arrangers included Bob Benson, Asa ‘Ace’ Harris, Ken Bryan, Mort Howard (arranger), Bill Doggett, Ray Tunia, Harold Francis and Fletcher Smith.”
I don’t know a ton about doo wop, only enough to know it had a succession of revivals and got co-opted, if with mostly good intentions, by other racial groups (“ethnic” white and Puerto Rican mostly) until they exhausted the public’s interest in the form. And, in that sense, it’s probably smart to credit the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots for popularizing the concept and the Ravens as the one of the bigger names in the mad scramble to both carry it forward and cash in on it.
About the Sampler
As with the post, it took some time to decide to roll the Ink Spots and the Ravens into one sampler. Stumbling across the contrast and/or direct connections made sense of that, and credit to Marv Goldberg for taking me there. Still, the way I struggled with the Ink Spots (who were incredibly formulaic in their hey-day) ate up enough calendar days that I started to panic about keeping on schedule, and that stiffed the Ravens. Going the other way, and regardless of the fact that I’d fight someone to have the Ravens over the Ink Spots for a desert island disc, that does conform with each group’s respective impact on popular music. Even then, I don’t know why I’d pretend both groups didn’t owe their reputation to an innovation (e.g., “Top & Bottom”) and a contrast thereto.
At any rate, here are the songs for both groups that I haven’t linked to already:
The Ink Spots
I went with a combination of the “Top & Bottom” ballads (most of them with the same goddamn guitar lead) that made them popular – e.g., “My Prayer,” “When the Swallows Come Back from Capistrano,” “We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me),” “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire,” and “To Each His Own” – a couple of (thank gods) livelier numbers with “Java Jive” and (the much later) “Truck Stop,” and one of their famous duets with Ella Fitzgerald, “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall.”
The Ravens
I’d call the oddball of the selection “Mahzel (Means Good Luck),” a song written by a couple of Jewish songwriters and selected by management as something that would help them “stand out,” but the rest are pretty standard numbers for them – and, Christmas songs aside, I tried to steer clear of standards. Those include, “Deep Purple,” “Would You Believe Me,” “Send for Me If You Need Me,” “Ricky’s Blues” and “Count Every Star.”
Till the next one in the series...which goes in a direction that I’m barely equipped to handle...
“The baritone, bass and second tenor would harmonize an accompaniment to the primary vocal line, which relied chiefly on a tenor lead...It was but one of the elements in black group singing, which became known a rhythm & blues in the 1950s and, more so than any other black group of the time [the Ink Spots] initiated a stream of development which led in turn to the Ravens, the Orioles, the Dominoes and the Drifters.”
Wikipedia’s separate entries call the Ink Spots “vocal jazz” while the Ravens’ goes with rhythm & blues, a restrictive view that Marv Goldberg rejects:
“The Ravens' material isn't difficult to classify; it was anything that they could sing: R&B ballads, R&B uptempo, Pop standards (done as Pop), Pop standards (done as R&B), novelty numbers. You name it, they tried it. And they were generally superb.”
The Ravens didn’t actually form until 1946. Despite coming up in completely different parts of the country and, probably more significantly, in different times and circumstances, the bands actually crossed paths by virtue of being drawn to the then-U.S. media Mecca, New York City. But the direct connection to the Ink Spots came about because one of the original (and most renowned) member of the Ravens, Jimmy “Ricky” Ricks, performed or a short time in a vocal group called the Melodeers with a guy named Herb Kenny. For those noting the surname, yes, Herb Kenny was Bill Kenny’s brother, but Herb only left the Ink Spots through a succession of accidents: it starts with Jones dying from a (year’s worth of) hemorrhage(s), and then his replacement, Cliff Givens, not working out; then the Melodeers landed a show in St. Louis, which landed on a date that happened to coincide with Bill Kenny holding auditions to replace Givens, only when Herb stopped by and listened, he stepped in to give advice to a guy who was auditioning, and it was then that everyone understood Herb made a great replacement for Jones/Givens. That’s here because I couldn’t figure out how else to get it on. Now, back to how and where the Ravens got started...
Ricks and Warren “Birdland” Suttles, the other original member of the Ravens, grew up in the South. Ricks learned singing from working cotton fields with his father; who taught him to how harmonize but never sold him on the line of work; Suttles, who hailed from Alabama, left the South on returning home from World War II because the Jim Crow regime pissed him off: they met waiting tables at New York’s Four Hundred Tavern. When they had “lean-time” during their shifts, they’d turn on the jukebox and work on harmonizing with the songs they heard. And it’s a story of accumulation from there (and, I can’t emphasize this enough, for anyone interested in a granular history of the Ravens, just go to Marv Goldberg’s series; it’s very dense/thorough).
Ricks and Suttles hired/had a vocal coach named Joe Thomas (who used to play saxophone for Jelly Roll Morton), who knew a guy a worked as a treasurer for the agency that handled the Ink Spots named Ben Bart. Bart, who’d decided to set up a shop of his own under the name Hub Recording Company, thought Thomas had something - he saw the then-very fledging Ravens as an “anti-Ink-Spots” – and worked with Thomas to get an accompanist/arranger (Howard Biggs) on board to write songs. A guy named Jimy Edwards (who, like Bart, worked for the Gale Agency) found a winner of an Apollo Theater talent contest named Leonard “Zeke” Puzey and a guy named Ollie Jones to make the Ravens a quartet. In the context of everything above, doesn’t sound so different from what the labels would do every time a band broke out in some random city during the rock era.
The Ravens’ management got them into the studio in short order and released a set of recordings – their first was “Lullaby” b/w “Honey” and the second “Out of a Dream” b/w “My Sugar Is So Refined" – but the group would always find their most ready markets in live shows and on the jukebox. Goldberg pegs through breakthrough moment at an early show at the Apollo where they followed Stan Kenton and Nat “King” Cole at the Apollo. To lift (again) from Goldberg:
“Their first song was, once again, ‘My Sugar Is So Refined.’ Leonard did the lead, up to ‘And you should see/ How she holds a cup of tea’ at which point Ricks' booming bass line (‘With just two fingers/ While she sticks out three’) brought down the house.”
In a pop culture moment where “bird bands” – e.g., the Orioles, the Crows, the Larks, the Robins and the Penguins – vied to dominate the R&B vocal market, the Ravens stood out by virtue of fronting a bass on lead vocals. Fascinatingly, some of that happened by accident: RCA Victor, the label that managed the Delta Rhythm Boys, and therefore their bass singer, Lee Gaines, who happened to be a major influence on Ricks, forbade Gaines from singing as low as he could due to the way lower notes widened the groove on an LP, thereby leading to skips. The Ravens’ label, National Records, didn’t give a shit (they wanted to move units, listening experience be damned), thereby clearing the field for Ricks to become, to pull a quote from Wikipedia, “the standard against which every rhythm and blues bass was measured for the next generation.”
At some point, the rest of the group and management landed on the theory that it was Jones that was holding them back, so they replaced him with a bartender (and, factually, paid singer) that Ricks had met prior named Maithe Marshall. Credit to all around, all this happened with no visible animosity: the group wanted a “stronger” tenor to counter Ricks’ leading bass and Jones accepted it, went on to form another vocal group called the Blenders (and to write “Send for Me” for Cole), and the Ravens helped out the Blenders by recommending them for any show they couldn’t get to.
For all their success, the Ravens only got so far and never matched the longtime/broad success of the Ink Spots. With the (near as I can tell) lone exception of 1947’s “Write Me a Letter,” they scored all their hits on the “race” (aka, R&B) charts – and that included everything from their first hit (“Ol’ Man River”) to their Christmas songs (“White Christmas” and “Silent Night”), all sung in their inimitable style. The Ravens’ scored their last real hit with 1952’s “Rock Me All Night Long” (pretty damn close to a rock song, fwiw), but they already lost members (Marshall and Puzey, both in 1951) and jumped labels at least three times (National to Columbia to Okeh (1950) to Mercury (1951) by then, and they’d been plagued by another future curse of the recording industry throughout: getting screwed over by management. After years of threats, Suttles finally left the group in 1954, while Ricks held on until 1956 before he went solo. The tenor who replaced Marshall, Joe Van Loan, carried the Ravens’ name with the help of his brothers Paul and James until 1958, but the group formally folded in 1958 - i.e., right as doo-wop took full flight as one of the major popular genres. The Ravens couldn’t keep up, despite their flexibility, but their career ended a lot more quietly than the Ink Spots.
Things got ugly shortly after Jones’ death in 1944, particularly between Kenny, the man who made their name, and Watson, an original member. Wikipedia actually quotes Marv Goldberg to explain the unraveling:
“According to writer Marv Goldberg: ‘The original group was a partnership, not a corporation, and that influenced [Judge Isidore Wasservogel] to say, in 1955, that when Hoppy Jones died in 1944, it effectively served to terminate the partnership and that no one could truthfully use the name after that.’ From 1954 to the present, more than 100 groups have used the name ‘The Ink Spots.’ In 1967 US federal judge Emmet C. Choate ruled that since so many groups had been using the name ‘Ink Spots’ it had become ‘public domain’ and was free for anyone to use.”
Even if that shies away from the full ugliness of the collapse – Kenny actually bought Watson’s “share” of the group for a slim $10K and proceeded to tour as the Ink Spots without him – the end of the Ink Spots tale goes on for many, many years and even the number of “legitimate members” makes for a massive roll call:
“Legitimate members of the Ink Spots included Bill Kenny, Jerry Daniels, Deek Watson, Charlie Fuqua, Hoppy Jones, Bernie Mackey, Huey Long, Cliff Givens, Billy Bowen, Herb Kenny, Adriel McDonald, Jimmy Cannady, Ernie Brown, Henry Braswell, Teddy Williams and Everett Barksdale. Pianists and arrangers included Bob Benson, Asa ‘Ace’ Harris, Ken Bryan, Mort Howard (arranger), Bill Doggett, Ray Tunia, Harold Francis and Fletcher Smith.”
I don’t know a ton about doo wop, only enough to know it had a succession of revivals and got co-opted, if with mostly good intentions, by other racial groups (“ethnic” white and Puerto Rican mostly) until they exhausted the public’s interest in the form. And, in that sense, it’s probably smart to credit the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots for popularizing the concept and the Ravens as the one of the bigger names in the mad scramble to both carry it forward and cash in on it.
About the Sampler
As with the post, it took some time to decide to roll the Ink Spots and the Ravens into one sampler. Stumbling across the contrast and/or direct connections made sense of that, and credit to Marv Goldberg for taking me there. Still, the way I struggled with the Ink Spots (who were incredibly formulaic in their hey-day) ate up enough calendar days that I started to panic about keeping on schedule, and that stiffed the Ravens. Going the other way, and regardless of the fact that I’d fight someone to have the Ravens over the Ink Spots for a desert island disc, that does conform with each group’s respective impact on popular music. Even then, I don’t know why I’d pretend both groups didn’t owe their reputation to an innovation (e.g., “Top & Bottom”) and a contrast thereto.
At any rate, here are the songs for both groups that I haven’t linked to already:
The Ink Spots
I went with a combination of the “Top & Bottom” ballads (most of them with the same goddamn guitar lead) that made them popular – e.g., “My Prayer,” “When the Swallows Come Back from Capistrano,” “We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me),” “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire,” and “To Each His Own” – a couple of (thank gods) livelier numbers with “Java Jive” and (the much later) “Truck Stop,” and one of their famous duets with Ella Fitzgerald, “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall.”
The Ravens
I’d call the oddball of the selection “Mahzel (Means Good Luck),” a song written by a couple of Jewish songwriters and selected by management as something that would help them “stand out,” but the rest are pretty standard numbers for them – and, Christmas songs aside, I tried to steer clear of standards. Those include, “Deep Purple,” “Would You Believe Me,” “Send for Me If You Need Me,” “Ricky’s Blues” and “Count Every Star.”
Till the next one in the series...which goes in a direction that I’m barely equipped to handle...
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