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| 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.”
Thus reads the genesis of the doo wop boom; the street corner changes – and it isn’t always a street corner (beaches, also popular) – but it reliably begins with a group of friends getting together for some competitive busking, only doo wop style. And those groups had battles, not unlike the rap battles that came about in the late 1970s and later. The Crows were just one group of many trying to get noticed and they did what all those other bands did – i.e., play local parties, community centers, clubs and school dances.
The original line-up featured Daniel “Sonny” Norton (lead), William “Bill” Davis (baritone), Harold Major (tenor), Jerry Wittick (tenor), and Gerald Hamilton (bass). When he decided the group would never go further than their favorite street corner, Wittick checked out and joined the military. A guitarist named Mark Jackson replaced him in the summer of 1952; he sang the occasional tenor part, but was mostly there for the guitar. They scored their break at an Apollo Theater talent contest in 1952 when a talent agent named Cliff Martinez liked what he saw and decided to take them on.
At first, Martinez shopped them as a ready-made backing vocals outfit, first to a Jubilee Records “Louis Armstrong sound-alike” name Frank “Fat Man” Humphries, who the group backed as the “4 Notes” on the 1952 singles “I Can’t Get Started With You” and “Lulubell Blues.” Martinez tried again, this time with the Rama label, a new undercard label run by George Golder (his main label was called Tico and put out mambo). In those June 1953 sessions, The Crows backed a singer named Viola Watkins on a couple singles – “Seven Lonely Days” and “No Help Wanted” – but the third song in the session was “Gee,” which was pulled together on the spot with Davis doing the writing with an assist from Watkins. And, as implied above, they put out the single without much hope of a breakout. Huggy Boy didn’t do his heartbroken magic until November of 1953.
The Crows’ time near the top didn’t last long. They released another pair of singles from a second June 1953 session – “Heartbreaker” and “Call a Doctor” – and tried again in early 1954, but none of their follow-ups grabbed the public’s ear. Somewhat curiously, they never toured or performed all that much. Marv Goldberg’s R&B Notebook found only three shows – dates in Revere Beach (near Boston), a date in Pittsburgh, and another in LA. Wikipedia described this as “the inability to perform regularly.” The very few (i.e., exactly two) sources I found makes it sound like they continued to perform, even if nobody noticed, but all hopes of a real reunion died with the passing of Hamilton and Norton in the late 1960s and early 1970s, respectively.
3 Points of Interest
1) Based on everything I read, The Crows were always a quintet, but their publicity photo (perhaps the only one) showed them as a quartet because Mark Jackson missed the photo shoot.
2) The Crows tried to use a fairly recent single to keep their careers going, a song titled “Perfidia” (which translates as “treacherous woman”), which had been a hit for some very, very big names just 12 years prior – e.g., Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Gene Krupa and Xavier Cugat.
3) They got even more creative with “Mambo Shevitz,” a fairly clear novelty song, if one with a highly specific pedigree, i.e., “(a magnificent blend of mambo and R&B; [the two great loves of George Goldner's life], as well as lyrics that were a cute take-off on the Manischewitz wine commercial).” Not something you hear every day, clearly.
Sources
Wikipedia – The Crows (a good simple read, even if it misses some things)
Marv Goldberg’s R&B Notebook (2004; which, assuming it’s accurate, is a good, thorough source)
The Sampler
Rather than build a sampler (as I typically do for these things), I’ll be posting a compilation I found on Spotify – one that happens to include a collection of songs by a contemporary act, The Harptones. And, to list the songs from the compilation not already linked to above: “Untrue,” “Baby,” “Miss You,” “I Really, Really Love You” and “Sweet Sue, Just You.”
The Crows’ history has mostly been lost to time and they got swallowed up by bigger, often later doo wop acts, but they have a fairly representative profile for their time/genre. As happened with any sound/scene that caught on, labels, agents, scouts and vultures swoop in to sign anyone and everyone doing something remotely similar before the gold rush dries up. At which point they move on to the next thing.
Till the next chapter...
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.”
Thus reads the genesis of the doo wop boom; the street corner changes – and it isn’t always a street corner (beaches, also popular) – but it reliably begins with a group of friends getting together for some competitive busking, only doo wop style. And those groups had battles, not unlike the rap battles that came about in the late 1970s and later. The Crows were just one group of many trying to get noticed and they did what all those other bands did – i.e., play local parties, community centers, clubs and school dances.
The original line-up featured Daniel “Sonny” Norton (lead), William “Bill” Davis (baritone), Harold Major (tenor), Jerry Wittick (tenor), and Gerald Hamilton (bass). When he decided the group would never go further than their favorite street corner, Wittick checked out and joined the military. A guitarist named Mark Jackson replaced him in the summer of 1952; he sang the occasional tenor part, but was mostly there for the guitar. They scored their break at an Apollo Theater talent contest in 1952 when a talent agent named Cliff Martinez liked what he saw and decided to take them on.
At first, Martinez shopped them as a ready-made backing vocals outfit, first to a Jubilee Records “Louis Armstrong sound-alike” name Frank “Fat Man” Humphries, who the group backed as the “4 Notes” on the 1952 singles “I Can’t Get Started With You” and “Lulubell Blues.” Martinez tried again, this time with the Rama label, a new undercard label run by George Golder (his main label was called Tico and put out mambo). In those June 1953 sessions, The Crows backed a singer named Viola Watkins on a couple singles – “Seven Lonely Days” and “No Help Wanted” – but the third song in the session was “Gee,” which was pulled together on the spot with Davis doing the writing with an assist from Watkins. And, as implied above, they put out the single without much hope of a breakout. Huggy Boy didn’t do his heartbroken magic until November of 1953.
The Crows’ time near the top didn’t last long. They released another pair of singles from a second June 1953 session – “Heartbreaker” and “Call a Doctor” – and tried again in early 1954, but none of their follow-ups grabbed the public’s ear. Somewhat curiously, they never toured or performed all that much. Marv Goldberg’s R&B Notebook found only three shows – dates in Revere Beach (near Boston), a date in Pittsburgh, and another in LA. Wikipedia described this as “the inability to perform regularly.” The very few (i.e., exactly two) sources I found makes it sound like they continued to perform, even if nobody noticed, but all hopes of a real reunion died with the passing of Hamilton and Norton in the late 1960s and early 1970s, respectively.
3 Points of Interest
1) Based on everything I read, The Crows were always a quintet, but their publicity photo (perhaps the only one) showed them as a quartet because Mark Jackson missed the photo shoot.
2) The Crows tried to use a fairly recent single to keep their careers going, a song titled “Perfidia” (which translates as “treacherous woman”), which had been a hit for some very, very big names just 12 years prior – e.g., Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Gene Krupa and Xavier Cugat.
3) They got even more creative with “Mambo Shevitz,” a fairly clear novelty song, if one with a highly specific pedigree, i.e., “(a magnificent blend of mambo and R&B; [the two great loves of George Goldner's life], as well as lyrics that were a cute take-off on the Manischewitz wine commercial).” Not something you hear every day, clearly.
Sources
Wikipedia – The Crows (a good simple read, even if it misses some things)
Marv Goldberg’s R&B Notebook (2004; which, assuming it’s accurate, is a good, thorough source)
The Sampler
Rather than build a sampler (as I typically do for these things), I’ll be posting a compilation I found on Spotify – one that happens to include a collection of songs by a contemporary act, The Harptones. And, to list the songs from the compilation not already linked to above: “Untrue,” “Baby,” “Miss You,” “I Really, Really Love You” and “Sweet Sue, Just You.”
The Crows’ history has mostly been lost to time and they got swallowed up by bigger, often later doo wop acts, but they have a fairly representative profile for their time/genre. As happened with any sound/scene that caught on, labels, agents, scouts and vultures swoop in to sign anyone and everyone doing something remotely similar before the gold rush dries up. At which point they move on to the next thing.
Till the next chapter...
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