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| 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.
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.
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| Ladies and gents, the band. |
Each of them called in one more friend – Duncan brought in Dexter Tisby, Williams Bruce Tate – and struck out on their own. When the time came to name the new group, they resorted to the classic tactic of looking around the room:
“One of the members smoked Kool cigarettes, which, at the time, had ‘Willie the Penguin’ as its cartoon advertising character. They considered themselves ‘cool’ and accordingly decided to call themselves ‘The Penguins.’”
Equipped with a name and a single, they approached a relative of Williams, Dootsie Williams, a former big band bass player who built a recording studio in his garage, to cut a couple demos. Dootsie packed them over to Dolphin’s of Hollywood All Night Record Shop, a store that happened to host a live radio R&B show guided by local LA DJ Dick Hugg. The night after Hugg played both sides, requests started coming in the next morning – and with “Earth Angel” getting most of them. Sensing he had a piece of gold in his hands – the elder Williams would later call the single his only “natural hit” (i.e., it took off without promotion) – he pressed sellable copies to move through his Dootone Records label so fast he ran out of label paper (and nearly bankrupted the label). For all Dootsie’s belief in “Hey Senorita,” it was “Earth Angel” that took off, becoming a regional No. 1 before catching fire all over and launching the Penguins to national fame.
The question of how it all fell apart actually started before the lawsuit. Dootsie Williams had volunteered to “take care” of publishing the songs that members of the Penguins wrote, an arrangement that, naturally, gave with the publishing rights. The group didn’t notice that as much as he noticed how tight he was with royalties and advances. With the Penguins touring far and wide (the very curious should check out the “Marv Goldberg” link down below; swear to God, it lists all of them), they needed the pocket money (probably? Between getting ripped off and pinched, the Penguins developed an interest in finding new management, especially after “Earth Angel” blew up. They reached out to Samuel “Buck” Ram, a good, if complicated choice who got them signed to a new and bigger label, Mercury Records – if with some strings attached. The blood was already bad in other words...
The final showdown started when Williams sued Dootsie and Dootone Records for the rights to “Earth Angel” plus a couple other originals for $110,000. Dootsie countersued, but took aim at the deep pockets – Mercury and Buck Ram – for somewhere between nine and ten times that amount for “inducing” the Penguins to break their contract. To further complicate the suit, Belvin came in as a related party looking for songwriting credits. Both Dootsie and Belvin won – the latter on stronger legs thanks to similarities between “Earth Angel” and his earlier tune “Dream Girl” (which he sang in court to seal his claim) – publishing and authorship rights, respectively, though Williams and Hodge got their piece of the latter. Not content with that kick, Dootsie continued to release Penguins singles he still owned the rights to as direct competition with the group’s earliest releases for Mercury – e.g., when “Be Mine or Be a Fool” b/w “Don’t Do It” came out, Dootsie pushed “Kiss a Fool Goodbye” b/w “Baby Let’s Make Some Love” at the same time to muddle the market.
And all that chaos (along with some other roadblocks; wait for it) ultimately exhausted the band. To carry forward a parenthetical, Marv Goldberg was as thorough on the timing (and lead vocalist) of the Penguins releases as he was about their shows. The short version: they recorded some modestly successful singles – e.g., “Devil That I See” and “My Troubles Are Not at an End,” and a cover called “Pledge of Love” went to No. 15 on the R&B charts – but none of them scored better than a minor hit. Members came and members went – e.g., Tate checked out in 1955, Randy Jones replaced him, then Ray Brewster and Teddy Harper came on, only to have Jones and Tisby come back, and so on – and then Duncan left in 1957, only to start all over after the group formally broke up in 1962 with entirely new bandmates (including sisters Vesta and Evelyn King, and later Vera Walker). Every member of the Penguins has passed by now – Tisby lived the longest, fwiw, - so, the story's well and truly over.
All in all, the Penguins didn’t have a great run, i.e., a hit followed by lots of turmoil and more than a little screwing over...which segues nicely into...
3 Points of Interest
1) Virtually all of the sources I read made Bruce Tate’s departure sound like your standard “and/or creative differences” falling out, but, if Marv Goldberg’s account can be trusted – and he does seem to draw from contemporary reporting – Tate ran over an 80-year-old woman in a stolen Pontiac in the greater Los Angeles area on the night of November 24, 1955, after which he veered into a pickup, continued into the front of a shoe store, and then attempted to flee the entire catastrophe by flagging down a driver and speeding into the night. In his defense, the Pontiac in question looked like the band’s car. And, with that, the defense rests.
2) When Buck Ram offered the Penguins to Mercury with ulterior motives: he was also managing another R&B group, the Platters, and served up both groups as a two-fer. Mercury might have jumped at the Penguins, but the Platters went on to have the much, much bigger career, riding hits like “Only You (And You Alone)” and “The Great Pretender” into the first half of the 1960s – and at a good clip. Members of the Penguins recall Ram effectively ghosting them after the release of “Only You.” Worse, he wrote or co-wrote multiple songs for the Platters, but just two for the Penguins (“A Christmas Prayer” and “Dealer of Dreams,” fwiw). This was not a lucky group.
3) A white doo-wop group called The Crew-Cuts – which Wikipedia’s text acknowledged as “a band name just screaming ‘conformity’” – cut a version of “Earth Angel” almost immediately after the Penguins did. And, for all the reasons, their single went higher on the pop charts. To No. 3, in fact. On the plus/aesthetic side, and this comes from Marv Goldberg, the Penguins version did top the R&B charts, which wasn’t so bad in the long run on the grounds that, “the Crew Cuts' version is looked upon as nothing more than a cute curiosity.” [Ed. - It's worse.] This would not be the last time the Crew Cuts pinched black artists’ music and made it...respectable. That was their whole damn thing.
Sources
Wikipedia – The Penguins (a quick, clean read, misses a lot)
Wikipedia – “Earth Angel” (best for details on the recording)
Marv Goldberg’s R&B Notebook (This man writes tomes; detail-rich, strictly for obsessives)
Honolulu Bulletin feature of Cleveland Duncan (2001)
Songfacts[dot]com (periods make the links go weird...)
The Sampler
Despite their short run, the Penguins have a fairly stout catalog – 40+ songs at a minimum – and a listener gets a decent amount of variety out of, if only because the way they changed lead vocals necessitated changing the approach. Which strikes me as admirably democratic. I also can’t think of a better way to organize the sampler, so here are all the songs I’m posting to a Spotify playlist, with links to the ones not already linked to above:
“Kiss a Fool Goodbye” “The Sound of Your Voice” “Jingle Jangle” “My Troubles Are Not at End” (Williams)
“Lover or Fool” “No There Ain’t No New Today” “Pledge of Love” “A Christmas Prayer” “Memories of El Monte” (Duncan; and that last one's a nostalgia piece)
“Devil That I See” (Tisby and Duncan)
“Ain’t Gonna Cry No More” “Ice” (Tisby)
“Cool Baby Cool” (Tisby and Tate)
For what it’s worth, I picked about half of those songs by ear – i.e., I just liked what I heard – and that includes my personal favorite, “Cool Baby Cool” (all about the chorus, honestly), which features both “minor” Penguin, but also some of the best vocals, at least to my ear. Cleveland Duncan has the most famous voice, but Williams, a hit or miss singer in my mind, hits better when he’s on (e.g., “The Sound of Your Voice” and “My Troubles Are Not at an End”).
As much as the Penguins’ singles blend together when you’re listening, they have somewhere between three and four distinct tones. It turns out that’s enough for me. I enjoyed this one.
Till the next chapter...
“One of the members smoked Kool cigarettes, which, at the time, had ‘Willie the Penguin’ as its cartoon advertising character. They considered themselves ‘cool’ and accordingly decided to call themselves ‘The Penguins.’”
Equipped with a name and a single, they approached a relative of Williams, Dootsie Williams, a former big band bass player who built a recording studio in his garage, to cut a couple demos. Dootsie packed them over to Dolphin’s of Hollywood All Night Record Shop, a store that happened to host a live radio R&B show guided by local LA DJ Dick Hugg. The night after Hugg played both sides, requests started coming in the next morning – and with “Earth Angel” getting most of them. Sensing he had a piece of gold in his hands – the elder Williams would later call the single his only “natural hit” (i.e., it took off without promotion) – he pressed sellable copies to move through his Dootone Records label so fast he ran out of label paper (and nearly bankrupted the label). For all Dootsie’s belief in “Hey Senorita,” it was “Earth Angel” that took off, becoming a regional No. 1 before catching fire all over and launching the Penguins to national fame.
The question of how it all fell apart actually started before the lawsuit. Dootsie Williams had volunteered to “take care” of publishing the songs that members of the Penguins wrote, an arrangement that, naturally, gave with the publishing rights. The group didn’t notice that as much as he noticed how tight he was with royalties and advances. With the Penguins touring far and wide (the very curious should check out the “Marv Goldberg” link down below; swear to God, it lists all of them), they needed the pocket money (probably? Between getting ripped off and pinched, the Penguins developed an interest in finding new management, especially after “Earth Angel” blew up. They reached out to Samuel “Buck” Ram, a good, if complicated choice who got them signed to a new and bigger label, Mercury Records – if with some strings attached. The blood was already bad in other words...
The final showdown started when Williams sued Dootsie and Dootone Records for the rights to “Earth Angel” plus a couple other originals for $110,000. Dootsie countersued, but took aim at the deep pockets – Mercury and Buck Ram – for somewhere between nine and ten times that amount for “inducing” the Penguins to break their contract. To further complicate the suit, Belvin came in as a related party looking for songwriting credits. Both Dootsie and Belvin won – the latter on stronger legs thanks to similarities between “Earth Angel” and his earlier tune “Dream Girl” (which he sang in court to seal his claim) – publishing and authorship rights, respectively, though Williams and Hodge got their piece of the latter. Not content with that kick, Dootsie continued to release Penguins singles he still owned the rights to as direct competition with the group’s earliest releases for Mercury – e.g., when “Be Mine or Be a Fool” b/w “Don’t Do It” came out, Dootsie pushed “Kiss a Fool Goodbye” b/w “Baby Let’s Make Some Love” at the same time to muddle the market.
And all that chaos (along with some other roadblocks; wait for it) ultimately exhausted the band. To carry forward a parenthetical, Marv Goldberg was as thorough on the timing (and lead vocalist) of the Penguins releases as he was about their shows. The short version: they recorded some modestly successful singles – e.g., “Devil That I See” and “My Troubles Are Not at an End,” and a cover called “Pledge of Love” went to No. 15 on the R&B charts – but none of them scored better than a minor hit. Members came and members went – e.g., Tate checked out in 1955, Randy Jones replaced him, then Ray Brewster and Teddy Harper came on, only to have Jones and Tisby come back, and so on – and then Duncan left in 1957, only to start all over after the group formally broke up in 1962 with entirely new bandmates (including sisters Vesta and Evelyn King, and later Vera Walker). Every member of the Penguins has passed by now – Tisby lived the longest, fwiw, - so, the story's well and truly over.
All in all, the Penguins didn’t have a great run, i.e., a hit followed by lots of turmoil and more than a little screwing over...which segues nicely into...
3 Points of Interest
1) Virtually all of the sources I read made Bruce Tate’s departure sound like your standard “and/or creative differences” falling out, but, if Marv Goldberg’s account can be trusted – and he does seem to draw from contemporary reporting – Tate ran over an 80-year-old woman in a stolen Pontiac in the greater Los Angeles area on the night of November 24, 1955, after which he veered into a pickup, continued into the front of a shoe store, and then attempted to flee the entire catastrophe by flagging down a driver and speeding into the night. In his defense, the Pontiac in question looked like the band’s car. And, with that, the defense rests.
2) When Buck Ram offered the Penguins to Mercury with ulterior motives: he was also managing another R&B group, the Platters, and served up both groups as a two-fer. Mercury might have jumped at the Penguins, but the Platters went on to have the much, much bigger career, riding hits like “Only You (And You Alone)” and “The Great Pretender” into the first half of the 1960s – and at a good clip. Members of the Penguins recall Ram effectively ghosting them after the release of “Only You.” Worse, he wrote or co-wrote multiple songs for the Platters, but just two for the Penguins (“A Christmas Prayer” and “Dealer of Dreams,” fwiw). This was not a lucky group.
3) A white doo-wop group called The Crew-Cuts – which Wikipedia’s text acknowledged as “a band name just screaming ‘conformity’” – cut a version of “Earth Angel” almost immediately after the Penguins did. And, for all the reasons, their single went higher on the pop charts. To No. 3, in fact. On the plus/aesthetic side, and this comes from Marv Goldberg, the Penguins version did top the R&B charts, which wasn’t so bad in the long run on the grounds that, “the Crew Cuts' version is looked upon as nothing more than a cute curiosity.” [Ed. - It's worse.] This would not be the last time the Crew Cuts pinched black artists’ music and made it...respectable. That was their whole damn thing.
Sources
Wikipedia – The Penguins (a quick, clean read, misses a lot)
Wikipedia – “Earth Angel” (best for details on the recording)
Marv Goldberg’s R&B Notebook (This man writes tomes; detail-rich, strictly for obsessives)
Honolulu Bulletin feature of Cleveland Duncan (2001)
Songfacts[dot]com (periods make the links go weird...)
The Sampler
Despite their short run, the Penguins have a fairly stout catalog – 40+ songs at a minimum – and a listener gets a decent amount of variety out of, if only because the way they changed lead vocals necessitated changing the approach. Which strikes me as admirably democratic. I also can’t think of a better way to organize the sampler, so here are all the songs I’m posting to a Spotify playlist, with links to the ones not already linked to above:
“Kiss a Fool Goodbye” “The Sound of Your Voice” “Jingle Jangle” “My Troubles Are Not at End” (Williams)
“Lover or Fool” “No There Ain’t No New Today” “Pledge of Love” “A Christmas Prayer” “Memories of El Monte” (Duncan; and that last one's a nostalgia piece)
“Devil That I See” (Tisby and Duncan)
“Ain’t Gonna Cry No More” “Ice” (Tisby)
“Cool Baby Cool” (Tisby and Tate)
For what it’s worth, I picked about half of those songs by ear – i.e., I just liked what I heard – and that includes my personal favorite, “Cool Baby Cool” (all about the chorus, honestly), which features both “minor” Penguin, but also some of the best vocals, at least to my ear. Cleveland Duncan has the most famous voice, but Williams, a hit or miss singer in my mind, hits better when he’s on (e.g., “The Sound of Your Voice” and “My Troubles Are Not at an End”).
As much as the Penguins’ singles blend together when you’re listening, they have somewhere between three and four distinct tones. It turns out that’s enough for me. I enjoyed this one.
Till the next chapter...
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