 |
| 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.
The Rest of the Story, Briefly
The origin story of The Chords starts with a bunch of high school friends from the Bronx, with brothers Carl and Claude Feaster at the center of it. The rest of the group included Jimmy Keyes, Floyd “Buddy” McRae, William Edwards, and, once they figured out the need for accompaniment, a “child prodigy” pianist named Rupert Branker. Like many a doo wop act, they performed in the subways and on street corners (specifically, the corner of Boston Road and Jennings Street in the Morrisiana neighborhood) and sharpened their craft in street-battles with rival groups. All that started in 1951, but they didn’t get discovered until early 1954...when they sharks started to circle.
They’d already pitched “Sh-Boom” to the owner of Red Robin Records, Bobby Robinson, who (in a state of delirium?) dismissed it as “not commercial enough.” It’s possible that was just as well, seeing that left them free to sign with the legendary Ahmet Ertegun on Atlantic Records' brand-new R&B subsidiary Cat Records (so named because “cat” referenced for R&B in the South). Ertegun picked The Chords because he heard a promising match to sell “Cross Over the Bridge,” and his people only grudgingly agreed to include “Sh-Boom” in the first recording session (the other two singles were “Hold Me Baby” and “Little Maiden”).
Things took off from there – and at escape velocity. Literally two weeks after Hugg’s radio show pushed it over the airwaves, The Chords drove cross-country to play Gene Norman’s Fifth Annual Blues Jubilee, where they shared a stage with the Clovers, the Robins, and the Hollywood Flames; after a mini-tour of California, they returned to LA for a performance on Huggy Boy’s KRKD live broadcast. The hit caught Atlantic Records miles off guard: in a panic about getting everything they could out of the unexpected jackpot, they sold the song to anyone who would take (e.g., the Crew Cuts). The firsts kept happening, including an appearance on the Colgate Summer Comedy Hour just one month later, singing “Say Hey, Willie” with Willie Mays and dressing as miners (for some damn reason) to sing “Sh-Boom” on their national TV debut.
To say things fell apart almost immediately soft-pedals the speed of the collapse. Most significantly, a label called Gem Records hepped Atlantic to the fact that a group called The Chords already existed (the band behind a 1953 “hit” called “The Woods”). The label forced their Chords to update their name to The Chordcats – which they band hated enough to change to (what else?) “the Sh-Booms” by the middle of 1955 – but, in all the ways that mattered, all that was too little too late. The follow-ups they released as the Chordcats (and this was October 1954) – “Zippity Zum” and “Bless You,” followed by more tracks between the end of 1954 and the beginning of 1955 (on the latter, “Lulu,” “Pretty Wild,” “Love Oh Love” and “Heartbeat”) – failed to go anywhere, never mind chart. Throw in legal woes (e.g., Carl Feaster getting hit with two separate charges of statutory rape right ahead of a week’s residency at the Apollo) a manager who barely noticed them (Lou Krefetz, who was much more excited about the Clovers), and Atlantic’s failure to publicly announce the change from The Chords to the Chordcats, it’s little wonder the Chords burned fast, hot and out.
Different members led different lives from there. For instance, Branker wound up with the Platters (i.e., the same group that asked the Chords for their autographs ahead of Hugg’s broadcast) and Carl Feaster made a couple attempts to keep going – up to and including recording six sides as “Lionel Thorpe” for Roulette Records in 1959. And I’ll kick the coda over to Marv Goldberg:
“When Buddy McRae came back from Detroit in the late 50s, he opened a bar; Jimmy Keyes ran a boutique; Claude Feaster was a contractor, fixing up apartments. Carl Feaster, Joe Dias and Arthur Dicks never really quit singing, but William Edwards didn't seem to work at all; if he wasn't singing, he ‘just hung around.’”
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.
The Rest of the Story, Briefly
The origin story of The Chords starts with a bunch of high school friends from the Bronx, with brothers Carl and Claude Feaster at the center of it. The rest of the group included Jimmy Keyes, Floyd “Buddy” McRae, William Edwards, and, once they figured out the need for accompaniment, a “child prodigy” pianist named Rupert Branker. Like many a doo wop act, they performed in the subways and on street corners (specifically, the corner of Boston Road and Jennings Street in the Morrisiana neighborhood) and sharpened their craft in street-battles with rival groups. All that started in 1951, but they didn’t get discovered until early 1954...when they sharks started to circle.
They’d already pitched “Sh-Boom” to the owner of Red Robin Records, Bobby Robinson, who (in a state of delirium?) dismissed it as “not commercial enough.” It’s possible that was just as well, seeing that left them free to sign with the legendary Ahmet Ertegun on Atlantic Records' brand-new R&B subsidiary Cat Records (so named because “cat” referenced for R&B in the South). Ertegun picked The Chords because he heard a promising match to sell “Cross Over the Bridge,” and his people only grudgingly agreed to include “Sh-Boom” in the first recording session (the other two singles were “Hold Me Baby” and “Little Maiden”).
Things took off from there – and at escape velocity. Literally two weeks after Hugg’s radio show pushed it over the airwaves, The Chords drove cross-country to play Gene Norman’s Fifth Annual Blues Jubilee, where they shared a stage with the Clovers, the Robins, and the Hollywood Flames; after a mini-tour of California, they returned to LA for a performance on Huggy Boy’s KRKD live broadcast. The hit caught Atlantic Records miles off guard: in a panic about getting everything they could out of the unexpected jackpot, they sold the song to anyone who would take (e.g., the Crew Cuts). The firsts kept happening, including an appearance on the Colgate Summer Comedy Hour just one month later, singing “Say Hey, Willie” with Willie Mays and dressing as miners (for some damn reason) to sing “Sh-Boom” on their national TV debut.
To say things fell apart almost immediately soft-pedals the speed of the collapse. Most significantly, a label called Gem Records hepped Atlantic to the fact that a group called The Chords already existed (the band behind a 1953 “hit” called “The Woods”). The label forced their Chords to update their name to The Chordcats – which they band hated enough to change to (what else?) “the Sh-Booms” by the middle of 1955 – but, in all the ways that mattered, all that was too little too late. The follow-ups they released as the Chordcats (and this was October 1954) – “Zippity Zum” and “Bless You,” followed by more tracks between the end of 1954 and the beginning of 1955 (on the latter, “Lulu,” “Pretty Wild,” “Love Oh Love” and “Heartbeat”) – failed to go anywhere, never mind chart. Throw in legal woes (e.g., Carl Feaster getting hit with two separate charges of statutory rape right ahead of a week’s residency at the Apollo) a manager who barely noticed them (Lou Krefetz, who was much more excited about the Clovers), and Atlantic’s failure to publicly announce the change from The Chords to the Chordcats, it’s little wonder the Chords burned fast, hot and out.
Different members led different lives from there. For instance, Branker wound up with the Platters (i.e., the same group that asked the Chords for their autographs ahead of Hugg’s broadcast) and Carl Feaster made a couple attempts to keep going – up to and including recording six sides as “Lionel Thorpe” for Roulette Records in 1959. And I’ll kick the coda over to Marv Goldberg:
“When Buddy McRae came back from Detroit in the late 50s, he opened a bar; Jimmy Keyes ran a boutique; Claude Feaster was a contractor, fixing up apartments. Carl Feaster, Joe Dias and Arthur Dicks never really quit singing, but William Edwards didn't seem to work at all; if he wasn't singing, he ‘just hung around.’”
Quiet respect to William Edwards. If you can pull it off...
 |
| wipe that grin right off your face, mister. |
3 Points of Interest
1) Those Bastard Crew Cuts
As noted above, the Crew Cuts pinched “Sh-Boom” just like they did with “Gee” and countless other singles, most of them by black artists. Their “Sh-Boom” stands out for one reason: it gave the Crew Cuts their only No. 1 hit ever. More gallingly, it stuck there for nine weeks and, for some, placed their version as the “first U.S. rock and roll number one hit record.” My God, the fucking Crew Cuts. They were not, however, the most fervid imitators:
“The record for most recordings of ‘Sh-Boom’ by a single group probably belongs to the Harvard Din & Tonics, a co-ed a cappella (slay) singing group that has featured the song on 12 of their 13 albums. Their 1979 Crew-Cuts-style arrangement was so popular that the group began performing ‘Sh-Boom’ as their signature song at all their concerts, bringing all their alumni onstage to perform it across the United States and through 10 world tours.”
Sigh.
2) How Bollixed Atlantic Got
I know I covered this above, but I bumped into a quote during the research that says a couple things, at a minimum, about the music business during the mid-1950s:
“While Atlantic had turned out monster R&B hits over the years, they'd been handled by R&B distributors. Their experience in the Pop field was definitely limited, and would have involved different distributors, with which they didn't have a relationship. This was important, simply because distributors didn't pay if they could help it. In a supreme irony, a new company could be bankrupted by having a hit record. They'd press and ship as fast as they could, then wait for the money to come in from the distributors. Many of them are still waiting. Distributors were notorious for waiting to see if there'd be a second hit; if not, they never paid for the first one. (Remember that record companies didn't deal directly with record stores and juke box operators; that was the realm of the distributor. Actually, when a record was recognized as a "hit," it was because a certain number of copies had been ordered by the distributors, not because any consumers had happened to buy it.)”
3) A (Literal) Flash of Inspiration
Because there’s no sampler (swear to God, Spotify pulled a compilation over the weekend), I decided to include a list of “nonsense word” hits that came out very shortly after “Sh-Boom” and rode in its wake. The Chords’ didn’t live all that long, but their self-penned single had a longer run in pop culture. Now, all those songs:
“Oop Shoop’ (Shirley Gunter & the Queens)...‘Voo Vee Ah Bee’ (the Platters), ‘Vadunt Un Vada Song’ (the Kings), ‘Du-Bi-A-Bo’ (the Falcons), ‘Oobidee Oobidee Oo’ (the Harptones), ‘Bazoom, I Need Your Lovin'’(Otis Williams & the Charms), ‘Chop Chop Boom’ (the Danderliers), ‘Shtiggy Boom’ (Patty Ann & the Flames)...‘Do Bop Sha Bam’ (the Spence Sisters)...‘Do-Li-Op’ (the Four Kings), ‘Boom Magazeno Vip Vay’ (the Cashmeres), and ‘Sha-Ba-Da-Ba-Doo’ (the Jac-O-Lacs [Flairs]). All of these songs (and plenty of others) probably owed their existence to the Chords and "Sh-Boom." Of course, nonsense songs were nothing new, ‘Ja-Da (Ja Da, Ja Da, Jing Jing Jing)’ had been a tremendous hit back in 1919.”
Sources
Wikipedia – The Chords (a good simple read, even if it misses some things)
Wikipedia – “Sh-Boom”
New York Daily News Article (on Buddy McRae, 2011)
Allmusic.com bio
Marv Goldberg’s R&B Notebook (This man writes tomes; detail-rich, strictly for obsessives)
The Sampler
I’ll link to a pair of EP-length collections of songs by The Chords on Spotify when those goes up, but I already linked to more of their songs above. And some bonus tracks by others. If there's one thing you should know, Carl Feaster sang lead on most of their songs. And Claude Feaster got his shot on "Crossing Over the Bridge."
Till the next chapter...
1) Those Bastard Crew Cuts
As noted above, the Crew Cuts pinched “Sh-Boom” just like they did with “Gee” and countless other singles, most of them by black artists. Their “Sh-Boom” stands out for one reason: it gave the Crew Cuts their only No. 1 hit ever. More gallingly, it stuck there for nine weeks and, for some, placed their version as the “first U.S. rock and roll number one hit record.” My God, the fucking Crew Cuts. They were not, however, the most fervid imitators:
“The record for most recordings of ‘Sh-Boom’ by a single group probably belongs to the Harvard Din & Tonics, a co-ed a cappella (slay) singing group that has featured the song on 12 of their 13 albums. Their 1979 Crew-Cuts-style arrangement was so popular that the group began performing ‘Sh-Boom’ as their signature song at all their concerts, bringing all their alumni onstage to perform it across the United States and through 10 world tours.”
Sigh.
2) How Bollixed Atlantic Got
I know I covered this above, but I bumped into a quote during the research that says a couple things, at a minimum, about the music business during the mid-1950s:
“While Atlantic had turned out monster R&B hits over the years, they'd been handled by R&B distributors. Their experience in the Pop field was definitely limited, and would have involved different distributors, with which they didn't have a relationship. This was important, simply because distributors didn't pay if they could help it. In a supreme irony, a new company could be bankrupted by having a hit record. They'd press and ship as fast as they could, then wait for the money to come in from the distributors. Many of them are still waiting. Distributors were notorious for waiting to see if there'd be a second hit; if not, they never paid for the first one. (Remember that record companies didn't deal directly with record stores and juke box operators; that was the realm of the distributor. Actually, when a record was recognized as a "hit," it was because a certain number of copies had been ordered by the distributors, not because any consumers had happened to buy it.)”
3) A (Literal) Flash of Inspiration
Because there’s no sampler (swear to God, Spotify pulled a compilation over the weekend), I decided to include a list of “nonsense word” hits that came out very shortly after “Sh-Boom” and rode in its wake. The Chords’ didn’t live all that long, but their self-penned single had a longer run in pop culture. Now, all those songs:
“Oop Shoop’ (Shirley Gunter & the Queens)...‘Voo Vee Ah Bee’ (the Platters), ‘Vadunt Un Vada Song’ (the Kings), ‘Du-Bi-A-Bo’ (the Falcons), ‘Oobidee Oobidee Oo’ (the Harptones), ‘Bazoom, I Need Your Lovin'’(Otis Williams & the Charms), ‘Chop Chop Boom’ (the Danderliers), ‘Shtiggy Boom’ (Patty Ann & the Flames)...‘Do Bop Sha Bam’ (the Spence Sisters)...‘Do-Li-Op’ (the Four Kings), ‘Boom Magazeno Vip Vay’ (the Cashmeres), and ‘Sha-Ba-Da-Ba-Doo’ (the Jac-O-Lacs [Flairs]). All of these songs (and plenty of others) probably owed their existence to the Chords and "Sh-Boom." Of course, nonsense songs were nothing new, ‘Ja-Da (Ja Da, Ja Da, Jing Jing Jing)’ had been a tremendous hit back in 1919.”
Sources
Wikipedia – The Chords (a good simple read, even if it misses some things)
Wikipedia – “Sh-Boom”
New York Daily News Article (on Buddy McRae, 2011)
Allmusic.com bio
Marv Goldberg’s R&B Notebook (This man writes tomes; detail-rich, strictly for obsessives)
The Sampler
I’ll link to a pair of EP-length collections of songs by The Chords on Spotify when those goes up, but I already linked to more of their songs above. And some bonus tracks by others. If there's one thing you should know, Carl Feaster sang lead on most of their songs. And Claude Feaster got his shot on "Crossing Over the Bridge."
Till the next chapter...
No comments:
Post a Comment