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| 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 came to 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 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.” 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 up there 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 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 came to 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 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.” 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 up there 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.
