One Hit No More, Chapter 8: "Party Doll" Was the Life of the Party for Buddy Knox

Early branding issues (& Knox is 3rd from left.)

One of the more relatable bands in the sample, honestly. They sound like the ones I came up watching.

The Hit
If I’d ever heard Buddy Knox’s “Party Doll” before working on this chapter, it slipped my mind. Despite being something of a groundbreaking tune – which I’ll get to – it doesn't sound so different from everything else you hear from the early rock of the late 1950s. And yet it was a little risque for its time: the King of American Bandstand, Dick Clark, refused to pick up Knox’s single due to the signature line in its chorus: “I want to make love to you.”

That racy line surprises less once you know that Knox fronted the Rhythm Orchids, a band that became all the rage at West Texas State College. Despite getting inspiration to record from two straight-up legends - they hardly get bigger than Roy Orbison or Elvis Presley (Knox recalls Presley telling him after he met him after a show, “Man, if you've got a band and some good songs, get into a recording studio cause something is fixing to happen”) – the Rhythm Orchids didn’t have visions of fame dancing in their heads when they stepped into “the recording studio.” They cut the singles – “Party Doll” b/w “I’m Sticking With You” – to pass on as “souvenirs” for their fans at WTSC and beyond. They were lucky to get that:

“Norman was an electrician who had built his own studio. His echo chamber was in the top of his dad's garage with a speaker at one end and a microphone at the other. Every time a truck passed by, it sounded like it was in the studio with us.”

The “Norman” referred to above was Norman Petty. Anyone who knows that name is a couple steps ahead on one of the Points of Interest (see below).

In any case, Knox and his bandmates paid $60 bucks for three days’ worth of recording time at a studio that had no interest in operating as a professional outfit. The recording sessions ran from midnight to 6:00 a.m. so they wouldn’t have to share the microphones with those trucks. That flyer scored them a No. 1 hit that ultimately 15 million copies and went gold within its first year.

Not bad for a kid from Happy, Texas, who was surely the most famous of his high school graduating class of 26 kids.

One Hit No More, Chapter 4: "Be-Bop-a-Lula," aka, Gene Vincent's Happiest Moment

Yeah, no. Not even he could be drunk enough...

Some discrepancies betwixt the sources in this one. And some guns...

The Hit
I have a personal connection to Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-a-Lula”: my dad used to wake me for Sunday school with renditions of old rock ‘n’ roll songs, all of them flat as they were loud.

Vincent sang his signature song differently, obviously (again, that was my dad waking me for Sunday school), with pinched, passionate phrasing that hinted at a man on the edge of ecstasy and a far from accidental dash of Elvis. The backing music – heavy on twang, surprisingly muted, but steady, steady, steady – lacks the sound and fury of some of the early rock records, and it turns out that’s the drummer, Dickie Harrell, screaming in the background because he wanted to prove to his mom that was him playing on the single.

Sources disagree how the song came together, but they all agree on where: in the U.S. Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, Virginia, where Vincent spent about half a year recovering from the motorcycle accident that shattered his leg (and almost saw it amputated). As for the how, a couple sources hold that a fellow patient named Don Graves wrote the words – with one source crediting a local stripper for the inspiration – while Vincent filled in the music. Other sources say Vincent bought the song, another says Vincent’s future manager, “Sheriff Tex” Davis, bought it while another has Davis claiming he wrote it with Vincent. Wikipedia’s entry on the song seconds a secondary theory in another source in saying that the inspiration came from the old Little Lulu comic strip, but that came from Vincent who admitted to rescuing that story from a blackout. Of which Vincent had many. So, let’s talk about how that happened...

The Rest of the Story, Briefly
He was born Vincent Eugene Craddock to Mary Louise and Ezekiah Jackson Craddock in Norfolk, Virginia in February of 1935, but his formative experiences happened in a small Virginia town called Munden Point. Vincent’s parents ran a general store in the town that did well enough that they could buy young Vincent a guitar. His first taste of music came from the old Grand Ole Opry mega broadcasts, but the move to Munden Point introduced him to black musical styles like gospel and blues. Once he had that guitar, he’d sit at the front of the store learning as he played; some of the locals egged him on by asking him to play.

His struggles in school, both socially (scrawny kid) and scholastically, led him to drop out at age 17 to join the U.S. Navy (his dad signed the papers). He served during the Korean War, without seeing any action, but liked either Navy life enough, or the money, to re-enlist for another five-year hitch in 1955. Vincent traded his re-enlistment bonus for the Triumph motorcycle that would get nailed by a car (possibly driven by a drunk) in short order and, more or less, destroy his leg. This is another place where sources disagree, but most of them agree he started wearing the “heavy metal brace” everyone mentions after this vehicular accident, as opposed to the later one. Something else that came with that brace: Vincent’s booze and pain pill habit.