|
Post by jk on Feb 7, 2024 21:20:33 GMT
”Save the Last Dance for Me,” by the Drifters Oct. 17, 1960, and Oct. 31-Nov. 7, 1960 (3 weeks combined) Love the soaring strings! There are some who hear the work of Phil Spector in this track. Apparently Uncle Phil was apprenticed to the record's producers Leiber and Stoller at the time. I can't say I recall hearing this when it was released. Those were the days, when nobody seemed to cared whether the backing harmonies were entirely in tune and it was the atmosphere that mattered most. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save_the_Last_Dance_for_Me
|
|
|
Post by jk on Feb 8, 2024 10:28:28 GMT
”Save the Last Dance for Me,” by the Drifters Oct. 17, 1960, and Oct. 31-Nov. 7, 1960 (3 weeks combined) I'll pull my usual stunt and and take this opportunity to sneak in a favourite of my own by the act being discussed. "There Goes My Baby" (1959) combined new elements in pop (the baion rhythm, strings up front, elaborate production) that point the way towards full-blown Spector, Motown and beyond. You can (hopefully) read more about this song and "Last Dance" here. (That string figure first heard one minute in can be heard again on The Move's debut single "Night Of Fear".) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Goes_My_Baby_(The_Drifters_song)
|
|
|
Post by Sheriff John Stone on Feb 8, 2024 12:05:04 GMT
Here we go. Some class at #1. Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman and The Drifters. A great record, a great radio song. You know it's a great song when it's been covered by so many artists in all kinds of genre. Again, I'm surprised "Save The Last Dance For Me" came out in late 1960. For some reason I always considered it a late 50's song. Some great things were brewing. It wouldn't be long.
|
|
|
Post by Kapitan on Feb 8, 2024 20:50:57 GMT
There are some who hear the work of Phil Spector in this track. Apparently Uncle Phil was apprenticed to the record's producers Leiber and Stoller at the time. Thanks for bringing that up! I had intended to include it in my write-up and totally forgot. (I wasn't very organized for this one...) Like Sheriff John Stone, I am glad we came to this one after what feels like (but I know was not) an endless string of novelty songs! This one definitely feels to me worthy of its #1 spot.
|
|
|
Post by jk on Feb 9, 2024 20:59:09 GMT
Here we go. Some class at #1. Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman and The Drifters. A great record, a great radio song. You know it's a great song when it's been covered by so many artists in all kinds of genre. Again, I'm surprised "Save The Last Dance For Me" came out in late 1960. For some reason I always considered it a late 50's song. Some great things were brewing. It wouldn't be long. Read a great biography of Doc Pomus a year or two ago: The first Drifters-related song I recall hearing at the time was Ben E. King's sultry "Amor": en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Harlem_(album)
|
|
|
Post by Kapitan on Feb 12, 2024 15:25:03 GMT
”I Want to be Wanted,” by Brenda Lee October 24, 1960 (1 week)
It wasn’t so long ago when we last left Brenda Lee, the 15-year-old singer whose B-side “I’m Sorry” topped the Hot 100 in summer of 1960. But a lot can happen in three months.
Lee’s hit single was followed closely by the release of her second album, Brenda Lee, in August 1960 … and then by her third, This is…Brenda, in October 1960! If there were fears of over-saturating the market, they were unfounded: the albums peaked at Nos. 5 and 4, respectively, on the Hot 100 charts.
“I’m Sorry,” along with its A-side “That’s All You Gotta Do,” were on the former album. The latter included what would become her next single, her next hit, and her last No. 1 single for more than six decades.
James Kimball “Kim” Gannon was born in Brooklyn in 1900. He grew up in New Jersey and eventually attended St. Lawrence University and Albany Law School with the intention of being an attorney—he passed the New York state bar exam—but eventually pursued other plans.
In 1934, he wrote his first song, and three years later, he wrote what was the best-selling song in the United States for several months, “Moonlight Cocktail,” recorded by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. Primarily a lyricist, he continued writing, especially for films and theater. So much for the law. (Another of his successes was the 1943 song “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” a top-10 hit for Bing Crosby that went on to become a Christmas standard.)
In 1960, Gannon wrote English lyrics to the Italian song “Per tutta la vita” (“For All Lifetime”), written by Pino Spotti and Alberta Testo. The song had been performed in the 1959 iteration of the Italian song contest Festival di Sanremo, but it did not place among the competition’s 10 top spots. (It was included in the Greek romantic comedy Never On Sunday.)
Lee recorded the song in late March 1960 in Nashville under the production guidance of Owen Bradley. The context was similar to that of several of the hits we’ve reviewed from the previous year: Nashville’s A-team of Buddy Harman on drums, Bob Moore on bass, Floyd Cramer on piano, Harold Bradley on guitar, and Buddy Emmons on steel guitar were among the contributors to Lee’s album sessions. This single also included a string section and background vocals, but the star is the star: Brenda Lee’s voice.
Released in July 1960 as a single, just as “I’m Sorry” was hitting #1, “I Want to be Wanted” began its ascent that climaxed atop the charts for one week in late October 1960.
The song was Lee’s last No. 1 until her 1958 recording of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” reached that position in December 2023, setting a record for the longest stretch between No. 1s (63 years) by an artist on the Hot 100.
Don’t cry for Lee over her decades without a No. 1, though: she kept having big hits throughout the early 60s and modest hits for decades thereafter.
|
|
|
Post by Kapitan on Feb 13, 2024 12:39:37 GMT
Here is a 1959 version of the original song, "Per Tutta La Vita," performed by Wilma De Angelis.
|
|
|
Post by Sheriff John Stone on Feb 13, 2024 13:01:14 GMT
A few years ago I watched the excellent Ken Burns' documentary, Country Music, on PBS. The miniseries featured Brenda Lee more than I expected. I mostly knew Brenda from "Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree" and I knew she had some hit singles, but I was surprised Burns devoted so much time to her. This thread prompted me to check out Brenda Lee's Wikipedia page. She was popular mostly from 1958-1966, starting with "Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree" in late 1958 and her last hit record being "Coming On Strong" in 1966. She only had a few (3 and one was a Christmas album) hit albums. Brenda Lee was a prolific singles artist; that appeared to be her forte'.
I was not familiar with "I Want To Be Wanted". It sounds like a well-produced but average song. It surprises me that it went to #1. I say that with almost every #1 song so far on this thread. I guess Brenda was riding the wave of momentum. It features that familiar Brenda Lee vocal. To her credit, Brenda did have a recognizable voice. I hear a lot of Patsy Cline influence on "I Want To Be Wanted", and as we know, Patsy was a friend and mentor to the young Little Miss Dynamite.
|
|
|
Post by jk on Feb 13, 2024 23:12:21 GMT
I was not familiar with "I Want To Be Wanted". It sounds like a well-produced but average song. It surprises me that it went to #1. I say that with almost every #1 song so far on this thread. I guess Brenda was riding the wave of momentum. It features that familiar Brenda Lee vocal. To her credit, Brenda did have a recognizable voice. I hear a lot of Patsy Cline influence on "I Want To Be Wanted", and as we know, Patsy was a friend and mentor to the young Little Miss Dynamite. Yes, on all three counts. "I'm Sorry" does something for me; this one doesn't. Love the picture of Brenda and Patsy!
|
|
|
Post by Kapitan on Feb 13, 2024 23:16:52 GMT
I was not familiar with "I Want To Be Wanted". It sounds like a well-produced but average song. It surprises me that it went to #1. I say that with almost every #1 song so far on this thread. I guess Brenda was riding the wave of momentum. It features that familiar Brenda Lee vocal. To her credit, Brenda did have a recognizable voice. I hear a lot of Patsy Cline influence on "I Want To Be Wanted", and as we know, Patsy was a friend and mentor to the young Little Miss Dynamite. Yes, on all three counts. "I'm Sorry" does something for me; this one doesn't. Love the picture of Brenda and Patsy! I admit I am startled by how good a singer Lee is. I knew her name, I knew a few songs--but not this one--but can't say I spent more than five minutes in my life thinking about her prior to our couple of songs in this thread. Her voice is really great. And so while I agree with you two that the song itself isn't anything to write home about, I think her vocal is actually wonderful. It would be fun to hear a different mix, one that removes the choir and orchestra and uses the Nashville session guys and her voice. Maybe (since I'm dreaming) with some tasteful Buddy Emmons pedal steel in place of the orchestra. I'd love to hear that. I think it would be really powerful, a bit less saccharine. The arrangement as it is is a bit rigid for the vocal.
|
|
|
Post by Kapitan on Feb 16, 2024 15:30:10 GMT
”Georgia On My Mind,” by Ray Charles November 14, 1960 (1 week)
The Singer Thank goodness for the Red Wing Cafe. That Greenville, Florida, restaurant was home to an old upright piano where owner Wylie Pitman used to play boogie woogie music that piqued the curiosity of the precocious three-year-old Ray Charles Robinson. It also occasionally was home to Robinson and his young mother.
Aretha Williams had been taken in by Bailey and Mary Jane Robinson as a child when her mother died and her father was unable to care for her. Scandal arose, however, when Bailey impregnated the girl he had been raising as a daughter. She returned to her hometown of Albany, Georgia, to give birth to Ray in 1930, but returned to Greenville to raise the child with the help of the Robinsons. Bailey left both Mary Jane and Aretha to marry yet another woman, and Aretha struggled to take care of Ray and his new younger brother, George.
Pitman always welcomed them into his cafe, including as a place to stay when they had nowhere else to live and no money. Around the same time his little brother accidentally drowned in a laundry tub, Ray began to lose his eyesight. By the time he was seven years old, he was completely blind.
Ray was accepted into the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind in St. Augustine, Florida. While it was not racially integrated—social opposition to integration was rampant in Florida at the time—the school had created the “Florida Institute for the Deaf, Blind, and Dumb, Colored Department” in 1895. Ray attended from 1937 to 1945 and learned to play classical piano as well as the jazz music of Art Tatum. He was also taught to read and write braille music at the school. He learned to play clarinet, alto saxophone, trumpet, and organ. He learned to repair radios and cars. (He was called “The Genius,” after all.)
His mother, Aretha, died in spring of 1945, and a devastated Ray chose not to return to school after the funeral. He moved to Jacksonville to live with one of his late mother’s friends, joined the local musicians’ union, and began playing professionally in the area.
A working, and struggling, musician, Ray kept working in Jacksonville, then Tampa, and in 1948, he followed a friend to Seattle. There he formed a trio, the McSon Trio (as in, friend Gossie McKee on guitar and him, Ray Robinson, on piano, plus bassist Milton Garred) that spawned his first national hit: “Confession Blues” reached No. 2 on the R&B charts.
In the late ’40s or very early ‘50s, Ray Charles Robinson began working under the name Ray Charles. He scored several other hits on the R&B charts. In 1952, Charles was signed to Atlantic Records. In the 1950s, he became a star. It was in this era that Atlantic producer Jerry Wexler gave Charles the nickname “The Genius,” a title many of his peers felt he deserved. Frank Sinatra called him the only genius in the industry.
In 1959, Charles’s Atlantic contract expired and he was the object of a bidding war. Eventually he signed with ABC-Paramount, receiving a large signing bonus, higher royalties, and ownership of his own master tapes. The contract gave him both money and control that was very rare in the industry, much less among black artists.
While Charles had regularly composed music previously, by 1960 he focused on interpreting and arranging other people’s music. His third single release for ABC was “Georgia On My Mind,” by Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell.
The Song Hoagland Howard Carmichael was born in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1899. “Hoagy” learned piano as a child, ragtime as a teen, and began playing professionally as a 19-year-old. He graduated from the University of Indiana in 1925 and got his law degree one year later. But he was already a performing musician by this time, becoming friends with Bix Beiderbecke.
He had been writing music as a college student, and in 1927, he wrote one of the first of his songs that would become a standard, “Star Dust.” In 1930, he wrote another, “Georgia On My Mind.”
It has been suggested that Carmichael wrote “Georgia On My Mind” for his sister, Georgia. Carmichael himself wrote in his second autobiography that he wrote it at the suggestion of saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer that he should write a song about the state of Georgia. Carmichael and his roommate Stuart Gorrell worked on the song, with Gorrell saying he’d written the lyrics about Carmichael’s sister. (Gorrell was not listed on the copyright, but was paid royalties anyway.) Carmichael and Beiderbecke released a recording of the song in 1930.
Charles recorded the song as part of his concept album Genius Hits the Road, his debut album for ABC, which included songs about different parts of the country: “Moonlight In Vermont,” “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” and, yes, “Georgia On My Mind.” The album reached No. 9 on the Billboard charts.
“Georgia On My Mind,” the only single from the album, was backed with “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.” While Charles had topped the R&B charts about half a dozen times before, and had several hits on the Hot 100, but “Georgia On My Mind” became his first record to top the Hot 100, having overtake the Drifters’ two-week, second tenure in that spot. Its stay was brief—just one week—but Ray Charles would return to that perch again.
|
|
|
Post by jk on Feb 16, 2024 23:30:27 GMT
”Georgia On My Mind,” by Ray Charles November 14, 1960 (1 week) "The Genius" for sure! And God bless Wylie Pitman! Talking of his early years, here's a vintage Ray track I bumped into many years ago: Great to see Hoagy, Tram and Bix getting a mention! It's a small world and that's a fact. Stupendous version by Ray there. Thanks once again, Cap'n.
|
|
|
Post by lonelysummer on Feb 17, 2024 4:50:47 GMT
”I Want to be Wanted,” by Brenda Lee October 24, 1960 (1 week)It wasn’t so long ago when we last left Brenda Lee, the 15-year-old singer whose B-side “I’m Sorry” topped the Hot 100 in summer of 1960. But a lot can happen in three months. Lee’s hit single was followed closely by the release of her second album, Brenda Lee, in August 1960 … and then by her third, This is…Brenda, in October 1960! If there were fears of over-saturating the market, they were unfounded: the albums peaked at Nos. 5 and 4, respectively, on the Hot 100 charts. “I’m Sorry,” along with its A-side “That’s All You Gotta Do,” were on the former album. The latter included what would become her next single, her next hit, and her last No. 1 single for more than six decades. James Kimball “Kim” Gannon was born in Brooklyn in 1900. He grew up in New Jersey and eventually attended St. Lawrence University and Albany Law School with the intention of being an attorney—he passed the New York state bar exam—but eventually pursued other plans. In 1934, he wrote his first song, and three years later, he wrote what was the best-selling song in the United States for several months, “Moonlight Cocktail,” recorded by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. Primarily a lyricist, he continued writing, especially for films and theater. So much for the law. (Another of his successes was the 1943 song “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” a top-10 hit for Bing Crosby that went on to become a Christmas standard.) In 1960, Gannon wrote English lyrics to the Italian song “Per tutta la vita” (“For All Lifetime”), written by Pino Spotti and Alberta Testo. The song had been performed in the 1959 iteration of the Italian song contest Festival di Sanremo, but it did not place among the competition’s 10 top spots. (It was included in the Greek romantic comedy Never On Sunday.) Lee recorded the song in late March 1960 in Nashville under the production guidance of Owen Bradley. The context was similar to that of several of the hits we’ve reviewed from the previous year: Nashville’s A-team of Buddy Harman on drums, Bob Moore on bass, Floyd Cramer on piano, Harold Bradley on guitar, and Buddy Emmons on steel guitar were among the contributors to Lee’s album sessions. This single also included a string section and background vocals, but the star is the star: Brenda Lee’s voice. Released in July 1960 as a single, just as “I’m Sorry” was hitting #1, “I Want to be Wanted” began its ascent that climaxed atop the charts for one week in late October 1960. The song was Lee’s last No. 1 until her 1958 recording of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” reached that position in December 2023, setting a record for the longest stretch between No. 1s (63 years) by an artist on the Hot 100. Don’t cry for Lee over her decades without a No. 1, though: she kept having big hits throughout the early 60s and modest hits for decades thereafter. Brenda Lee was one of my uncle's favorite singers. He played a recording of her singing "Jesus Loves Me" at grandma's funeral. I've heard some of her songs, but never studied up on her. I had no idea she started off so young. I thought of her as more of a pop country singer, so it was a surprise to see that her big hits were not on the country charts. I enjoy the education I'm getting here.
|
|
|
Post by Kapitan on Feb 17, 2024 11:41:43 GMT
I enjoy the education I'm getting here. I'm enjoying the one I'm getting here, too. A lot of this is new to me.
|
|
|
Post by Sheriff John Stone on Feb 17, 2024 15:22:29 GMT
I enjoy the education I'm getting here. I'm enjoying the one I'm getting here, too. A lot of this is new to me. Same here, and what I learned with this latest "Georgia On My Mind" exploration is:
- Ray Charles signed with Atlantic Records as early as 1952.
- Frank Sinatra was a fan. I knew Sinatra was an advocate for black artists (Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Quincy Jones come to mind), but I didn't know Frank was an admirer of Ray Charles.
- Hoagy Carmichael had a law degree.
- The lyrics to "Georgia On My Mind" could've been inspired by a person. While that certainly makes sense and could be true, I never considered it. I always thought of the state when listening to the song.
...and I didn't know that "Georgia On My Mind" was a single and a #1 one at that. Of course I'm familiar with the song (I also love Willie Nelson's rendition), but I always thought it as just one of Ray Charles' best songs. I've heard/seen the song featured in various documentaries, biographies, TV shows, and numerous Best Of compilations. I own one, in fact, and bought the comp mostly for "Georgia On My Mind", among others. I guess I considered the song more as an American standard than a popular recording, a single, a radio song, a 45. I think other Ray Charles records have been/are played more on the radio. "What'd I Say", "Hit The Road Jack", and "I Can't Stop Loving You" come to mind. So, now I know. "Georgia On My Mind" was a chart-topper in 1960!
|
|