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SINGNG GROUPS RULED After black groups like The Mills Brothers and The Ink Spots and white girl groups like The Andrews Sisters and the De Castro Sisters dominated the 1940s, these North American "white boy" groups topped the charts for a decade before Motown and the Invaders from England took over the Top 40 everywhere.
Top left: The Four Aces; Top right, The Hilltoppers; Bottom left, Canada's The Four Lads; Bottom right, the giants of the folk boom, The Kingston Trio. |
pre-rock Eisenhower years
of TheColumnists.com
One of the petty indulgences of my senior years is to round up all the record albums I never quite heard enough of in my youth, so I can keep them playing constantly while the sand slowly leaks down to the bottom of my personal hourglass. Right now I'm exhausting the ranks of the white boy singing groups of the early 1950s.
More about them later, but first I must admit my quest to hear everything I missed in my youth is not making me Mr. Popularity in my little world.
My wife is now patiently putting up with the likes of Rose "Chi-Chi" Murphy, Billy "Deed I Do" Daniels, Rosemary "Come On-a My House" Clooney and The Incomparable Hildegarde, which she finds acceptable as long as I don't play them constantly, which I'm afraid I do.
Meanwhile, she's covering her ears during my playbacks of Billy Eckstine, Kitty Kallen, Johnnie Ray and anything that sounds even vaguely like country music of the 1950s, especially the likes of Webb Pierce and Hank Snow.
And I've recently discovered my wife also isn't so fond of my two favorite "white boy" groups--The Four Aces and The Hilltoppers. "They sound too 1950-ish," she whines.
I got to them after several consecutive years of playing every known recording made by The Mills Brothers and The Ink Spots, two great all-black groups who piled up scores of hits each from the 1930s through the 1950s, defying the conventions of the time which seemed to suggest white record-buyers weren't interested in the music made by black people. That is, until Motown changed everything in the 1960s and made urban ghetto sounds attractive to kids of all races.
If there are any better records of the 20-year period from 1930-50 than the Mills Brothers' "Paper Doll" or "Up A Lazy River" or The Ink Spots' "To Each His Own" or "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall" (with Ella Fitzgerald, no less!), I'd love to hear them. These were incredibly innovative recording artists who influenced generations of black--and white--singing groups to come.
The four Mills Brothers, who started out singing with their dad in barber shop quartet-style, even used their own voices to create make-believe musical instruments to accompany their singing. If you listen to their great recording of "Hold That Tiger," I defy you to identify the "horns" playing along with them. Well, there weren't any horns. That's them alone, pretending to be horns.
The Ink Spots followed closely behind, always admitting they were inspired by the Mills Brothers. They added the high falsetto sound of lead singer Bill Kinney, which has echoed through the ages, even in the "original" sound of white groups like Frankie Valli's Four Seasons and England's Bee Gees.
Though both black groups were still charting top 10 hits in the late 1940s, the until-then small potatoes world of r&b ("rhythm and blues") was beginning to surface out of the "ethnic" charts and "soul" radio stations, breaking into the mainstream by way of Southern white boys who loved that kind of music. Those white boys were growing tired of playing country music heavy with fiddles and were starting to cross-pollinate black music, creating something that would be called "rockabilly." They were the forebears of such 1950s rock pioneers as Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis.
I'm prepared to believe that many young black men of the late 1940s and early 1950s had been made bold by their induction into a newly-integrated U.S. Armed Forces, where they were exposed to a much bigger world where Jim Crow didn't always rule. I'm betting they were anxiously awaiting a new music more relevant to their life on the wrong side of the tracks. They were waiting for Fats Domino and Chuck Berry and Ray Charles. And they maybe weren't so eager to embrace the old-fashioned kind of black singers like The Mills Brothers and The Ink Spots, who dressed up like white dudes at a wedding, singing songs composed by white people for white people.
But white record buyers were not so fast to give up the kind of dance hall music they had cherished for a generation. With the Big Bands mostly gone and radio disk jockeys now dictating what was pop music and what wasn't, there came a marvelous post World War II window of opportunity for white boys who liked to sing together.
In the 1940s, the Big Bands had boy singers, girl singers and boy-girl groups of backup singers like The Modernaires and The Merry Macs. When the bands started breaking up, the solo performers went looking for their own recording contracts, but there was no proving ground for new singing groups to get themselves going except on high school and college campuses or in small clubs that couldn't afford to book a name pop singer.
It was a great time for a group like The Ames Brothers to show up. The four--Joe, Gene, Vic and Ed Urick--were from a family of immigrants from Ukraine, who started a new life to Malden, Mass. The brothers always liked singing together and in the late 1940s Gene, Vic and Ed formed a quartet called The Amory Brothers with a cousin, Lennie. They toured Army and Navy bases, singing for the troops, and landed their first real professional gig singing at a classy Boston night club called The Fox and Hounds. They were held over and over, doing so well that older brother Joe joined them, replacing cousin Lennie.
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Ed Ames, upper right, is now 82 and is the only surviving member of the famous singing group. |
Trying to link up with one of the few remaining big bands, they went to New York and were taken on by the Art Mooney dance orchestra. A Decca records executive heard them singing and had them cut a few demos. Then the disastrous musicians strike came along and the recording industry was shut down for about a year, starting in January of 1948.
Once the recording ban was lifted, they cut records for the Coral label, a subsidiary of Decca, as The Ames Brothers, a condensation of "Amory Brothers," and had their first hit with "Rag Mop" in 1950, a cover of the famous song by The Treniers, a black group. There was a tremendous thirst for their white bread sound and they became regulars on Arthur Godfrey's radio show, an important showcase for new talent. Because they were good-looking, well-dressed guys, they also had great appeal for the new TV medium and became one of the first acts to work on Ed Sullivan's "Toast of the Town" television variety show.
Soon they were the biggest male pop singing group in the country, appearing regularly in the major clubs and on TV and even landing their own syndicated "Ames Brothers Show" in 1956. Their close harmony fell into the category of "traditional" pop music. They were never really innovative and sounded old-fashioned a lot earlier than most of the other white boy singing groups of the 1950s.
They had at least 21 hit songs from 1950-1963. The only Ames Brothers single I bought in my teens was "The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane," a 1954 novelty tune they recorded after they moved to the RCA Victor label. The youngest brother, Ed Ames, went on as a solo act after the brothers broke up the group in the 1960s and was a regular as an actor in the "Daniel Boone" TV series. He's now the only surviving member of the group. Vic died in 1978, Gene in 1997 and Joe in 2007. Ed will be 82 in July.
Though The Ames Brothers never really excited me much--I figured they were for my Mom's and Dad's generation--they certainly helped pave the way for the explosion of white male singing groups that followed them into the spotlight.
Right on their heels were a Canadian group, The Four Lads, and The Four Aces, a much more innovative group from Pennsylvania. The bond between the Lads was their membership in the St. Michael's Choir School in Toronto, where they first sang together. The Four Lads were lead singer Jimmy Arnold, tenor John "Bernie" Toorish, bass "Connie" Codarini and baritone Frank Busseri, who served as their manager.
Curiously, Codarini and Toorish earlier had formed a group with two other students at St. Michael's--Rudi Maugeri and John Perkins, who left to form their own new group,, The Crew-Cuts, another seminal "white boys" group of the 1950s.
Originally, The Four Lads called themselves The Four Dukes, but had to become the Lads when they learned there already was a Four Dukes group in Detroit. They started singing professionally in small clubs in Toronto and were encouraged to go to New York to land a recording contract--and did in 1950. Mitch Miller, the artists and repertoire boss at Columbia Records, heard them and signed them--as a backup group for his solo singers.
Though it wasn't much publicized at the time, The Four Lads' first slice of a hit record was as the backuip group to Johnnie Ray on his first two big hits of 1951--"Cry" and "The Little White Cloud That Cried." The Lads first recorded on their own in 1952 for the Columbia subsidiary, Okeh records, where Johnnie Ray started.
By 1953, they had their first gold record hit--"Istanbul" (Not Constantinople), which had the standard Mitch Miller "novelty" sound to it. They had a succession of hits for Columbia after that, including their best-remembered one, "Moments To Remember" (1955), which I actually remember buying. My favorite of their many hits came in 1956, the year I finished high school. It was "Standing on the Corner" (Watching All the Girls Go By), which was a showtune from Broadway's "The Most Happy Fella."
The Four Lads didn't have what I would call a signature voice in the group. Codarini left the group in 1962 and was replaced by Johnny D'Arc. Bernie Toorish was replaced by Sid Edwards in the 1970s. Lead singer Jimmy Arnold died in 1972 and D'Arc in 1999. The Four Lads still perform, but as a new group built around original member Frank Busseri.
Much more significant on the pop scene were The Four Aces, whose origins date back to the meeting of Al Albertini, originally from South Philadelphia, and Navy buddy Dave Mahoney. They started playing clubs in Philly with Albertini, who changed his name to Al Alberts, singing while Mahoney served as his accompanist. Later, they added Lou Silvestri, a drummer, and Rosario "Sod" Vaccaro, who played the trumpet. All the boys originally were from Chester, Penn. At first, the other boys basically started singing backup to Alberts, but soon began to sing together, though Alberts always sang the lead vocals.
Their recording career began when Alberts decided to start his own independent label because no major label was interested in having them record the song "(It's No) Sin." He founded Victoria records and "Sin" became an enormous hit, not only for The Four Aces, but also for Eddy Howard. This often was the story in those days for young singers--such as another Philly sensation, Al Martino, whose "Here In My Heart" was recorded on an indie label, but didn't become a giant hit until Tony Bennett did a cover version for Columbia.
I loved The Four Aces because they had a very stylish upbeat rhythm to most of their songs and because Al Alberts' bell-clear voice seemed to ride right along on top of the close harmony of the other boys. Signed quickly by Decca, they churned out a series of huge hits, starting with "Tell Me Why" and "Perfidia." Quickly they began to be known for their rousing versions of movie title tunes, such as "Three Coins in the Fountain" (though Frank Sinatra sang it on the film's soundtrack), "Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing," "It's A Woman's World" and "Written On the Wind."
Often a white male singing group came apart when the lead singer tried to go out on his own as a solo. That definitely happened with The Four Aces. Alberts broke from the group in 1956, but never made it on his own. He was replaced by Fred Diodati, who came from the same South Philly high school Alberts attended. Eventually, all the original members left and Diodati won the legal right to re-form the group as The Four Aces. He still performs with them. The original members were granted the right to tour as The Original Four Aces with Al Alberts--and did so until 1987.
Equally interesting, as far as I'm concerned, were The Hilltoppers, probably the one male singing group that most easily bridges the gap between traditional pop and the rock and roll era that began in the mid-1950s. They began as a trio of college students at Western Kentucky State College (now Western Kentucky University) in the late 1940s. Jimmy Sacca, Don McGuire and Seymour Spiegelman sang barber shop harmony at campus events--and might have been content to just let their dreams of pop singing careers end there if a World War II veteran named Billy Vaughn hadn't come along.
Vaughn, a former student at their college, was playing piano at a club in the college town in Bowling Green, Ky., and had heard the boys sing. He had written a song called "Trying" and asked Sacca to sing it in a recording he was going to make. Sacca agreed, but brought in McGuire and Spiegelman as backup voices. As they rehearsed the song, Vaughn added his baritone voice to the mix and they all liked what they heard.
Calling themselves The Hilltoppers, which was the name of the school team, they made a tape recording of themselves singing "Trying," then took it to a local deejay, who liked it so much that he sent it to the head of Dot Records in Tennessee, who loved it and signed The Hilltoppers to a recording contract immediately.
Though it's kind of embarrassing to look at photos of The Hilltoppers as they dressed for their first public performances as recording stars--they wore stupid-looking college beanies and sweaters in their school colors--there's certainly nothing embarrassing about the quality of their early records. Jimmy Sacca has a rich, masculine voice that just doesn't go with beanies and college sweaters. He sounded urban and tough, which was just the sound that was soon to dominate the pop world.
"Trying" became a huge hit and was a chart-topper for months in 1952. Their follow up records "Must I Cry Again," "If I Were King" and especially "P.S., I Love You" (the Johnny Mercer tune from the 1930s, not the song of the same title by The Beatles) and "Love Walked In" also charted big in 1953-54.
The three college boys were still in school when fame hit them between the eyes, resulting in appearances on the Ed Sullivan TV show and nationwide tours. Then Sacca was drafted and spent 1953-55 in the service. Fortunately, they had stockpiled songs featuring Sacca and weathered his absence well, at least as far as their recording went. Military duty followed for the other two college-age members and replacements had to be found. Vaughn left the group, formed his own band and had several recording hits under his own name.
Later, Sacca went out on his own as a single
and had some success. He eventually re-formed The Hilltoppers
and toured with them for years. Personally, I believe the group
could have held onto fame much longer if the draft hadn't broken
them up at the very height of their fame--and just as the rock
era was beginning.
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...They sang hits like "Tell Me You're Mine" party in English, partly in Italian. |
Another group I especially liked were The Gaylords, a trio that originally began in pre-Motown Detroit, circa 1949, when a couple of Italian-American boys--Ronald Fredianelli and Bonaldo Bonaldi--teamed up with Don Rea and began recording romantic ballads sung with choruses in both English and Italian. At first, they called themselves The Gay Lords, but I suppose that sounded too much like a street gang that wore ballet shoes and loved old Broadway show tunes. Lead singer Fredianelli began to call himself Ronnie Gaylord professionally and Bonaldi later changed his name to Burt Holiday.
Their first big hit was "Tell Me You're Mine" (1953), which began with Ronnie singing "Oh, my wonderful one: How I a-dore you!" I bought that record and also a 1953 follow-up, "Ramona," a classic old romantic song. I was put off by the song that was perhaps their greatest hit--"The Little Shoemaker" (1954), which was played so often on the radio that I had shoemaker nightmares.
The trio stretched out their run, reasonably hitless through the 1960s, until Fredianelli and Bonaldi launched a new act called "Gaylord and Holiday." Rea dropped out at that point, but Gaylord and Holiday played clubs until 2003. Fredianelli died in 2004, but Bonaldi went on performing with Fredianelli's son, who's known as Ron Gaylord, Jr.
The Crew-Cuts often are considered the group with the first rock and roll hit, but that's a marginal claim. Formed first as The Canadaires by brothers John and Ray Perkins with friends Pat Barrett and Rudi Maugeri, they were Toronto kids inspired by The Four Lads, who came from the same school in Toronto. They first established themselves locally, then went into the U.S. as a more or less traditional pop quartet where a Cleveland, Ohio, deejay suggested they change the name of their group and gave them a pitch to Mercury records, which signed them to a contract sight unseen.
Re-dubbed The Crew-Cuts, after the ultra-short hairstyle of most early 1950s boys in North America, they debuted with what would be their only self-composed hit, "Crazy 'Bout You Baby," which cracked the American top 10 in 1954. But their true fame came from their cover recording of "Sh-Boom," which had been a major r&b hit by a black quintet called The Chords. Given giant airplay by white deejays, "Sh-Boom" went to the top of the mainstream pop charts, where it's now hailed as the first rock and roll chart-buster.
This started The Crew-Cuts (and other groups) on a rush to cover every black r&b hit they could get their hands on, starting with "Oop Shoop," "Earth Angel" and "Ko Ko Mo," all covers of r&b chart hits. They finally had their last charted hit in 1957, a cover of Sonny James' country song "Young Love." (Movie star Tab Hunter also charted with the same song.) The Crew-Cuts disbanded in 1963.
Much more clearly linked to the rock era was the group known as Danny and the Juniors, which had one great hit that is considered a marker for the rock era--"At the Hop." The four young men--lead singer Danny Rapp, Dave White, Frank Maffei and JOe Terranova--started out in Philadelphia in 1955 as The Juvenairs. Initially they recorded for a local Philly label, which insisted on a new name, which came from a local deejay: Danny and the Juniors.
Group member Dave White wrote a song called "Do the Bop," which was supposed to be linked to a new dance craze, but Dick Clark, then a Philly TV personality and host of "American Bandstand," asked them to change the song to "At the Hop." He gave them a big push in 1957 and suddenly they had a non-stop hit, selling more than two million copies.
The boys had a few more charted hits, biggest of them being "Rock and Roll is Here To Stay" (1958). White left the group in the 1960s to concentrate on his songwriting. He came up with several hits for other artists, incluidng Leslie Gore's "You Don't Own Me." Original lead singer Danny Rapp died in 1983, an apparent suicide. Danny and the Juniors still tours (without anyone named Danny) with Frank Maffei's brother, Bobby, filling out the trio.
As the rock and roll era finally settled on the music industry in the mid-1950s, the white boy groups began to shift almost totally away from traditional pop styles in favor of either quasi-rock or some other new trend. Dion and the Belmonts would be a typical example of a new white boys group that debuted in 1957 and zeroed in on the rock scene. Otherwise, they might have been The Hilltoppers, given their strong lead singer Dion DiMucci, who began recording with singers he didn't know, but soon formed his own group by recruiting street pals from his native Bronx neighborhood.
The sand and surf beach movies of the late 1950s began to produce white boy singing groups, starting with ensembles like The Four Preps, who were classmates at Hollywood High School in 1956 and were signed to a recording contract at Capitol after the manager of Capitol recording stars Les Paul and Mary Ford saw them perform at a campus talent show.
The original Four Preps were Bruce Belland, Ed Cobb, Marv Ingram and Glen Larson. They charted first in 1956 with "Dreamy Eyes," but followed that up with their biggest hit "26 Miles (Santa Catalina," which was written by Belland and Larson and most expressed their beach-friendly youthful spirit. At the peak of their fame, they appeared as themselves in the quintessential beach movie, the original "Gidget" with Sandra Dee in 1959.
The group broke up a decade later. Glen Larson has had the most spectacular post-Preps career. He became a very successful TV producer, whose hits included the original "Battlestar Galactica," "The Fall Guy," "Knight Rider" and many more. Belland became a network executive, Cobb a record producer and Ingram a commodities broker. Cobb and Ingram died in 1999.
The other major trend of the late 1950s that produced many white boy singing groups was the folk music boom. Biggest of all the folk groups was The Kingston Trio--three young college men from Palo Alto, Calif., who were deeply influenced by The Weavers, one of the great folk groups, and by the trend to Calypso music, hence the name of their group for Kingston, the capital of Jamaica, wellspring of Calypso sounds.
The original members were Dave Guard, Bob Shane and Nick Reynolds, who played guitar, banjo and keyboards and sang. They were spotted performing in a youth-oriented club near Menlo College on the San Francisco Peninsula and signed to a contract by Frank Werber, a publicist for San Francisco's No. 1 club the hungry i, who got them a Capitol records contract.
Their first mega hit was "Tom Dooley" (Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley!), which went gold in 1958 and established The Kingston Trio as a major act. It also won them the first Grammy Award for Best Country and Western Performance at the first Grammy ceremony in 1959.
Their fresh, youthful sound was totally different than anything on the market at the time. Their appeal to college students was enormous and at one time in the early 1960s, they had four albums in the top 10 at the same time--a record not broken for 40 years! Among their biggest single hits: "Tiajuana Jail" (1959), "M.T.A." (1959), "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" (1962).
Their all-time most requested song--and my personal favorite--was "Scotch and Soda," a gentle love song that was especially effective with romantic-minded young women.
Dave Guard left the trio in 1961 and formed The Whiskey Hill Singers. He was replaced by John Stewart. Guard died in 1991, Reynolds in 2008. Shane is the only surviving member. The Kingston Trio still performs, but without any direct connection to the original group.
Following the same trend was another influential white boys group in the folk mood--The Limeliters. They were formed by Lou Gottlieb, an arranger for The Kingston Trio, who had just earned his doctorate in musicology and was attending a performance that included a duet by singers Alex Hassilev and Glenn Yarbrough. He wanted to talk them into doing some demo recordings for The Kingston Trio, but wound up joining with them at the Aspen night club they had purchased--The Limelite.
Once they decided they sounded pretty good together, they headed for San Francisco's hungry i and were signed to perform their under their new name, The Limeliters. Recording contracts came flying at them and they made their first album for Elektra in 1959, then signed with RCA where they had one hit aalbum after another.
Yarbrough left to become a highly popular single performer (his biggest hit record was the movie title tune, "Baby, the Rain Must Fall"), but The Limeliters kept going with replacements for Yarbrough. Gottlieb died in 1996 and the current version of The Limeliters has none of the original members.
Though white boy groups still come along now and then, it seems clear their era is long gone, though the Broadway and touring show popularity of "Jersey Boys," based on the real-life rock era group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. probably has stirred interest in that kind of sound all over again. It's hard to imagine a group like that getting anywhere today in a music world dominated by rap and hip-hop entertainers.
Did racism aimed at blacks play a role in the boom of white boy singers in the early 1950s? I would guess it was a factor, but not the dominant one. Given a chance to shine in the spotlight, for whatever reason, most of these groups just happened to be great entertainers. I would like to think they'd have made it somehow, somewhere, for that reason alone.
©2009 by Ron Miller. The illustrations are from a variety of internet sources, but a special thanks is extended to Wikipedia, the online enclopedia, which provided many of the photos and much of the background information for this column.This column first posted June 8, 2009.
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