Silky smooth: that was Brook Benton's byword from his first record to his very last, as the singer parlayed his rich baritone pipes into seven number one R&B hits and eight Top Ten items. Stints on the gospel circuit preceded Benton's first secular session for Okeh in 1953, but his career didn't begin to take off until he teamed with writer/producer Clyde Otis. Benton co-wrote and sang hundreds of demos for other artists before frequent collaborator Otis signed his friend to Mercury; together they pioneered a lush, violin-studded variation on the standard R&B sound, which beautifully showcased Benton's intimate vocals.
Benton crashed the top spot on the R&B charts in early 1959 with his moving "It's Just a Matter of Time," then rapidly encored with three more R&B chart-toppers: "Thank You Pretty Baby," "So Many Ways," and "Kiddio." Pairing with Mercury labelmate Dinah Washington, their delightful repartee on "Baby (You've Got What It Takes)" and "A Rockin' Good Way" paced the R&B lists in 1960.
The early '60s were a prolific period for Benton, but he left Mercury a few years later and bounced between labels before reemerging with the atmospheric Tony Joe White ballad "Rainy Night in Georgia" on Cotillion in 1970. Benton later made a halfhearted attempt to cash in on the disco craze, but his hitmaking reign was at an end long before his death in 1988.
Decision: Red hot R&B artist from 1959 to 1963, but other than "Rainy Night In Georgia", not well remembered by Pop music fans. No HOF.
Carole King
While the landmark Tapestry album earned her superstar status, singer/songwriter Carole King had already firmly established herself as one of pop music's most gifted and successful composers, with work recorded by everyone from the Beatles to Aretha Franklin. Born Carole Klein on February 9, 1942, in Brooklyn, NY, she began playing piano at the age of four, and formed her first band, the vocal quartet the Co-Sines, while in high school. A devotee of the composing team of Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller (the duo behind numerous hits for Elvis Presley, the Coasters, and Ben E. King), she became a fixture at influential DJ Alan Freed's local rock & roll shows; while attending Queens College, she fell in with budding songwriters Paul Simon and Neil Sedaka as well as Gerry Goffin, with whom she forged a writing partnership.In 1959, Sedaka scored a hit with "Oh! Carol," written in her honor; King cut an answer record, "Oh! Neil," but it stiffed. She and Goffin, who eventually married, began writing under publishers Don Kirshner and Al Nevins in the famed pop songwriting house the Brill Building, where they worked alongside the likes of Doc Pomus, Mort Shuman, Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, and countless others. In 1961, Goffin and King scored their first hit with the Shirelles' chart-topping "Will You Love Me Tomorrow"; their next effort, Bobby Vee's "Take Good Care of My Baby," also hit number one, as did "The Locomotion," recorded by their babysitter, Little Eva. Together, the couple wrote over 100 chart hits in a vast range of styles, including the Chiffons' "One Fine Day," the Monkees' "Pleasant Valley Sunday," the Drifters' "Up on the Roof," the Cookies' "Chains" (later covered by the Beatles), Aretha Franklin's "(You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman," and the Crystals' controversial "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)."
King also continued her attempts to mount a solo career, but scored only one hit, 1962's "It Might as Well Rain Until September." In the mid-'60s she, Goffin, and columnist Al Aronowitz founded their own short-lived label, Tomorrow Records; Charles Larkey, the bassist for the Tomorrow group the Myddle Class, eventually became King's second husband after her marriage to Goffin dissolved. She and Larkey later moved to the West Coast, where in 1968 they founded the City, a trio rounded out by New York musician Danny Kortchmar. the City recorded one LP, Now That Everything's Been Said, but did not tour due to King's stage fright; as a result, the album was a commercial failure, although it did feature songs later popularized by the Byrds ("Wasn't Born to Follow"), Blood, Sweat & Tears ("Hi-De-Ho"), and James Taylor ("You've Got a Friend").
Taylor and King ultimately became close friends, and he encouraged her to pursue a solo career. Released in 1970,Writer proved a false start, but in 1971 she released Tapestry, which stayed on the charts for over six years and was the best-selling album of the era. A quiet, reflective work that proved seminal in the development of the singer/songwriter genre, Tapestry also scored a pair of hit singles, "So Far Away" and the chart-topping "It's Too Late," whose flip side, "I Feel the Earth Move," garnered major airplay as well. Issued in 1971, Music also hit number one, and generated the hit "Sweet Seasons"; 1972's Rhymes & Reasons reached number two on the charts and 1974's Wrap Around Joy, which featured the hit "Jazzman," hit the number one spot.In 1975, King and Goffin reunited to write Thoroughbred, which also featured contributions from James Taylor, David Crosby, and Graham Nash. After 1977's Simple Things, she mounted a tour with the backing group Navarro and married her frequent songwriting partner Rick Evers, who died a year later after a heroin overdose. Pearls, a collection of performances of songs written during her partnership with Goffin, was released in 1980 and was her last significant hit, and King soon moved to a tiny mountain village in Idaho, where she became active in the environmental movement. After 1983's Speeding Time, she took a six-year hiatus from recording before releasing City Streets, which featured guest Eric Clapton. In 2001, she returned with Love Makes the World, a self-released disc on her own Rockingale label. Four years passed before her next record, The Living Room Tour, a double-disc set documenting her intimate 2004-2005 tour that found her revisiting songs from throughout her career with only her piano and acoustic guitars as accompaniment. King joined longtime friend James Taylor for a co-starring show at L.A.’s famed Troubadour venue in 2007, and the pair followed it with several more shows, resulting in the Live at the Troubadour release in 2010.
Decision: As a artist, the album Tapestry is an all time classic, but she only had a few other hit singles. But, if you include her incredible success as a songwriter, you have to include her in the Pop Music HOF.
Frankie Avalon
Discussing Frankie Avalon's career as a mover and shaker in 1950s rock & roll with anyone who takes their rock & roll even halfway seriously is to court derision. Avalon was the first of the manufactured teen idols, before Fabian and Bobby Rydell and the myriad of other pretenders to the throne who worked the turf with tight black pants and red, red sweaters to the fore while Elvis cooled his heels in Germany. In the late '50s and early '60s, post-Twist and pre-Beatles, these generally untalented pretty boys were the cardboard no-threat remnants of a post-Elvis age. But Avalon had a real musical background to go with the pretty boy looks, and was no drugstore teenager waiting to be discovered.
Born in South Philadelphia in 1939 as Francis Thomas Avallone, he broke into show business as a child prodigy trumpet player, good enough to win talent contests, get on the Jackie Gleason Show, and make records for RCA Victor's subsidiary, X Records. But as childhood gave way to teendom, Avalon found himself playing backup trumpet in a local band called Rocco & the Saints. When queried by local impresario Bob Marcucci if there might be some local rock & roll singers who would be good enough to record some of his songs, Frankie suggested he check out the group's lead singer, blond-haired-and-blue-eyed Andy Martin. Marcucci came to the gig, but was unimpressed with Martin, feeling that blond-haired singers didn't have the right "look" to connect with females. But once he heard Avalon belt out a couple of tunes, Marcucci knew he had found what he was looking for, and a management contract was inked immediately. It was another six to eight months before Avalon's first single, "Cupid," came out on Marcucci's Chancellor label, and it wasn't until his third release, "Dede Dinah," that he had his first Top Ten hit. From there, it was an unprecedented run of hits, starting with his first number one in 1959, "Venus," placing no less than six more records in the Top 40 in that year alone. Marcucci worked the formula, easing Avalon away from rockers into more "adult," sap-oriented fare like a true pro, and was able to produce similar results with the far less talented but also very pretty Fabian.
By 1962, Avalon's four-year domination of the charts was coming to an end, but his career wasn't. He teamed up with Annette Funicello and reinvented himself as a clean-cut, pretty-boy surfer in a wildly successful batch of Beach Party movies that got him through the '60s in far better shape than most of his colleagues. The series was big enough to bring himself and Funicello back for an update in the '80s, called Back To The Beach and a cameo appearance in Grease, in 1978, singing "Beauty School Dropout". Ever the musician, Avalon insisted surf legend (and original cast member) Dick Dalebe in this revival. Today, Avalon divides his time between hawking pain medicine on home shopping networks and appearing on the Golden Boys of Rock'n'Roll oldies show with Bobby Rydell and Fabian, looking handsome as ever.
Decision: One of the hottest pop acts of 1958-1959, but not a prolific enough career to be a pop music HOFer.
Freddy"Boom Boom" Cannon
Cannon could genuinely rock and on two of his very best records -- "Talahassee Lassie" and "Buzz-Buzz-A-Diddle-It" -- Freddy Cannon supplies his own electric rhythm guitar, with his scrappy work on the latter record being particularly effective. His records were masterminded by producers Bob Creweand Frank Slay, all well-constructed discs with every thump of the big beat and every vocal "woo" out of Cannon perfectly placed and timed for maximum impact. Hits like "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans," "Action," and "Palisades Park" may be "slicker" records than the two mentioned above, but they still possess an enormous vitality and commitment to rock & roll; few others could bring an old chestnut like "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans" into the modern age with a straight face. "Cannon"'s immense energy and contagious style make these noisy, very exciting records well worth investigating.
He was born Frederico Anthony Picariello in 1940 and grew up in the nearby Boston suburb of Lynn, MA. He got hit by the big beat early, but it helped having parents who had more than a passing interest in music; his dad blew trumpet, sang, and fronted local combos as Freddy Karmon while his mother's penchant for amateur songwriting would hand him the genesis of his first hit. Young Freddy soaked up the rhythm & blues of Big Joe Turner and the jump blues of bands like Buddy Johnson on the radio. But it was the guitar music of Chuck Berry that made the most lasting impression. As Cannon once said, "Give me four of five guys who can play hard and in the pocket and to me, you've got a rock & roll show." This stripped, down-to-basics motto became his credo, even when surrounded by big, brassy bands, singing old tunes his father had sung; in a time frame full of phony baloney teen idols, Freddy Cannonalways remained a true rock & roller.
Like most American teenagers at the time, Freddy went in search of the new music, which wasn't plentiful back then, despite what revisionist history tells us. He soon threw his lot in -- playing rhythm guitar and singing -- with a group called the Spindrifts and cut his first record, a local almost hit called "Cha-Cha-Do." After the group's 15 minutes of local fame had evaporated, our hero formed his first rock & roll band, Freddy Karmon & the Hurricanes. With himself on rhythm guitar, another guy on sax taking most of the leads, a piano man, and a distant relative keeping the beat, Freddy had his first big beat combo. The record-hop scene in the Boston area was wide open for artists to make a local dent andCannon and the boys played at every opportunity that came their way. In the meantime, he drove a truck after school, always coming home in time to watch Dick Clark's American Bandstand every afternoon, wishing he was one of the recordings stars, singing his song on the show.
One afternoon, he arrived home and his mother instructed him to grab his guitar; she had written a poem that she wanted Freddy to set to music. The poem was called "Rock and Roll Baby," which our hero put to a stomping, Chuck Berry beat and three-chord rock & roll progression. A quickie solo demo eventually found its way into the hands of indie producer Bob Crewe and his partner Frank Slay. Slayand Crewe rewrote the tune's verses and had Freddy Karmon & the Hurricanes go into a Boston studio and cut the new version as "Tallahassee Lassie." Even with local guitar twanging hotshot Kenny Paulsen brought into the lineup as a ringer, the record was only 75 percent of the way there to being a bona fide hit. After a pre-release acetate hearing at Dick Clark's house, the host of American Bandstand suggests the addition of a bass drum lick and hand claps in the middle, and back to the studio to overdub went Slay, Crewe, and Freddy. To fill up the remaining holes in the record, Crewe got the singer to go "wooo" at every available opportunity, a vocal gimmick that would soon become a signature trademark. A true piece of 1950s DIY studio craftsmanship and a record that simply rocks from beginning to end like few others, "Tallahassee Lassie" was his first solo record, his first hit, and the first record under his new name: "Freddy Cannon," newly named by Bernie Binnick, the president of his new record company, Swan Records in Philadelphia.
It was also the birth of a whole new style, a style that belonged to Freddy and his producers, lock, stock, and excitement galore. Following a formula of cutting tunes that named cities or states in the title,Cannon re-stormed the charts with records like "Okefenokee," "Way Down Yonder In New Orleans," "Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy," and "Muskrat Ramble." It is "Palisades Park," however, that remains his most enduring hit, a one-shot piece of amateur songwriter genius penned by later-Gong Show host Chuck Barris under the original title of "Amusement Park." It's a certified classic of oldies radio with a razor-sharp double tracked vocal by Cannon and roller-coaster sound effects dubbed in by Crewe as its audio hallmarks. Later chart entries like "Humdinger," "Transistor Sister," "If You Were a Rock and Roll Record," and "Teen Queen of the Week," showed that Cannon kept bringing the energy and the big beat at a time when most male singers were insipidly crooning. After leaving Swan with the height of Beatlemania lurking right around the corner, Freddy Cannon kept on rockin', extending his hit streak over to Warner Bros.; with records like "Abigail Beecher," "Beechwood City," "The Dedication Song" and providing the theme for Dick Clark's Where The Action Is!, also appearing in a couple of micro epic rock & roll movies along the way. He continued to knock 'em dead as a live act, something he still does today when the mood strikes him on the revival circuit, still capable of bringing the heat when a young band nails the groove behind him.
Decision: Only 3 top 10 hits. Not a HOFer..
Tomorrow: More 1959 Nominees:Jerry Butler, Neil Sedaka, Brenda Lee
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