Connie Francis is the prototype for the female pop singer of today. At the height of her chart popularity in the late '50s and early '60s, Francis was unique as a female recording artist, amassing record sales equal to or surpassing those of many of her male contemporaries. Ultimately, she branched into other styles of music -- big band, country, ethnic, and more. She still challenges Madonna as the biggest-selling female recording artist of all time. Like Madonna, Concetta Rosemarie Franconero came from an Italian-American background. Francis started her music career at three, playing an accordion bought for her by her contractor father, George. Her father's dream was not for his daughter to become a star, but for Francis to become independent of men as an adult with her own accordion school of music. At age ten, she was accepted on Startime, a New York City television show that featured talented child singers and performers. The show had no one else who played an accordion. Its host, legendary TV talent scout Arthur Godfrey, had difficulty pronouncing her name and suggested something "easy and Irish," which turned into Francis. After three weeks on Startime, the show's producer and Francis' would-be manager advised her to dump the accordion and concentrate on singing. Francis performed weekly on Startime for four years.
After being turned down by almost every record label she approached, 16-year-old Francis signed a record contract with MGM, only because one of the songs on her demo, "Freddy," also happened to be the name of the president's son. "Freddy" was released in June 1955 as the singer's first single. After a series of flop singles, on October 2, 1957 she undertook what was to be her last session for MGM. Francis had recently accepted a premed scholarship to New York University and was contemplating the end of her career as a singer. Having recorded two songs, she thanked the technicians and musicians, hoping not to have to record the third song her father had in mind, an old tune from 1923. After a false start, she sang it in one take. When Dick Clark played "Who's Sorry Now?" on American Bandstand, he told the show's eight million viewers that Connie Francis was "a new girl singer that is heading straight for the number one spot."
"Who's Sorry Now?" was the first of Francis' long string of worldwide hits. By 1967, she had sold 35 million worldwide, with 35 U.S. Top 40 hits and several number ones ("Everybody's Somebody's Fool," "My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own," "Don't Break the Heart That Loves You," and "Stupid Cupid") to her credit. Released in 1963, "In the Summer of His Years," written as a tribute to the assassinated John F. Kennedy, remains one of the earliest known charity records, with proceeds donated to dependents of the policemen shot during the incident.
Francis had an affinity for languages and was one of the first pop singers to record her songs in other languages; 1961's title song from the movie Where the Boys Are was recorded in six languages. She starred in four (nondescript) films, sang voice-overs in movies for actresses who could not sing, and was a guest star on innumerable TV shows. Music critics who didn't take kindly to Francis' pop music years were eventually won over by her versatility. Her Italian and Jewish albums transformed Francis from a teenage idol to a mature performer at leading nightspots around the world. She has also had a long history being a composer's first choice to interpret songs that went on to become major hits for other artists, including "Somewhere My Love," "Strangers in the Night," "Angel in the Morning," and "When Will the Apples Fall."
While the recording of "Who's Sorry Now?" in 1957 was planned to be her final session for MGM, she actually ended that relationship in 1969, choosing not to renew her contract when MGM was taken over by Polydor. She opted instead for domestic life with her third husband. Francis didn't return to the recording studio until 1973 when the writers of "Tie a Yellow Ribbon," longtime friends, wrote "The Answer" especially for Francis. In 1974, her husband encouraged her to return to the stage, with disastrous consequences. After her third performance, she was raped at the hotel where she was staying. Ultimately, this incident contributed to the end of her marriage. During 1975, nasal surgery temporarily robbed her of her voice. She was on the comeback trail in 1981 when her brother, George, was brutally murdered. It took seven years to determine that through all of those events, she was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She finally made her return to the stage and recording in 1989, and Connie Francis has continued to sing to sold-out audiences into the new millennium. She has recorded more than 70 LPs.
Decision: 16 top 10 pop hits, and 8 gold singles....Easily makes the Pop Music HOF.....
Kingston Trio
In the history of popular music, there are a relative handful of performers who have redefined the content of the music at critical points in history -- people whose music left the landscape, and definition of popular music, altered completely. The Kingston Trio were one such group, transforming folk music into a hot commodity and creating a demand -- where none had existed before -- for young men (sometimes with women) strumming acoustic guitars and banjos and singing folk songs and folk-like novelty songs in harmony. On a purely commercial level, from 1957 until 1963, The Kingston Trio were the most vital and popular folk group in the world, and folk music was sufficiently popular as to make that a significant statement. Equally important, the original trio -- Dave Guard, Nick Reynolds, and Bob Shane -- in tandem with other, similar early acts such as the Limeliters, spearheaded a boom in the popularity of folk music that suddenly made the latter important to millions of listeners who previously had ignored it. The group's success and influence transcended its actual sales. Without the enviable record of popularity and sales that they built up for folk music, it is unlikely that Columbia Records would ever have had any impetus to allow John Hammond to sign an unknown singer/guitarist named Bob Dylan, or to put Weavers co-founder Pete Seeger under contract, or for Warner Bros. to record the Greenwich Village-based trio Peter, Paul and Mary.
The group was founded in Palo Alto, CA, by Dave Guard (1934-1991), a graduate student from Stanford University, and two of his close friends, Bob Shane (born 1934) and Nick Reynolds (1933-2008), from Menlo College. Guard and Shane had both been raised in Hawaii, and had originally played together in high school in Honolulu. Reynolds hailed from Coronado, CA, the son of a career Navy officer, and attended Menlo College as a business major. He first spotted Shane asleep in the back of the hall during a very boring lecture on accounting, and they started hanging out, drinking, and chasing women together, and this, in turn, led to playing music, initially as a way of being popular at parties -- Shane's guitar and Reynolds' bongos became a fixture at local frat gatherings, and after a few weeks of this,Shane introduced Reynolds to Dave Guard. It turned out that Hawaiian music fit in perfectly with the luaus that people were throwing locally, and Shane and Guard taught Reynolds some genuine Hawaiian songs. The group was playing at a local tavern two nights a week, but the formation of The Kingston Trio was still not quite in place. Shane returned to Hawaii for a time to work for his father's sporting goods company, and tried to become the future island state's answer to Elvis Presley as a solo act -- meanwhile, Guard and Reynolds began playing with Joe Gannon on bass and singer Barbara Bogue, and became Dave Guard & the Calypsonians. That group didn't last, and finally Reynolds and Shane(back all the way from Hawaii) were brought back to the now newly rechristened Kingston Trio.
Their initial approach to music was determined by the skills that each member brought or, more accurately, didn't bring to the trio -- Bob Shane sang most of the lead parts simply because he had no familiarity with harmony singing, while Nick Reynolds sang a third above the melody, and Guardhandled whatever was left above or below. Guard had taken some banjo lessons, but otherwise they were completely self-taught on their instruments, with Shane teaching Guard his first guitar chords while they were still in high school. And Reynolds soon swapped his ukulele for a tenor guitar. They were booked into the Purple Onion, a leading night spot in San Francisco, opening for comediennePhyllis Diller, and Guard then sent out postcards to 500 people that all three of them knew at Stanford and Menlo, inviting them to a week's worth of shows at the Purple Onion. The result was a series of sold-out shows, and a one-week engagement that was doubled, before the Trio got their own headlining gig at the club lasting five months, from June to December of 1957. During that summer, Capitol Records producer Voyle Gilmore, who had previously recorded Frank Sinatra and the Four Freshmen, saw them play at the Purple Onion, and a seven-year contract was signed soon after.
The Kingston Trio spent the next few months intensively rehearsing, refining, and polishing their act as they went along -- they recognized that musical ability alone was not going to keep audiences entertained, and they quickly developed a comic stage banter, which grew out of their own personalities, and learned how to pace themselves, their songs, and their banter for maximum effect, and also how to make it sound spontaneous to audiences night after night. The group followed the Purple Onion engagement with a national tour that took them to Mr. Kelly's in Chicago and the Village Vanguard in New York, all of them successful appearances. During this tour, the group recorded its self-titled debut album in a series of sessions held over the three days. That record contained a brace of classic Kingston Trio songs, including "Scotch and Soda," "Hard, Ain't It Hard," and "Tom Dooley." The latter song, picked up by a DJ in Salt Lake City who began playing it, became a single in July of 1958 -- it spent October through January in the Billboard Top Ten, selling over three million copies and becoming, in the estimation of historian Bill Bush, one of that handful of records, such as Elvis' "Heartbreak Hotel" andthe Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand," that transformed the musical landscape. In the process, the Trio earned appearances on The Dinah Shore Show and The Kraft Music Hall. "Tom Dooley" was so successful that it became the basis for a feature film, The Legend of Tom Dooley -- a sort of low-budget variant on Love Me Tender -- starring Michael Landon as the doomed title character.
Their residence in San Francisco was now at the much more prestigious Hungry I, and it was there that they recorded their second album, before a live audience in the summer of 1958. The album sold well despite the fact that it broke little new ground, merely showcasing the group's engaging interaction with its audience and some spirited singing. At Large, the Trio's third album, was their first done in stereo, and the first recording on which they began to change their sound, advancing it significantly from their roots. There was extensive use of overdubbing, with multiple voices, guitars, and banjos, so that there were upward of half a dozen Trio "members" heard at any one time singing and playing. By that time, they had broadened their repertory as well, to embrace R&B as well as folk songs. the Trio made the cover of Life magazine on August 3, 1959, and were voted the Best Group of the Year for 1959 in the pages of both Billboard and Cashbox magazines, the twin recording industry bibles, as well as two Grammy Awards. None of this exactly pleased the serious folk audience, who felt that The Kingston Trio, in popularizing traditional songs, also cheapened them -- although the Trio got a reasonably enthusiastic reception at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, they were never embraced by the folk audience of the late '50s.There was also probably some professional resentment, owing to the fact that these three college graduates in their twenties, who had never paid their dues in the labor or anti-Nazi struggles of the 1930s and '40s, or endured the frosty anti-left political atmosphere of the early and mid-'50s, were suddenly making hundreds of thousands of dollars with the very same repertories that these serious folkies had performed for decades. The group was, however, immensely popular with almost every segment of the mass audience, but most of all among college students, who found both relaxation and validation in their mix of folk songs, humor, and good spirits. They were sufficiently well liked by older listeners, and embraced by younger audiences, to justify their appearances on television series such as The Jack Benny Show (where they mimed to their recordings of "I'm Going Home" and "Tijuana Jail," the latter sung on a set made up as -- you guessed it -- a Tijuana jail).
By the early '60s, there were lots of Kingston Trio imitators running around: the Highwaymen (from Wesleyan University), who scored big with "Michael"; Bud & Travis; the Journeymen, whose ranks included John Phillips and Dick Weissman, who were probably the most promising of them all; the Halifax Three (with Denny Doherty) from Canada; and, on the "big-band" folk side, the New Christy Minstrels under Randy Sparks and the Serendipity Singers from the University of Colorado; as well asthe Big 3 (with Cass Elliot) and, later, the Shilos (featuring Gram Parsons). All these artists were capable of recording popular versions of old folk songs, although none matched the trio's exposure or sales. Still, there was plenty of work to go around in those days -- folk music was what was happening, and other record labels and folk clubs were willing to try anything to imitate Capitol's success with the Trio. Even Roulette Records, best known for rock & roll acts and as a recording haven for veteran jazz acts such as Count Basie, had a resident folk trio in the Cumberland Three, featuring a young singer/songwriter/guitarist named John Stewart.
This era was later recalled and satirized in Christopher Guest's comedy film A Mighty Wind, in whichThe Kingston Trio and other collegiate-type folk groups of the period were parodied in the guise of "the Folksmen." the Trio's record of hits continued unabated for the next two years, into 1961 -- according to Bill Bush, they accounted for 20 percent of Capitol Records' profits for the entire year of 1960, during a period when the label's roster also included such legends (and sales powerhouses) as Frank Sinatraand Nat King Cole. They defined the entire folk-pop genre in much the same way that the Beach Boysdefined surf music and the Beatles later defined the entire British Invasion. Their influence extended far beyond their corner of the music marketplace -- the Trio not only recorded an enviable array of hits but also introduced to the world a number of songs that became hits in the hands of others, including "It Was a Very Good Year" during the 1950s and, in the early '60s, "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." As a reflection of the group's impact, their manager, Frank Werber, was one of the most influential behind-the-scenes figures in music, occupying a position in early-'60s popular music not too far from that occupied by Beatles manager Brian Epstein in England from 1963 onward -- he could literally give some aspiring musician a good living and a future at the stroke of a pen, and record labels were eager to audition his clients as potential recording artists.
the Trio's youthful exuberance and mix of upbeat sensibilities and traditional songs seemed perfectly of a piece with the dawn of the Kennedy administration, and their music a veritable soundtrack for college life during the era. Before the new president had even taken office, however, The Kingston Trio faced their first major crisis. In January of 1961, amid growing differences over the musical direction of the group, Dave Guard left. The most serious and cerebral of the three, Guard was the one who knew a lot of the folk songs, especially the songs from other countries, that the Trio had performed and recorded. His very sophistication, however, resulted in his departure, out of a desire to explore folk music on a broader level, with fewer concessions to popular taste. After leaving the Trio, Guard founded a quartet called the Whiskeyhill Singers with Judy Henske, David "Buck" Wheat (who had been the Trio's bassist), and Cyrus Faryar -- their one album for Capitol, done in a style very different from that of the Trio, met with little success, and the group later appeared on the soundtrack of the blockbuster Western How the West Was Won (1962). However, The Kingston Trio carried on, their success unabated, with new member John Stewart joining in early 1961. Stewart, a onetime aspiring rock & roller who had switched to folk music and gotten two of his songs recorded by the Trio, was part of the Cumberland Three when Guard left the group, and was brought into The Kingston Trio following a lag of several months while Shane and Reynolds took time off, their first break since 1958. His arrival reinvigoratedthe Trio personally and professionally, beginning with "Take Her Out of Pity," a group original featuringStewart's first lead vocal, and such Stewart compositions as "Coming from the Mountains."
Fate intervened soon after he arrived when the group happened to catch a performance by the trio Peter, Paul and Mary, and heard their rendition of a Pete Seeger song entitled "Where Have All the Flowers Gone." The Kingston Trio duly recorded their own version of the song, which marked a new era for the group -- though the Trio had avoided being topical in a confrontational way, they had addedWoody Guthrie songs such as "Pastures of Plenty" to their repertory during the Guard era, recorded the anti-Nazi ballad "Reuben James" on their first album with Stewart, and introduced some politics in their concerts as time went by;College Concert, recorded in December of 1961, included the comment in the intro of "Goin' Away for to Leave You" describing a piece of square dance music requiring the dancer to throw one's partner "as far right as possible" as "the John Birch Polka," a reference to the ultra-right wing John Birch Society (whose followers believed, among other things, that President [and former General of the Army] Dwight Eisenhower was a communist stooge).
the Trio's version of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" reached number 21, not as high a place as many of their earlier singles, on the pop charts, but it also got picked up by a new category of radio station and listener, making number four on the Billboard Easy Listening chart. More than that, as a song of social protest and serious intent, it became the favorite Triosong for millions of younger folk listeners who had come along in the years since "Tom Dooley." What's more, the timing of the single could not have been better if it had been planned -- it gave the previously apolitical group an antiwar statement to its credit on the pop charts, just as American college campuses were slowly becoming politicized again for the first time since the 1940s, and although American troops' involvement in combat in Vietnam was still a few years away, the Cuban Missile Crisis in the fall of 1962 spurred a small but vocal antiwar movement into existence, whose members often overlapped with the folk music audience. the Trio were still doing standing-room-only business into 1962 and early 1963 -- by then they'd even recorded one song that expressed the goals and hopes of the burgeoning civil rights movement, "Road to Freedom" on the album #16. The mere fact that it was their 16th album posed problems for the Trio, however -- coming up behind them were performing groups that were more directly political than they were, and more attuned to the next wave of folk music. Where the Trio did Seeger and Guthrie songs, other performers, most notably Peter, Paul and Mary, had picked up on the compositions of Guthrie's self-appointed successor, Bob Dylan, and were soon dominating the airwaves and raising the public consciousness with recordings of "Blowin' in the Wind" and other songs.The Kingston Trio, by contrast, still had pure entertainment as a big part of their image and purpose, and looked too much like part of the establishment. It was a problem similar to that of the Chad Mitchell Trio, rivals to The Kingston Trio, who had embraced some of Dylan's work (but, thanks to a producer's misjudgment, never issued any of it as singles) and who were known to be "irreverent" -- "irreverent" was fine for comics and entertainers, and acceptable to parents, but it made the Mitchell Trio and The Kingston Trio seem like establishment lackeys, while more confrontational composers such as Dylanand Phil Ochs were generating in-your-face challenges to a ton of social and political assumptions that helped hold campuses (or, at least, the communities where they were based) together.
By 1962, there was a split in the folk music audience and community -- on one side were the newly identified topical folk listeners, principally younger college students and more serious high-school students, augmented by older activists who had kept their heads down and their profiles low for most of the late '50s. They identified with Seeger, Guthrie, Lee Hays, and the leftist/union background of the Almanac Singers, which extended into modern politics in antiwar sentiment and a deepening involvement in the civil rights movement. They didn't constitute a majority of listeners, even on many college campuses, but they were committed to folk music and their dedicated attendance at concerts and clubs amplified their influence, and on the other side were the more centrist pop-folk listeners, or what the leftist listeners might well have called the right-wing folk audience. It wasn't that groups like The Kingston Trio or the New Christy Minstrels were right wing, so much as that they simply defined their goal and mission differently, to entertain rather than send messages or inspire audiences to mass protest -- their concerts and music tended to be upbeat and enjoyable without a lot of heavy lifting in the analysis department.
the Trio might have survived the loss of the activist folk listeners and gotten through this period with their audience of middle-of-the-road college students augmented with younger children (whose parents always regarded folk music as a safe haven) and older listeners, except that those middlebrow college students had no real commitment to folk music; they liked what sounded good to them, and by early 1963, they were ready to move on to other sounds. The kids going to college in 1962 and 1963, after all, had grown up with rock & roll as part of their musical environment, and while the student attending college in, say, 1957-1961 might have thought of Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis or Chuck Berry as beneath him, the college student of the early '60s was a lot more flexible. And just about then, a new wave of rock & roll acts had begun emerging, heralded by the Beach Boys (ironically, also a Capitol act, and who wore striped shirts remarkably like those of The Kingston Trio), the Kingsmen, Paul Revere & the Raiders, et al. Along with a growing number of R&B-based acts, this music began drawing away the more boisterous, fun-loving segment of the college audience that had always been part of the Trio's core fandom. The situation that the group faced was summed up, albeit in hindsight, in the movie Animal House, in the toga party scene, in which a drunk Bluto Blutarsky (John Belushi) comes staggering down the stairs, passing a folksinger serenading a group of coeds with "The Cherry Song" ("I gave my love a cherry that had no stone...."), reaches over, smashes the singer's guitar to bits, and stumbles on, muttering, "sorry," while Sam Cooke's "Twistin' the Night Away" plays in the background.
With the college audience gone, all that the Trio could find as listeners were the folkies. But on that stage, they found themselves swamped by a wave of relevance and topicality on one side and their seeming musical irrelevance on the other. Their sales plummeted toward the end of 1963, and the arrival of the Beatles and the British Invasion in early 1964 sealed their fate. Capitol Records clearly had bigger fish to fry, and in the late spring of that year they and the label parted company. the Trio continued recording and performing, first for Decca, before calling it quits in June of 1967. Ironically, they still had an ear for good songs -- "I'm Going Home" was as fine a folk-style single as anyone recorded in 1964, and they subsequently did excellent recordings of works such as Tom Paxton's "The Last Thing on My Mind" and "Where I'm Bound," as well as Gordon Lightfoot's "Early Morning Rain." And they also rescued such gorgeous pieces as "Love Comes a Trickling Down" from obscurity. But the group that had so embodied the confidence and boldness of the Kennedy years seemed totally out of place in Lyndon Johnson's America, with its campuses torn by antiwar protests and its inner cities ablaze in racial strife.
Ironically, the same month that the Beatles and Capitol Records were to release yet another album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, that would effect a seismic shift in popular music, few people noticed the Trio's farewell gig at the Hungry I in San Francisco on June 17. Stewart went on to become a very successful songwriter ("Daydream Believer") and recording artist ("Gold"). Nick Reynolds left the music business, moving to Oregon, where he ranched sheep and ran a theater, among other activities. Dave Guard remained active as a musician until his death from cancer in March of 1991, writing several music instruction books and becoming deeply involved with what had become known as world music. Bob Shane had opposed the breakup, however, and in 1972 re-formed The Kingston Trio (initially as the New Kingston Trio), amid the same '50s nostalgia boom that had already given performers like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley new careers. By the late '70s, with George Grove and Roger Gambill joining Shane, the group had found a small but enthusiastic audience.In 1981, as part of a concert taped for a public television broadcast, the current and former group members gathered together into a sort of Kingston Trio mega-group of Bob Shane, Nick Reynolds,Dave Guard, John Stewart, George Grove, and Roger Gambill, with Mary Travers as host, withLindsey Buckingham -- a longtime Trio fan -- as special guest. The untimely death of Gambill in the late '80s led to Nick Reynolds rejoining, and The Kingston Trio have kept going since, past Reynolds' retirement, as a sort of "folk oldies" outfit, into the 21st century. A recent version of the group, featuringShane, Grove, and Bob Haworth (born 1946), who succeeded Nick Reynolds on the latter's retirement in 1999, continued working through 2004. A heart attack suffered by Shane in March of that year took him off the road, and since then the touring version of the group -- in its 52nd year as of 2009 -- has consisted of Grove, Bill Zorn (late of the Limeliters), and Rick Dougherty (also a Limeliters alumnus).
Decision: A highly-influencial folk-rock group, but not many big pop hits besides their first hit "Tom Dooley". Not a HOFer.
Paul Anka
One of the biggest teen idols of the late '50s, Paul Anka moved to the adult sphere several years later and became a successful performer, songwriter, music businessman, and recording artist, remaining so well into the new millennium. Born in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1941 to parents of Lebanese Christian descent who owned a local restaurant, Anka proved a child prodigy, beginning his show business life at the age of 12 as an impressionist. By the age of 14, he was stealing the family car to drive to amateur singing contests in nearby Hull, Quebec, and writing his own songs. His first single, "I Confess," appeared on the Riviera subsidiary of Jules and Joe Bihari's RPM label. While on a trip to New York with a group of friends who sang as the Rover Boys, Anka gained an audition with ABC producer Don Costa, and sang his own composition, "Diana," an ode to a former babysitter. Costa liked what he heard, recorded the teenager, and watched as the single hit number one on both sides of the Atlantic later in 1957, eventually selling a reported ten million copies worldwide.
Anka placed four songs in the Top 20 a year later, including "You Are My Destiny" and "Crazy Love," tempering the all-out rebellion of rock & roll with songs that questioned parental authority rather than promoting outright disobedience. He wrote one of Buddy Holly's last hits, "It Doesn't Matter Anymore," and moved into movies with Let's Rock and Girls Town. The latter film spawned his biggest American hit, "Lonely Boy," just the first in a string of 1959 chart successes including "Put Your Head on My Shoulder," "It's Time to Cry," and "Puppy Love" (written for old flame Annette Funicello, and later a hit for Donny Osmond as well).
By 1961, when the teen idol craze began to cool off, Anka (a millionaire while still a minor) could boast of the over 125 compositions under his belt, his own record label (Spanka), and the recognition of being behind the second-best-selling single of all time (only "White Christmas" had sold more copies than "Diana"). Instead of resting on his laurels, Anka took on the adult market. First, he groomed a solo act and got bookings into that haven for sophisticates, the Copacabana. Anka next moved to RCA and, in yet another shrewd business move, bought the rights to his old masters and made a fortune on reissues alone. He diversified his career by appearing in several more movie roles (including the 1962 drama The Longest Day, for which he provided the title song). One of the first pop singers to do shows in Las Vegas, he also hosted television variety shows like Hullabaloo, The Midnight Special, and Spotlite, and moved on to foreign audiences in Asia and Europe (where he found his wife, Parisian model Anne de Zogheb). He wrote the theme to The Tonight Show (aired every weeknight for almost 30 years), rewrote the French lyrics to the song "Comme d'Habitude" for one of Frank Sinatra's most famous later songs, "My Way," and also wrote Tom Jones' biggest hit, "She's a Lady." Anka also branched out in the recording studio, recording theme albums such as Excitement on Park Avenue and Strictly Nashville.
Although he had hit the Top 40 only once since 1963, Ankastormed the number one slot in 1974 with "(You're) Having My Baby," a duet recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with his singing protégée, Odia Coates. The duo's next two singles, "One Man Woman/One Woman Man" and "I Don't Like to Sleep Alone," both hit the Top Ten (his 1974 LP Anka reached gold), and his 1975 solo single, "Times of Your Life," reached number seven. Anka charted into the early '80s, continuing his many casino and international appearances while recording sparingly but continually. Concert recordings and compilations constituted the bulk of his '80s and '90s discography, although he also entered the studio, most notably on the 2005 Verve date Rock Swings, a collection of contemporary standards. Its large success prompted a follow-up (of sorts), Classic Songs: My Way, from 2007, which included more contemporary standards as well as duets with Michael Bublé and Jon Bon Jovi. Anka returned in 2011 with an album of Christmas songs, Songs of December, backed by a full orchestra. In 2013, Anka delivered the album Duets as a tie-in to his autobiography, My Way. The album featured Anka alongside a bevy of duet partners including Michael Bublé, Celine Dion,Chris Botti, and others.
Decision: Between 12 top 10 Pop hits and a very successful career writing for other artists, he deserves to be a Pop music HOFer...
Gene Pitney
One of the most interesting and difficult-to-categorize singers in '60s pop, Gene Pitney had a long run of hits distinguished by his pained, one-of-a-kind melodramatic wail. Pitney is sometimes characterized (or dismissed) as a shallow teen idol-type prone to operatic ballads. It's true that some of his biggest hits -- "Town Without Pity," "Only Love Can Break a Heart," "I'm Gonna Be Strong," "It Hurts to Be in Love," and "Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa" -- are archetypes of adolescent or just-post-adolescent agony, characterized by longing and not a little self-pity.
But Pitney was not just an archetype of his style -- he was one of the best at his style, and indeed one of the few (along with Roy Orbison) that could pull it off convincingly. Also (like Orbison), he had more range than he's generally given credit for, making forays into tough pop/rock, country, and even borderline rockabilly. Other than Dionne Warwick, he was the best interpreter of Bacharach-David's early compositions. Although he didn't pen much of his material, he was a composer of note, writing "He's a Rebel" for the Crystals, and "Hello Mary Lou" for Rick Nelson. He was also something of a closet hipster -- he was the first American artist to cover a Jagger-Richards song ("That Girl Belongs to Yesterday," which was a British hit before the Rolling Stones had ever entered the U.S. Top 100), contributed to an actual Rolling Stones session in early 1964 (during which they recorded "Not Fade Away"), had a brief fling with a teenage Marianne Faithfull, and recorded songs by Randy Newman andAl Kooper long before those musicians became famous.
Pitney broke into the music as a songwriter in his late teens, getting his first taste of success when Rick Nelson had a hit with "Hello Mary Lou" in 1961. That same year, Pitney had a small hit with his first single, "(I Wanna) Love My Life Away," a self-penned demo on which he sang and played every instrument -- an extraordinary feat for 1961. Another 1961 single, Goffin-King's "Every Breath I Take," was produced by Phil Spector, and is one of the very first examples of his pull-out-the-stops Wall of Sound productions. Pitney didn't really find his metier, however, until late-1961's "Town Without Pity," which became his first Top 20 entry.
For the next four years, Pitney was one of the most successful solo male vocalists in America, reeling off over a dozen more Top 40 hits. While lovelorn angst was his stock-in-trade, some of the singles were fairly innovative -- "Half Heaven, Half Heartache" and "(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance" were crossover country-pop before that term existed, "Mecca" was one of the few big pop/rock hits to bear the influence of Middle Eastern music (albeit in a superficial fashion), and "Last Chance to Turn Around" was a hard-boiled tough-luck tale worthy of a top-notch B-movie thriller.
Pitney withstood the initial onslaught of the British Invasion fairly well, scoring Top Ten hits in 1964 with "It Hurts to Be in Love" and "I'm Gonna Be Strong." By 1966, though, he was in serious trouble stateside. Ironically, by this time he was a much bigger star in Britain, making the U.K. Top Ten six times in 1965-1966. He could also depend on a faithful international audience throughout Europe, and frequently recorded in Italian and Spanish for overseas markets. In 1966, he became one of the first artists to reach success with Randy Newman compositions, taking "Nobody Needs Your Love" and "Just One Smile" into the British Top Ten.
Pitney entered the U.S. Top 20 one last time in 1968 with "She's a Heartbreaker," a rather forced updating of his trademark sound, and reached the Top 40 in Britain for the last time in 1974. Still, he remained a big concert draw on the overseas nostalgia circuit. In 1989, he made number one in the U.K. again by duetting with Marc Almond on a remake of one of his '60s singles, "Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart." He died in April 2006, the night after a show in Cardiff, Wales.
Decision: He left his mark in 60's Pop music, but he falls a little short of the Pop Music HOF..
The Drifters
The Drifters are a long-lived American doo-wop and R&B/soul vocal group. They were originally formed to serve as a backing group for Clyde McPhatter (of Billy Ward & the Dominoes) in 1953.
According to the Vocal Group Hall of Fame, "Through turmoil and changes the (original) Drifters managed to set musical trends and give the public 13 chart hits, most of which are legendary recordings today."Matching that feat, subsequent formations of the Drifters managed to give the public 13 Hot 100 top 30 chart hits.
Ahmet Ertegün of Atlantic Records attended a Billy Ward and His Dominoes performance and noticed star lead tenor, Clyde McPhatter, was no longer with the group. As Jerry Wexler recalls, "Ahmet exited Birdland like a shot and headed directly uptown. He raced from bar to bar looking for Clyde and finally found him in a furnished room. That very night Ahmet reached an agreement with McPhatter under which Clyde would assemble a group of his own. They became known as the Drifters."Wanting to blend gospel and secular sounds, Clyde's first effort was to get 4 out of 5 members of his old church group, the Mount Lebanon Singers. They were William “Chick” Anderson (tenor), David Baldwin (baritone), James “Wrinkle” Johnson (bass), and David “Little Dave” Baughan (tenor). After a single recording session of four songs on June 29, 1953, Ertegün saw this combination didn't work and prompted McPhatter to recruit another lineup.
This second group of newly recruited Drifters consisted of gospel vocalists: first tenor Bill Pinkney (of the Jerusalem Stars), second tenor Andrew Thrasher and baritone Gerhart Thrasher (both formerly of the gospel group the "Thrasher Wonders"), and Willie Ferbee asbass, with Walter Adams on guitar.
This is the group on the second session, which produced the group's first major hit, "Money Honey", released September 1953, with the record label proudly displaying the group name Clyde McPhatter & the Drifters. McPhatter was barely known during his time with the Dominoes, and he was sometimes passed off as "Clyde Ward, Billy's little brother." Others assumed it was Billy Ward doing the singing.
"Lucille", written by McPhatter, from the first session was put on the B-side of "Money Honey", making a recording industry rarity: a single released with songs from two essentially different groups of the same name on the two sides. "Money Honey" was a huge success and propelled the Drifters to immediate fame.
More lineup changes followed after Ferbee was involved in an accident and left the group, and then Adams died. Adams was replaced by Jimmy Oliver. However, Ferbee was not replaced; instead, the voice parts were shifted around. Gerhart Thrasher moved up to first tenor, Andrew Thrasher shifted down to baritone, and Bill Pinkney dropped all the way down to bass. This group released several more hits, including "Such A Night" in November 1953,[7][8] "Honey Love" June 1954, "Bip Bam" October 1954, "White Christmas" November 1954, and "What'cha Gonna Do" in February 1955. McPhatter received his draft letter in March 1954; however, as he was initially stationed in Buffalo, New York, he was able to continue with the group for a time. "What'cha Gonna Do", recorded a year before its release, was McPhatter's last official record as a member of the Drifters, although his first solo release ("Everyone's Laughing" b/w "Hot Ziggety") was actually from his final Drifters session in October 1954. After completing his military service, McPhatter pursued a successful but somewhat short-lived solo career with 16 R&B and 21 Pop hits.
McPhatter had demanded a large share of the group's profits, which he had been denied in the Dominoes, but, upon his departure, did not ensure that this would continue for his successor. He sold his share of the group to George Treadwell, manager, former jazz trumpeter, and husband of singer Sarah Vaughan. As a result, the Drifters cycled through many members, none of whom made much money. McPhatter later expressed regret at this action, recognizing that it doomed his fellow musicians to unprofitability.
McPhatter was first replaced by David Baughn, who had already been singing lead in concert while McPhatter was in the service. While his voice was similar to McPhatter's, his erratic behavior proved him difficult to work with and made him unsuitable in the eyes of Atlantic Records executives. Baughn soon left the group to form the Harps (1955) (finding his way back into Bill Pinkney's Original Drifters in 1958), and was replaced by Selma native Johnny Moore (formerly of The Hornets). September 1955 saw this lineup record a major double-sided R&B hit with the A side's "Adorable", reaching number one and the B side, "Steamboat," going to number five. These were followed by "Ruby Baby" in February 1956, and "I Got To Get Myself A Woman".
Low salaries contributed to burnout among the members, particularly Bill Pinkney, who was fired after asking Treadwell for more money. In protest, Andrew Thrasher left as well. Pinkney formed another group, called "The Flyers", with lead singer Bobby Hendricks, who would leave to join the Drifters the next year. Bill Pinkney was replaced by Tommy Evans (who had replaced Jimmy Ricks in The Ravens). Charlie Hughes, a baritone, replaced Andrew Thrasher. Moore, G. Thrasher, C. Hughes, and Evans were the last quality lineup with the top ten hit, "Fools Fall In Love" in 1957 (number 69 Pop and number 10 R&B).
Moore and Hughes were drafted in 1957 and replaced by Bobby Hendricks and Jimmy Millender. By early 1958, the lineup was: Bobby Hendricks (lead tenor), Gerhart Thrasher (first tenor), Jimmy Millender (baritone), Tommy Evans (bass), and Jimmy Oliver (guitar). This lineup had one moderate hit, the original version of "Drip Drop" (number 58 Pop), released in April 1958.
With declining popularity, the last of the original Drifters were reduced to working the club scene and doing double duty with gigs under the Coasters and the Ravens names. By May 1958, both Hendricks and Oliver had quit, returning only for a week's appearance at the Apollo Theater. During that week, one of the members got into a fight with the owner of the Apollo, Ralph Cooper. That was the last straw for manager George Treadwell, who fired the entire group.
Although Treadwell owned the Drifters brand, original members felt they were the real Drifters and were determined to keep the group alive. Bill Pinkney left first. After receiving exclusive and irrevocable ownership of the name/mark "The Original Drifters" in a binding arbitration, he joined with the Thrashers and David Baughan to begin touring as "The Original Drifters." Several original Drifters came in and out of this group over time, as well as other new artists, but these Drifters never replicated the success of the earlier Drifters group.
Baughan left after a short time. Bobby Lee Hollis joined in 1964 and took over the lead spot. Later that year, Andrew Thrasher left and Jimmy Lewis joined the group. Bobby Hendricks returned, making the group a quintet for a short time, before Lewis' departure. Andrew Thrasher returned, replacing Hollis. Hollis and Baughan were periodically with the group through the 1960s. As of 1968, the group consisted of Pinkney, Gerhart Thrasher, Hollis, and Hendricks.
Pinkney then recruited an existing group, the Tears, to perform as part of his group on a short tour. The Tears were Benny Anderson, George Wallace, Albert Fortson, and Mark Williams. After the tour, the Tears—without Pinkney—continued to tour as the Original Drifters, but Pinkney successfully sued to stop them using the name.
Pinkney then added new members Bruce Caesar, Clarence Tex Walker, and Bruce Richardson, but the lineup changed rapidly. In 1979 the group was Pinkney, Andrew Lawyer, Chuck Cockerham, Harriel Jackson, and Tony Cook. Their 1995 album Peace in the Valley, on Blackberry Records, credited vocals to Pinkney, Cockerham, Richard Knight Dunbar, (Vernon Young), and Greg Johnson. They appeared on the 2001 PBS special Doo Wop 51 with Pinkney, Dunbar, Johnson, and Bobby Hendricks. The lineup in the early 2000s was Pinkney, Cockerham, Dunbar, Young, and Ronald Jackson, the son of singer Ruth Brown and Clyde McPhatter. Young died in 2005 and Pinkney in 2007.
The present Original Drifters lineup is Russell Henry, Chuck Cockerham, Richard Knight Dunbar, Vernon Taylor, Kingsley O'Brian McIntosh, and Joseph Turner.
Treadwell owned the rights to the name "Drifters", and still had a year's worth of bookings for the Apollo when he fired the group. In the summer of 1958, he approached Lover Patterson, the manager of the Five Crowns featuring lead singer Ben E. Nelson—better known by his later stage name of Ben E. King—and arranged for them to become the Drifters. The new line-up consisted of King (lead tenor), Charlie Thomas (tenor), Dock Green (baritone), and Elsbeary Hobbs (bass). James "Poppa" Clark was the fifth "crown"; he was not included due to an alcohol problem, which Treadwell had considered to be a problem with the first group. The group went out on the road to tour for almost a year. Since this new group had no connection to the prior Drifters, they often played to hostile audiences.
When Atlantic decided to send the new Drifters into the studio, Ertegün and Wexler were too busy to produce the sessions, so they enlisted Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who had been successful producing the Coasters. With Leiber & Stoller producing, this new lineup—widely considered the "true" golden age of the group—released several singles with King on lead that became chart hits. "There Goes My Baby", the first commercial rock-and-roll recording to include a string orchestra, was a Top 10 hit, and number 193 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. "Dance with Me" followed, and then "This Magic Moment" (number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1960). "Save the Last Dance for Me" reached number 1 on the U.S. pop charts and number 2 in the UK. It was followed by "I Count The Tears". This version of the Drifters was inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2000 as Ben E. King and the Drifters. The write-up indicates an award primarily as a tribute to Ben E. King with a nod to his time in the Drifters, only one of five paragraphs being exclusively devoted to the Drifters, although Charlie Thomas was also cited by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (and the Vocal Group Hall of Fame's induction of the original Drifters, which technically was only through 1958).
With this brief golden age lasting just two years, personnel changes quickly followed. Lover Patterson (now the Drifters' road manager) got into a fight with George Treadwell. Since Patterson had King under personal contract, he refused to let him tour with the group. Thus King was only able to record with the group for about a year. Johnny Lee Williams, who sang lead on "True Love, True Love", the flipside of "Dance with Me", handled the vocals on tour along with Charlie Thomas. When the group passed through Williams' hometown ofMobile, Alabama, Williams left the group. (Williams died on December 19, 2004, at the age of 64.) When King asked Treadwell for a raise and a fair share of royalties, a request that was not honored, he left and began a successful solo career. Williams left at the same time, and new lead Rudy Lewis (of The Clara Ward Singers) was recruited. Lewis led the Drifters on hits such as "Some Kind Of Wonderful", "Up On The Roof", "Please Stay" and "On Broadway", which reached number 5 on the U.S. pop singles chart and number 4 on the U.S. R&B singles chart in 1963. Lewis was also named in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Drifters induction.
Hobbs was drafted for military service and eventually replaced by the returning Tommy Evans (from the first group). Green left in 1962 and was replaced by Eugene Pearson (of The Rivileers and The Cleftones). Evans left again in 1963 and was replaced by Johnny Terry, who had been an original member of James Brown's singing group, The Famous Flames(and was co-writer of their first hit, "Please Please Please"). After his military service and a failed solo career, Johnny Moore returned in 1964, making the group a quintet of Moore, Thomas, Lewis, Pearson, and Perry.
Later that year, the group was scheduled to record "Under the Boardwalk" on May 21. However, Rudy Lewis died the night before the session, and Johnny Moore took over as the sole lead (he and Lewis had been alternating). Terry was replaced in 1966 by Dan Dandridge for a couple of months, then by William Brent, who had been with Johnny Moore in the Hornets in 1954. Gene Pearson was replaced by Rick Sheppard that same year. By late 1966, baritone/bass Bill Fredricks replaced William Brent. Charlie Thomas, the group's last member from the Five Crowns, left in mid-1967 and was replaced by Charles Baskerville, a former member of The Limelites. Baskerville stayed only a short time. It was in 1972 that the Drifters quietly left the talent roster of Atlantic artists.
After this, the Drifters moved to England and continued with unstable personnels. There were so many changes, that a few groups of former members were able to form and tour, which caused a few lawsuits through the years, which is not uncommon for groups with this much longevity.
Decision: Though they only had 13 top 40 Pop hits, nearly all of them are considered R&B classics, and they are considered the most successful pre-Motown R&B group. For those reasons, I select them for the Pop Music HOF..
Tomorrow: 1959 Nominees Brook Benton, Carole King, Frankie Avalon, Freddy"Boom Boom" Cannon
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