#1458: The Magic Touch by the Bobby Fuller Four
Peak Month: July 1966
Peak Position #19
19 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN Chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube.com: “The Magic Touch”
Lyrics: “The Magic Touch”
Robert Gaston Fuller was born in 1942 in Baytown, Texas, a suburb of Houston. In his early childhood his family moved to Salt Lake City, and in 1956 to El Paso. While Fuller was a 13-year-old Elvis Presley was shaking the foundations of the pop music world. Bobby Fuller was memorized by what was unfolding. In 1958, he formed a four-man combo in the style of fellow Texan Buddy Holly. Other members were Bobby’s brother Randy (Randell) Fuller on bass and rhythm guitar, Jim Reese on guitar, Dalton Powell on piano, and Dewayne Quirico on drums. Randy Fuller was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1944. Jim Reese was born in Amarillo, Texas, on December 7, 1941. DeWayne Quirco was born in 1942 in El Paso, and Dalton Powell was born in El Paso in 1942. Powell and Quirco were drummers at different points in the life of the band. In 1961 the Bobby Fuller Four released their first single titled “You’re In Love”. In 1962, “Gently My Love” cracked the Top 30 on KELP-AM in El Paso. From November 1963 to March 1964, the Bobby Fuller Four single “Saturday Night” was a Top 30 hit in Sydney, Australia. In the spring of 1965, the Bobby Fuller Four had a Top Ten hit in Las Vegas with “She’s My Girl”. Another release, “Let Her Dance”, stalled at #133 bubbling beneath the Billboard Hot 100.
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#1457: Turn Around by Dick and Dee Dee
Peak Month: November 1963
Peak Position #7
19 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN Chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #27
YouTube.com: “Turn Around”
Lyrics: “Turn Around”
Mary Sperling was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, around 1942. At the age of 16 she began songwriting. She teamed up with Dick St. John who she met at junior high. The pair lost track of each other until DeeDee’s first year at college when they both started working at See’s Candies in Los Angeles. On their lunch breaks they discovered a mutual love of song writing and ended up collaborating on a song called, “I Want Someone.” The flip side, “The Mountain’s High”, became their first gold record, storming up the charts in summer of 1961. The song spent two weeks at the #2 position on the Billboard Hot 100. “The Mountain’s High” reached #1 in Vancouver and #37 on the UK Singles Chart. Dick and DeeDee played in the Los Angeles area for six months, backed by the new, upcoming surf band, The Beach Boys.
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#2: Mean Woman Blues/Gotta Lotta Livin’ To Do/Party by Elvis Presley
B-side: “Mean Woman Blues”
Peak Month: July-August-September 1957
Peak Position #1
12 weeks on Vancouver’s Red Robinson Teen Canteen Survey
Peak Position on Billboard Pop Singles chart ~ did not chart
YouTube.com: “Mean Woman Blues”
Lyrics: “Mean Woman Blues”
B-side: “Gotta Lotta Livin’ To Do”
Peak Month: August-September 1957
Peak Position #4
6 weeks on Vancouver’s Red Robinson Teen Canteen Survey
Peak Position on Billboard Pop Singles chart ~ did not chart
YouTube.com: “Gotta Lotta Livin’ To Do”
Lyrics: “Gotta Lotta Livin’ To Do”
B-side: “Party”
Peak Month: July 1957
Peak Position: #5
4 weeks on Vancouver’s Red Robinson Teen Canteen Survey
Peak Position on Billboard Pop Singles chart ~ did not chart
YouTube.com: “Party”
Lyrics: “Party”
Elvis Aaron Presley was born on in a two-room house in Tupelo, Mississippi, on January 8, 1935. His twin brother, Jessie Garon Presley, was stillborn. When he was eleven years old his parents bought him a guitar at the Tupelo Hardware Store. As a result Elvis grew up as an only child. He and his parents, Vernon and Gladys, moved to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1948. The young Presley graduated from high school in 1953. That year he stopped by the Memphis Recording Service to record two songs, including “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”. Elvis’ musical influences were the pop and country music of the time, the gospel music he heard in church and at the all-night gospel sings he frequently attended, and the black R&B he absorbed on historic Beale Street as a Memphis teenager. In 1954, Elvis began his singing career recording “That’s All Right” and “Blue Moon Of Kentucky” at Sun Records in Memphis.
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#9: Mister Fire Eyes by Bonnie Guitar
Peak Month: October-November 1957
Peak Position #2
20 weeks on Vancouver’s CKWX chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #71
YouTube.com: “Mister Fire Eyes”
Lyrics: “Mister Fire Eyes”
Bonnie Buckingham was born in 1923 in Seattle. She was raised on a farm outside of Auburn, south of Seattle. She learned to play guitar at the age of 12 from her older brothers. At the age of 16, she began performing at the end of the Great Depression. Having taken up playing the guitar as a teenager, this led to her stage name: Bonnie Guitar. She later started songwriting. At the age of 21, in 1944 Bonnie Guitar married her former guitar teacher Paul Tutmarc. The couple performed together around the Pacific Northwest as bandmates with Paul Tutmarc and the Wranglers. She got several offers to audition for roles in Hollywood movies. However, as Guitar told the Seattle Times in 1986, “It never culminated. My first husband didn’t want me to have anything to do with the Hollywood scene. And I wasn’t ready to make the move at the time.” The couple had one daughter in 1950 named Paula. But the marriage collapsed in 1955, and Bonnie moved to Los Angeles.
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#14: Ebony Eyes by Bob Welch
Peak Month: April-May 1978
Peak Position #1
16 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #14
YouTube.com: “Ebony Eyes”
Lyrics: “Ebony Eyes”
Robert Lawrence Welch Jr. was born in Hollywood, California, in 1945. His father was a producer and screenwriter who produced the 25th Academy Awards in 1953. His mother, Templeton Fox, was an actress who worked with Orson Welles Mercury Theatre in Chicago. Welch learned to play the clarinet during his childhood, and picked up guitar in his teens. From 1964 o 1969, Welch was part of an L.A. band called The Seven Souls. From 1969 to 1971, he headed up a band in Paris, France, named Head West. In 1971, he joined Fleetwood Mac. After touring and contributing to five Fleetwood Mac studio albums, Welch left the band in December 1974. He formed a band called Paris, which released two albums. When that band dissolved later in 1976, Bob Welch went solo.
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#16: Lana by Roy Orbison
Peak Month: April 1962
Peak Position #1
14 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube.com: “Lana”
Lyrics: “Lana”
Roy Kelton Orbison was born in Vernon, Texas in 1936. When he turned six his dad gave him a guitar. Both his dad, Orbie Lee, and uncle Charlie Orbison, taught him how to play. Though his family moved to Forth Worth for work at a munitions factory, Roy was sent to live with his grandmother due to a polio outbreak in 1944. That year he wrote his first song “A Vow of Love”. The next year he won a contest on Vernon radio station KVWC and was offered his own radio show on Saturdays. After the war his family reunited and moved to Wink, Texas, where Roy formed his first band, in 1949, called The Wink Westerners.
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#17: Fame And Fortune by Elvis Presley
Peak Month: April 1960
Peak Position #1
14 weeks on Vancouver’s CKWX chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #17
YouTube.com: “Fame And Fortune”
Lyrics: “Fame And Fortune”
Elvis Aaron Presley was born on in a two-room house in Tupelo, Mississippi, on January 8, 1935. His twin brother, Jessie Garon Presley, was stillborn. When he was eleven years old his parents bought him a guitar at the Tupelo Hardware Store. As a result Elvis grew up as an only child. He and his parents, Vernon and Gladys, moved to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1948. The young Presley graduated from high school in 1953. That year he stopped by the Memphis Recording Service to record two songs, including “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”. Elvis’ musical influences were the pop and country music of the time, the gospel music he heard in church and at the all-night gospel sings he frequently attended, and the black R&B he absorbed on historic Beale Street as a Memphis teenager. In 1954, Elvis began his singing career recording “That’s All Right” and “Blue Moon Of Kentucky” at Sun Records in Memphis.
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#18: Caribbean by Mitchell Torok
Peak Month: August 1959
Peak Position #1
14 weeks on Vancouver’s CKWX chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #27
YouTube.com: “Caribbean”
Lyrics: “Caribbean”
In 1929 Mitchell Torok was born in Houston, Texas. His parents were immigrants from Hungary. Torok learned the guitar at the end of elementary school. A natural athlete, Mitch went to university in Nacogdoches, Texas, on a football and baseball scholarship. While at university he was hired to write a song to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Cononco Oil Company. He also cut his first record in the late 40s while hosting a radio show in Lufkin, two hours northeast of Houston, and another radio show in the Houston suburb of Rosenberg.
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#19: Follow That Dream by Elvis Presley
Peak Month: May 1962
Peak Position #1
15 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ EP – did not chart
YouTube.com: “Follow That Dream”
Lyrics: “Follow That Dream”
Elvis Aaron Presley was born on in a two-room house in Tupelo, Mississippi, on January 8, 1935. His twin brother, Jessie Garon Presley, was stillborn. When he was eleven years old his parents bought him a guitar at the Tupelo Hardware Store. As a result Elvis grew up as an only child. He and his parents, Vernon and Gladys, moved to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1948. The young Presley graduated from high school in 1953. That year he stopped by the Memphis Recording Service to record two songs, including “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”. Elvis’ musical influences were the pop and country music of the time, the gospel music he heard in church and at the all-night gospel sings he frequently attended, and the black R&B he absorbed on historic Beale Street as a Memphis teenager. In 1954, Elvis began his singing career recording “That’s All Right” and “Blue Moon Of Kentucky” at Sun Records in Memphis.
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#21: Ballad Of A Teenage Queen by Johnny Cash
Peak Month: March 1958
11 weeks on CKWX’s Vancouver Chart
Peak Position ~ #1
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #14
Billboard Top 100 Singles 1958 Year End ~ #81
BONUS REVIEW
YouTube: “Ballad Of A Teenage Queen”
Lyrics: “Ballad Of A Teenage Queen”
John R. “Johnny” Cash was born in Kingsland, Arkansas, in 1932. At the age of five he started working with his sharecropping parents and siblings in the cotton fields. During his childhood his family home was flooded twice. He began singing and playing guitar by the age of 12. He moved to Detroit in his late teens for work. He was drafted and served in the U.S. Air Force as a Morse Code Intercept Operator for Soviet Army transmissions at a base in Germany from 1950 to 1954. When he was discharged from the military he and his new wife, Liberto, moved to Memphis. Cash worked as an appliance salesman while trying to get a break in the music industry. Cash got to audition with Sun Records in 1954. He had his first charting single on the Billboard Country charts in 1955 titled “Cry! Cry! Cry!” Subsequently single releases, “So Doggone Lonesome” and “I Walk The Line” climbed to #4 and #1 on the Country charts. The latter hit also was his first debut on the Billboard pop charts where it made it to #17 in 1956.
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