#1046: Poor Little Puppet by Cathy Carroll
Peak Month: August 1962
8 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position #8
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #91
YouTube.com: “Poor Little Puppet”
Lyrics: “Poor Little Puppet”
Wikipedia says Cathy Carroll was born Carolyn Stern in 1939. However, both Billboard Magazine and Radio Television Daily wrote in 1963 that Carroll was 17 years old at the time. Doing the math, that puts Carolyn Stern’s birth around 1946. Cathy Carroll seemed from the start to be aiming for an award for drama queen among girl singers in the early rock ‘n roll era. In the previous decade Johnnie Ray would tear at his hair and fall on the floor sobbing before his fans as he sang his 1951 million selling hits “Cry,”and “The Little White Cloud That Cried.” From his histrionic performances Ray earned the nicknames the “Nabob of Sob” and “Mr. Emotion”. Cathy Carroll would later record “Cry” as well, perhaps as a nod to her musical soulmate.
Continue reading →
#1047: California Dreamin’ by The Beach Boys
Peak Month: November 1986
8 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position #9
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #57
YouTube.com: “California Dreamin‘”
Lyrics: “California Dreamin’”
Brian Wilson was born in Inglewood, California, in 1942. In biographer Peter Ames Carlin’s book, Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, he relates that when Brian Wilson first heard George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” it had a huge emotional impact on him. As a youngster, Wilson learned to play a toy accordion and sang in children’s choirs. In his teens he started a group with his cousin, Mike Love and his brother, Carl. His named the group Carl and the Passions in order to convince his brother to join. They had a performance at Hawthorne High School, where they attended. Among the people in the audience was Al Jardine, another classmate. Jardine was so impressed with the performance that he let the group know. Jardine would later be enlisted, along with Dennis Wilson to form the Pendletones in 1961.
Continue reading →
#1050: Blue Ribbon Baby by Tommy Sands And The Raiders
Peak Month: September 1958
7 weeks on Vancouver’s Teen Canteen chart
Peak Position #5
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #50
YouTube.com: “Blue Ribbon Baby”
Lyrics: “Blue Ribbon Baby”
In 1937 Thomas Adrian “Tommy” Sands was born in Chicago. His dad was a piano player and his mom was a big-band singer. His family moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, when he was seven. He began playing the guitar at eight and within a year had a job performing twice weekly on a local radio station. At the beginning of his teen years, he moved to Houston, Texas, where he attended Lamar High School and joined a band called Jimmie Lee Durden and the Junior Cowboys. It was made up of Sands, Durden, and Billy Reno. They performed on radio, at county fairs, and did personal appearances. He was only fifteen when Colonel Tom Parker heard about Tommy Sands and signed him to RCA Records. Sands became an overnight sensation and instant teen-idol when he appeared on Kraft Television Theater in January 1957 as “The Singin’ Idol.” On the episode Sands played the part of a singer who was very similar to Elvis Presley, with guitar, pompadour hair, and excitable teenage fans. The song Tommy Sands sang during the show was titled “Teen Age Crush“. Soon it climbed to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and in Vancouver.
Continue reading →
#1051: A Beatle I Want To Be by Sonny Curtis
Peak Month: March 1964
7 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position #10
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
CFUN Twin Pick February 15, 1964
YouTube.com: “A Beatle I Want To Be”
Sonny Curtis was born in a dugout in 1937 in Meadow, Texas. His parents were cotton farmers contending with the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression. He was a teenage pal and lead guitarist with Buddy Holly in Lubbock, Texas, in a pre-Crickets band called The Three Tunes. Sonny is his actual first name, not a nickname. Although Curtis had gone on the road with other musicians by the time Buddy Holly put together The Crickets in 1957, Curtis joined The Crickets after Holly’s death in 1959. Soon, he took over the lead vocalist role in addition to lead guitar. As the credits show, he was part of the band for the 1960 album In Style with The Crickets. On this album they recorded the original versions of two of Curtis’s best known songs, “I Fought the Law” (a hit for the Bobby Fuller Four in 1966) and “More Than I Can Say” (a hit for Leo Sayer sixteen years later.)
Continue reading →
#1053: There Is Love by Jim Valley
Peak Month: June 1967
9 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position #8
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube.com: “There Is Love”
Jim Valley was born in 1943 in Tacoma, Washington, and grew up in Seattle in a musical family. In the third grade, he won an art scholarship to the Frye Art Museum for young gifted students. In fourth grade Valley took up the trumpet and had dreamed about being as great as the 1940’s big band leader, Harry James. Jim Valley was in grade seven when rock ‘n roll recordings started to appear on the Top Forty. Jim listened to Bill Haley & the Comets, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and others. Valley mastered a dance called The Bop and with his dance partner won several dance contests. When he was in grade nine attending Jane Addams Jr. High School in Seattle, Jim learned to play the piano. He wrote a Doo-Wop type song for one of the people in his junior choir at the school, Cassie Kenyon. He named the song Cassandra. A next door neighbor, Curt Pearson, heard the song and suggested Valley start up a band and make a recording of Casandra. Pearson knew a lad named Greg Thompson who’d just been given drum set for his birthday. Pearson also put Jim Valley in touch with a friend of his who played the saxophone and a guy who had a guitar but couldn’t play it. The band was called Vince Valley and his Chain Gang. Since there was no one who knew how to play the electric guitar, Jim Valley bought one with money from his summer job in his dad’s laundry. Soon after he became the band’s guitarist.
Continue reading →
#1054: Home of The Brave by Jody Miller
Peak Month: September 1965
7 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position #4
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #25
YouTube.com: “Home Of The Brave”
Lyrics: “Home Of The Brave”
Myrna Joy Miller was born in Phoenix in 1941. The youngest of five girls, Miller’s family spent some of her early years in Oakland, California. Around the age of six, her older sister, Pat, would play the guitar and encourage Jody to sing. By the age of seven her parents were entering her in amateur contests around Oakland. A year later Jody was sent to Blanchard, Oklahoma, where she learned to play the piano while living with her fiddle-playing grandmother. In 1949, she heard Mario Lanza sing “La donna è mobile.” Jody Miller recalls once she heard Lanza’s song, she determined she would be a singer. Miller got her start singing in folk clubs in Oklahoma. She moved to Los Angeles and was discovered by western movie actor and fellow Oklahoman, Dale Robertson, while she was performing at the Troubador nightclub.
Continue reading →
#1056: El Toro by Link Wray
Peak Month: November 1961
7 weeks on Vancouver’s CKWX chart
Peak Position #8
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube.com: “El Toro”
Fred Lincoln “Link” Wray Jr. was born in 1929 in Dunn, North Carolina. Both his mother and father were Shawnee Native Americans. Among the instrumentals Wray recorded were three named after American Indian tribes: “Shawnee,” “Apache” and “Comanche.” When Link was eight years old he was sitting in the porch trying to play guitar. An elderly African-American guitar player named Hambone heard Link Wray trying to play the guitar. Hambone gave Link his first guitar lesson and showed him how to play the bottleneck slide guitar. Link moved with his family moved to Portsmouth, Virginia, when he was thirteen years old. His first band was in the late 40’s with his brothers, Vernon and Doug, playing Western Swing. As Link put it, “rock and roll before it was rock and roll.” Vernon “Lucky” Wray was the lead singer. This band also included Wray’s friend Brantley “Shorty” Horton, who later went on to become part of Link Wray’s backing band the Ray Men. A fourth member of Link Wray’s band in the late 40’s was Dixie Neal. The band was known by Lucky Wray and the Lazy Pine Wranglers, and later Lucky Wray and the Palomino Ranch Hands. The band became popular in Portsmouth, opening for many Country and Western recording artists who played in local fairs and made live appearances on AM radio shows.
Continue reading →
#1057: The Sins of a Family by P. F. Sloan
Peak Month: October 1965
7 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position #4
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #87
YouTube.com: “The Sins Of The Family”
Lyrics: “The Sins Of A Family”
Philip Gary Schlein was born in New York City in 1945. His mom was born in Romania and his dad in the USA. The family moved to West Hollywood when Philip was twelve years old. His father was a pharmacist and had the family name changed legally since Philip’s dad was repeatedly denied a liquor license for his store. The new surname, Sloan, gave Philip’s dad no hassles and the family business thrived. In 1958 Philip was given a guitar as a present. Prior to being drafted into the US Army, Elvis Presley gave Philip Sloan a quick guitar lesson at a music store in Hollywood. By the age of 14 Philip Sloan’s nickname was “Flip,” a variant of Philip. So he became P (Philip) F (Flip) Sloan. At 16, “Flip” Sloan got a position as a songwriter with Screen Gems in Los Angeles. In addition to songwriting, Sloan teamed up with Steve Barri. The pair recorded several records hoping for a hit single. They failed at getting any notice when releasing singles under the names The Lifeguards, Themes Inc., The Rally-Packs and The Wildcats. And they barely registered on the charts in 1964 as Philip and Stephan with “When You’re Near You’re So Far Away”, or as The Street Cleaners with “That’s Cool, That’s Trash”.
Continue reading →
#1059: What’s That Got To Do With Me by Jim & Jean
Peak Month: April 1967
9 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position #11
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube.com: “What’s That Got To Do With Me”
Jim & Jean were a folk duo composed of Jim Glover, a native of Cleveland, Ohio, born in 1942, and New Yorker, Jean Ray, who was born in 1941. This folk duo appeared in folk clubs, TV shows and folk festivals between 1961 to 1969. They got married in 1963, and were listed as Jim and Jean Glover on the liner notes of their albums. Glover was a student at Ohio State University. While he was there he met Phil Ochs, in the fall of 1959. It was Glover who acquainted Ochs to folk music, Left-wing politics, and showed him how to become a guitar player. For a brief time Glover and Ochs became a folk duo on the campus and billed themselves as The Singing Socialists. The name resonated with the duo as Jim Glover came from a multi-generational family connected to the Communist Party USA. Glover’s father was a longtime friend of Gus Hall, the leader and chairmen of the CPUSA who ran for president in the US federal elections of 1972, 1976, 1980 and 1984. Phil Ochs was very supportive of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and had high hopes for its nation under the leadership of Fidel Castro. The Singing Socialists didn’t last as an act. Glover left Ohio State University to pursue folk music in Greenwich Village in Manhattan in 1961.
Continue reading →
#1062: Lil’ Ole Me by Cornbread And Jerry
Peak Month: June 1961
8 weeks on Vancouver’s CKWX chart
Peak Position #9
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
Peak Position on Cashbox ~ #138
YouTube.com: “Lil’ Ole Me”
William Everett “Bill” Justis Jr. (pictured in photo to the left) was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1926. He was a pioneer rock n’ roll musician, composer, and musical arranger, best known for his 1957 Grammy Hall of Fame song, “Raunchy“. Justis grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and studied music at Tulane University in New Orleans. Fine-tuning his trumpet and saxophone skills, he was featured in concert with local jazz and dance bands. In 1954, Justis went back to Memphis and hired by Sam Philips at Sun Records. While in the employ of Sun Records, Bill Justis made his own recordings. In addition he was a musical arranger Sun recordings by Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash.
Continue reading →
