#1041: A-Rab by The Titans
Peak Month: February 1962
9 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position #10
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube.com: “A-Rab”
The Titans were a group from McCleary, Washington, who played rock ‘n roll from 1959 to 1964. Their members included vocalists Willie Washington and Sandy Faye, saxophonist Walt Ratenbury, guitarist Gary Buchanan, pianist Rudy Volkman, Walt Newman and Nick Burris both on bass and Jim Wroughton on drums. On a YouTube post is found this comment: “McCleary, Washington, a small town west of Olympia would produce the very popular Titans. In early 1962, their fantastic instrumental, “A-Rab” would go top ten in Vancouver, BC. I do remember airplay in Seattle, but it didn’t receive the support that it deserved. My older brother saw them one time and he raved about them. They were never able to break into the Seattle dance circuit, so were mostly unheard north of Tacoma.” The Titans gave concerts in places like the Civic Auditorium in Chehalis (WA) and the Red Carpet in Tacoma. The band was inter-racial, with Willie Washington being a featured lead vocalist. From 1960 to 1961, Nick Burris had been part of a band called The Wander’ers, based in Hoquiam, Washington.
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#1271: Sweet Dreams by Don Gibson
Peak Month: November 1960
6 weeks on Vancouver’s CKWX chart
Peak Position #10
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #93
YouTube.com: “Sweet Dreams”
Lyrics: “Sweet Dreams”
In 1928 Donald Eugene Gibson was born in Shelby, North Carolina. His family was poor and he stopped attending school in grade two to help out his sharecropping parents. He developed an interest in music at an early age and was inspired by recording artists like Tennessee Ernie Ford. Don Gibson began performing at local clubs before he was 18. In his late teens he held down a number of jobs including a as soda jerk, baby diaper deliveryman and dishwasher. A friend came home from Paris, France, after World War II with records by the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. This enhanced Gibson who began to experiment with different styles by his mid-teens. In 1946, he became a regular with the Tennessee Barn Dance in Knoxville, but things weren’t what Gibson expected. The fans wanted old-time country, not Gibson’s brand of crooning. He hung on to the radio job but struggled on $30 a week earned playing beer joints.
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#1042: Livin’ High by Vince Everett
Peak Month: October 1963
8 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position #8
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube.com: “Livin’ High”
Of all the Elvis Presley soundalikes, two stand head and shoulders above the rest: Ral Donner and Vince Everett. Ral Donner, with songs like “You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Until You Lose It,” often sounded like a tamed down Elvis after Presley finished his service in the U.S. Army. In contrast, Vince Everett contained the dynamic, raucous energy on Elvis’ earlier recordings. Vince Everett was the name of the character Elvis Presley played in the 1957 movie, Jailhouse Rock. In that movie Elvis’ Vince Everett is sent to jail for manslaughter. Vince Everett has a cellmate, Hunk Houghton, who was a country and western singer. In Jailhouse Rock, Vince Everett forms a bond with his cellmate. After serving his sentence he and Hunk Houghton are part of the same band and find fortune and fame.
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#1044: Indian Giver by Annette with the Up Beats
Peak Month: May 1961
8 weeks on Vancouver’s CKWX chart
Peak Position #8
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
Peak Position on Music Vendor ~ #107
YouTube.com: “Indian Giver”
Lyrics: “Indian Giver”
Annette Joanne Funicello was born in Utica, New York in 1942. In 1955 she began her professional career as a child performer at the age of twelve when Walt Disney discovered her performing as the Swan Queen in a dance recital of Swan Lake at the Starlight Bowl in Burbank, California. She became one of the most popular Mouseketeers on the original Mickey Mouse Club. As a teenager, she became a pop singer and shortly after an actress in a series of films popularizing the successful Beach Party genre alongside co-star Frankie Avalon during the mid-1960s. On July 17, 1955 Annette Funicello made her television debut during the live broadcast of Disneyland’s opening day ceremonies. She participated in a song and dance routine promoting the upcoming debut of Walt Disney’s new television show, The Mickey Mouse Club. Following the shows premier on Monday, October 3, 1955, The Mickey Mouse Club became an immediate hit. Its army of small, amateur mouse-eared stars took America by storm. It wasn’t long before the young audience of boys and girls developed a particular interest in a little dark haired girl named Annette. Just as she had appealed to Walt Disney himself, when he discovered her at a dance recital, Annette emerged as a favorite among many children across the USA, launching her into television stardom. As a result she appeared on numerous magazine covers and a variety of Disney branded merchandise.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.
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#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.)
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#1054: 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.
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#1055: 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.
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