Fred Parris of the Five Satins has died (vanity)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak6tttHk_R8 ^

[firebrand]

He wrote this song in 1955 and the record was released in 1956. A classic of the fifties doo-wop genre.

[llevrok]

Rough week for pop music singers....

[firebrand]

Here's the New York Times story.

[Fiji Hill]

Wonderful Girl--The Five Satins (1956)

[Fiji Hill]

Weeping Willow--The Five Satins (1956)

[Fiji Hill]

Fred Parris wrote this one and sang lead.

Dear One--The Scarlets (1954)

[firebrand]

Another Korean War-era doo-wop. I actually like this one even more.

[Beowulf9]

Beautiful. What an era it was. Great singers, songs.

[Fiji Hill]

Thanks for the memory--a blast from the past! I have "Soldier Boy" on a 45 rpm disc, but I haven't played it in years. It came out shortly after the shooting stopped in Korea, but this one--also about a serviceman--was waxed while it was still going on.

Feeling Sad--The Sha-Weez (1952)

[firebrand]

Here's what was playing on the black stations only, no crossover. Along with lots of other good stuff. My suburban friends were so jealous!

[firebrand]

This one is fabulous. Just a little earlier, when I was still in grade school, and I never heard it before.

[firebrand]

Just one more, which I had the thrill of seeing the heartbeats do on the stage of Radio City Music Hall (with a member or two replaced with others, as I remember it.) The one that actually has "rat-a-tat" as part of the background refrain.

[Fiji Hill]

I'm pretty sure "Love Is Strange" wasn't on the playlist of KFI, the station we usually listened to on our Zenith portable AM radio. You would have to tune in to a black station like KGFJ to hear that. KFI stuck to pop standards like Perry Como's Round and Round.

[Fiji Hill]

You were fortunate to have seen the Heartbeats perform. My favorite disc of theirs is Crazy for You, which came out in October, 1955.

[firebrand]

We had two black radio stations in Newark. One of them played older stuff and gospel, the other not so much.

There was also a polka station that you could listen to for about four minutes before you went nuts. When I was really little, my grandparents used to listen to opera on the Italian station.

For some reason, we could get WWVA, from Wheeling, West Virginia, in Newark, late at night. Someone told me it was a very powerful station because it was in mountainous country where it was harder to reach everybody. Not sure how true that is, but I heard a lot of good music on that one.

[firebrand]

“Crazy for You” is wonderful! I guess I sort of missed that one.

At that same Radio City show, they had a group called the Penguins that didn’t have even one original member of the group. That kind of makes sense, since they were pretty much a one-hit wonder and the gang probably split up shortly after Earth Angel.

[Fiji Hill]

The Penguins had a number of releases after "Earth Angel," but except for Pledge of Love (1957), none of them sold well. They underwent numerous personnel changes before breaking up in 1962.

Soon afterwards, Cleveland Duncan, the lead singer, put together a group and continued performing under the name the Penguins. In 1963, they waxed Memories of El Monte, a paean to the American Legion Stadium in El Monte, Calif., the site of dozens of rock and R&B concerts. The song wasn't a chart hit, but it got a lot of airplay on stations like the border blaster XERB, broadcasting out of Rosarito, Lower California, where disc jockey Art Laboe played it on his late-night Oldies show in the late sixties-early seventies.

On New Years Eve, 1983, I saw Duncan with his Penguins group perform at the Olympic Auditorium in LA (now a church). They ushered in 1984 with "Memories of El Monte," which segued into "Earth Angel."

[Impala64ssa]

The first release of Earth Angel was from Dootone records. The same company that released the Medallions hits, and also the first songs the Drifters came out with. They also recorded Redd Foxx’s early albums which are still a bit “salty” by today’s standards.

[Fiji Hill]

One of my favorite songs in this genre is You're Heavenly by the Saigons, the Penguins' label mates at Dootsie Williams' Dootone diskery in South-Central Los Angeles. In an interview, Williams said that the Saigons broke up shortly after this disc was released.

[Impala64ssa]

XERB, broadcasting out of Rosarito, Lower California,

An aircheck with the late great Wolfman Jack when he was a DJ on XERB