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To: Fiji Hill
This is a very obscure group which waxed a few discs and then disappeared around 1956.

No doubt there were a few groups that faded away. Some of those you listed were new to me or were songs I've never heard.
Plenty of one-hit-wonders out there.

123 posted on 03/30/2012 10:29:05 AM PDT by beachn4fun (Lock and Load)
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To: beachn4fun
Some of those you listed were new to me or were songs I've never heard.

I picked songs that are probably not well-known today except by collectors, but some of these acts were popular at the time, and some contained personalities who were on their way up.

I had never heard of the Kavaliers ("Get That Communist, Joe!") until Youtube came along, and as far as I know, that was their only release. The "Joe" in question is Sen Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.), who was at the time hunting Russian spies as chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations.

"Lucille" by the Drifters was the B side of their first hit "Money, Honey," but I think it should have been the A side, since it's my favorite Drifters opus.

I don't know much about the Five Blue Notes, from Washington, DC, except that they also recorded "Something Awful" in 1958, which is on my Halloween anthology.

After their big hit "ShBoom," he Chords had only a few releases before fading away. The Cheers followed "Bazoom"--which was probably inspired by the Chords' "ShBoom"--with a much bigger hit, "Black Denim Trousers" in 1955.

The Quails, like the Eagles, named themselves after birds. Other "bird" groups of the time included the Ravens, the Robins, the Starlings, the Cardinals and the Orioles.

The Queens and the Flairs were Los Angeles groups. Shirley Gunter, lead singer of the Queens was the sister of Cornell Gunter, who sang with the Flairs. She later joined the Flairs in 1955. Cornell Gunter later became the lead singer of the Coasters.

The lead singer of the Flairs was Richard Berry, whose claim to fame outside of Los Angeles, where he had a lot of local hits, is "Louie, Louie," which he recorded in 1957 with Richard Berry & the Pharaohs. This was a local hit in LA on the Flip label, but the Kingsmen and other groups turned it into a monster global hit in the 1960's. I have met both Richard Berry and Shirley Gunter.

The Spiders are the only group on this list that hail from New Orleans.

To round out my list, Ruth Brown, Les Paul & Mary Ford, Kitty Kallen and Rosemary Clooney were well-known pop stars at the time.

142 posted on 03/30/2012 3:14:24 PM PDT by Fiji Hill (Deo Vindice!)
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