AM Gold 1963

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 1995

Labels: Warner Special Products, Time Life Music

Time-Life released this disc as Various - Superhits 1963 (SUD-08) in the Super Hits series in 1991, and as Various - AM Gold 1963 (AM1-17) in the AM Gold series in 1995.

℗ 1991 Warner Special Products
© 1991, 1995 Time Life Inc

Track durations obtained from software.

Complete liner notes:

The urban folk movement of the late '50s and early '60s began on college campuses and in bohemian strongholds like Greenwich Village as a reaction to what some considered the crass commercialism and contrivances of rock 'n' roll. But by 1963 folk itself had percolated up into the mainstream and onto the pop charts, albeit in radically different form.

Sugar Shack, by Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs, is a case in point. It's not a folk song but rather a song inspired by the folk scene. Keith McCormack, who played in the West Texas rockabilly combo the String-a-Longs, had never been near a coffeehouse-had never sipped espresso or talked existentialism-when he sat down one bleary five a.m. at his aunt's house to write about that scene.

He'd been cruising town all night, drinking homemade beer, when he dropped by to wish her a happy birthday, and after dashing the song off at the breakfast table, he gave her half the royalties as a present. Gilmer, a solo artist producer Norman Petty had put together with the Fireballs, began singing Sugar Shack in concert, and it went over so well that vocalist and band cut it at the same Clovis, New Mexico, studio where Buddy Holly's career was launched.

The Rooftop Singers' Walk Right In was closer to real folk. Gus Cannon had written the song and recorded it with his jug band, the Jug Stompers, in Memphis in 1929. When Erik Darling, a veteran of the Tarriers (which included Alan Arkin) and the Weavers (he replaced Pete Seeger on banjo), assembled a harmony trio specifically for this single, he thought Walk Right In was a traditional tune. Though Darling cleaned the lyrics up, Cannon, then 79 and living in a shack by the railroad tracks in Memphis, recognized his song immediately. Darling quickly corrected the authorship error, and Cannon even wound up cutting an album for Stax/Volt.

The Kingston Trio was a clean-cut San Francisco group that went to No. 1 with its debut, Tom Dooley, in 1958. The trio's success stemmed partly from the fact that, like the Rooftop Singers, this was a folk group with no discernible politics. Reverend Mr. Black was, however, the trio's last top-40 single. Trini Lopez, a Dallas native who had been in residence at P.J.'s in Hollywood for 18 months, remade If I Had a Hammer, a traditional black work song Pete Seeger had rewritten for the Weavers (in 1962 it provided Peter, Paul and Mary their first top-10 hit).

With You're the Reason I'm Living Bobby Darin moved from a brassy sound toward commercial folk. His acoustic guitar accompanist during this period was Jim (Roger) McGuinn, who would later found the Byrds. Even the Village Stompers, Dixieland revivalists based in Greenwich Village, capitalized on the folk boom; their Washington Square was named after the New York park where the folkies hung out and swapped songs.

Skeeter Davis' The End of the World had the atmosphere of commercial folk, though it was also a formative Nashville-sound recording. In 1953 Kentucky friends Skeeter Pennick and Betty Jack Davis, as the Davis Sisters, had a country smash with I Forgot More than You'll Ever Know. But while on tour, Betty Jack was killed, and Skeeter gravely injured, in a car wreck, and the disillusioned Skeeter left the business until 1959. When producer Chet Atkins gave her The End of the World, he thought it was simply a good love ballad, but Skeeter heard it as a death song and sang it with Betty Jack in mind. Later, Sylvia Dee revealed she had written the song about her father's death but couched it in the language of love songs because she feared it would be too morbid to sell.

Boy-girl duets enjoyed an unprecedented vogue in 1963. Nino Tempo and April Stevens were a brother and sister who had modest solo careers-she as a singer, he as a sessions sax man-before teaming up. Atlantic boss Ahmet Ertegun had them cut the standard Paradise, and with 14 minutes left at the end of the session, Stevens suggested they also throw together a quick remake of Deep Purple. Ertegun hated the results, but Tempo, sure it was a hit, said he wanted out of the contract if Ertegun wouldn't release it. After Paradise failed, the exec relented, declaring that if Deep Purple also stiffed, he would tear up the contract (which proved unnecessary).

Dale and Grace's I'm Leaving It Up to You knocked Deep Purple out of the No. 1 slot, marking the first time duets had ever topped the charts back to back. Dale Houston was a northern Louisiana honky-tonker, Grace Broussard a southern Louisiana Cajun singer, when Baton Rouge producer Sam Montel put them together to remake this 1957 Don and Dewey R & B ballad.

Another duo, Paul and Paula, were really Ray Hildebrand, a rangy basketball star at Howard Payne College in Brownwood, Texas, and Jill Jackson. the niece of the woman who ran the boardinghouse where he lived. Inspired by Annette Funicello's Tall Paul, Hildebrand wrote something he called Paul and Paula. When Jackson asked him to sing with her on a radio benefit for the American Cancer Society, they did his tune.

The DJ liked it so much that he recommended they visit Fort Worth producer Major Bill Smith. The pair entered Smith's studios in the midst of all-day sessions, but when Amos Milburn Jr., the son of the boogie pianist, failed to show for his slot, Smith (not wanting to waste the assembled musicians) let the Brownwood kids record their song. However, he released it as Hey Paula because he'd just had a hit with Bruce Channel's Hey! Baby. When Shelby Singleton of Philips International leased Hey Paula from Smith's tiny Le Cam label, he changed the duo's name from Ray and Jill to Paul and Paula.

Ruby and the Romantics' Our Day Will Come had the wide-eyed innocence of duet records, but it was a hard-won innocence. Writers Bob Hilliard and Mort Garson had been saving the song for a name act, and producer Allen Stanton had to promise them he would redo it with Jack Jones if the Romantics' take failed. Stanton cut it with the group as both a bossa nova and a straight pop ballad before deciding on the former.

Among vocal groups, the Cascades, a San Diego party band, made a great first impression with the ethereal Rhythm of the Rain, but they couldn't repeat their feat. The Caravelles were two women who worked for a London brokerage firm and named themselves after a French airliner; You Don't Have to Be a Baby to Cry slipped onto American charts just before the onslaught of Beatlemania. Surfer Girl was one-half of the Beach Boys' second straight two-sided hit, a harbinger of a new kind of American music. And the Drifters, with Rudy Lewis crying lead, kept the old sound alive with On Broadway, which featured the shimmering guitar of Phil Spector, then still apprenticing for producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

Among solo acts, Bobby Vinton used the success of Blue on Blue to go
to Nashville for a whole album of "blue" songs, and publisher Al Gallico, a spectator at the sessions, urged him to take on the standard Blue Velvet, which later topped the charts. Bobby Vee sang The Night Has a Thousand Eyes in the teen flick Just for Fun. Dionne Warwick began her own string of top-10s with Anyone Who Had a Heart. Barbara Lewis' Hello Stranger won a different kind of distinction. It was one of the very few non-Motown singles cut at that company's Hitsville studios. Unlike commercial folk, the best was yet to come for Detroit rhythm and blues.

-John Morthland

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