A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 25: “Earth Angel” by the Penguins

Episode Date: March 26, 2019

Welcome to episode twenty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Earth Angel” by the Penguins. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs by Andrew Hic. Episode 25, Earth Angel by The Penguins. When you're dealing with music whose power lies in its simplicity, as early rock and rolls does, you end up with music that relies on a variety of formulae, and whose novelty relies on using those formulae, in ever so slightly different ways this is not to say that such music can't be original but that its originality relies on using the formulae in original ways rather than in doing something completely unexpected and one of the ways in which early rock and roll was formulaic was in the choice of chord sequence.

When writing a 50s rock and roll song, you basically had four choices for chord sequence, and those four choices would cover more than 90% of all records in the genre. There was the 12 bar blues, songs like Hound Dog or Roll Over Beethoven, or, shake, rattle and roll are all based around the 12 bar blues. There's the variant 8 bar blues, which most of the R&B we've talked about uses. That's not actually one chord sequence, but a bunch of related ones. Then there's the three-cord trick, which is similar to the 12-bar blues, but just cycles through the chords 14-5-4-14-5-4. This is the code sequence for La Bamba and Louie Louie and Twist and Shout and Hang on Sloopy.

And finally, there's the doo-wop code sequence. This is actually two very slightly different code sequences. There's one minus sixth, minor second, fifth, and there's one minus sixth, fourth, fifth. But those two sequences are, so similar that we'll just lump them both in under the single heading of the do-wop chord sequence from now on. When I talk about that in future episodes, that's the chord sequence I mean. And that may be the most important chord sequence ever, just in terms of the number of songs which use it. It's the progression that lies behind 30s songs like Blue Moon, and the version of

heart and soul most people can play on the piano. The original version is slightly different, but it's also in Oliver's Army by Elvis Costello, Inola Gay by orchestral manoeuvres in the dark, Million Reasons by Lady Gaga, and a one by DJ Khaled. Whatever genre of music you like, you almost certainly know and love dozens of songs based on that progression, and you almost certainly hate dozens more. It's also been used in a lot of big ballads that get overplayed to death. And if you're not the kind of person who likes those records, you might end up massively sick of them. Blue moon, you saw me standing alone without a dream. And at the truth of murder, I'm the one, But while it has been used in almost every genre of music,

the reason why we call this progression the doo-wop progression is that it's behind almost every do-wop song of the 50s and early 60s. Duke of Earl Why do fools fall in love? In the still of the night, Shiboom. It forms the basis. of more hit records in that genre than I could name even if I spent the whole of this podcast naming them.

And today we're going to talk about a song that cemented that sequence as the do-wop standard, imitated by everyone, and which managed to become a massive hit despite containing almost nothing at all original. The Penguins were a vocal group that formed out of the maelstrom of vocal groups in LA in the 50s, in the scene around Central Avenue.

One thing you'll notice when we talk about vocal groups, especially in LA, is that it gets very confusing, very fast, with all the different bands swapping members and taking each other's names. So for clarity, the Hollywood Flames featuring Bobby Bird were different from the famous Flames, who also featured Bobby Bird, who wasn't the same Bobby Bird as the Bobby Bird who was a Hollywood Flame. And when we talk about bird groups, we're talking about groups named after birds, not groups featuring Bobby Bird. And the two members of the Hollywood Flames, who were previously in a bird group called the Flamingos, weren't in the bird group called the Flamingos that people normally mean when they talk about the flamingos. They were in a different band called the

flamingos that went on to become the platters. Got that? I'm sorry. I'll now try to take you slowly through the convoluted history of the penguins in a way that will hopefully make sense to you. But if it doesn't, just remember, not what I actually just said,

but how hard it was to follow. Even the sources I'm consulting for this, written by experts who've spent decades trying to figure out who was in what band, often admit to being very unsure of their facts. Vocal groups on the West Coast in the US were far more fluid than on the East Coast, and membership could change from day to day and hour to hour. We'll start with the Hollywood Flames.

The Hollywood Flames initially formed in 1948 at one of the talent shows there were such important incubators of black musical talent in the 1950s. In this case, they all separately attended a talent show at the Largo Theatre in Los Angeles, where so many different singers turned up that instead of putting them all on separately, the theatre owner told them to split into a few vocal groups. Shortly after forming, the Hollywood Flames started performing at the Barrelhouse Club,

owned by Johnny Otis, and started recording under a variety of different names. Their first release was as The Flames, and came out in January 1950. Please tell me now how much you care Another track they recorded early on was this song by an aspiring songwriter named Murray Wilson. Yes, I met her at the tamper. On a night to a star I was holding her so down. Even now I hear her love.

Murray Wilson would never have much success as a songwriter. But we'll be hearing about him a lot when we talk about his three sons, Brian, Carl and Dennis. once we hit the 1960s and they form the Beach Boys. At some point in late 1954, Curtis Williams, one of the Hollywood Flames, left the group. It seems likely, in fact, that the Hollywood Flames split up

in late 1954 or early 55 and reformed later. Throughout 1955, there were a ton of records released, featuring various vocalists from the Hollywood Flames in various combinations, under other band names. But in the crucial years of 1955 and 1956, when rock and roll broke out, the Hollywood Flames were not active, even though later on they would go on to have quite a few minor hits. But while the band wasn't active, the individuals were, and currently. And, Curtis Williams took with him a song he had been working on with another member, Gaynell Hodge. That song was called Earth Angel, and when he bumped into his old friend Cleave Duncan,

Williams asked Duncan if he'd help him with it. Duncan agreed, and they worked out an arrangement for the song, and decided to form a new vocal group, each bringing in one old friend from their respective high schools. Duncan brought in Dexter Tisby, while Williams brought in Bruce Tate. They decided to call themselves the Penguins, after the mascot on cool cigarettes. Williams and Tate had both attended Jefferson High School, and now is as good a time as any to talk about that school, because Jefferson High School produced more great jazz and R&B musicians, then you'd expect from a school ten times its size, or even a hundred. Etta James, Dexter Gordon, Art Farmer, Johnny Guitar Watson, Barry White, Richard Berry.

The great jazz trumpeter Don Cherry actually got in trouble with his own school because he would play Truant in order to go and play with the music students at Jefferson High. and this abundance of talent was down to one good teacher, the music teacher Samuel Brown, who, along with Hazel Whitaker and Marjorie Bright, was one of the first three black teachers to be employed to teach secondary school classes in LA. Several of the white faculty at Jefferson

asked to be transferred when he started working at Jefferson High, but Brown put together an astonishing, programme of music lessons at the school, teaching the children about the music that they cared about, jazz and blues, while also teaching them to play classical music. He would have masterclasses taught by popular musicians like Lionel Hampton or Nat King Cole, and art musicians like William Grant Still, the most important black composer and conductor in the classical world in the mid-20th century. It was, quite simply, the greatest musical education it was possible to have at that time, and certainly an education far beyond anything that most poor black kids of the time could dream of.

Half the great black musicians in California in the 40s and 50s learned in Brown's lessons. And that meant that there was a whole culture at Jefferson High of taking music seriously. which meant that even those who weren't brown star pupils knew it was possible for them to become successful singers and songwriters jessie belvin who had been a classmate of curtis williams and gaynell hodge when they were in the hollywood flames was himself a minor r and b star already and he would soon become a major one He helped Williams and Hodge with their song Earth Angel, and you can see the resemblance to his first hit, a song called Dream Girl. Dream Girl, Dream Girl, I love you so.

Dream Girl, Dream Girl, Dream Girl, I love you so. I hug you. You did. Note how much that melody line sounds like this bit of Earth Angel. Earth Angel, Earth Angel, will you be mine, my darling dear? But that's not the only part of Earth Angel that was borrowed. There's the line, Will You Be Mine? Which had been the title of a hit record by The Swallows.

then there's this song by the hollywood flames recorded when williams was still in the band with hodge That sounds like a generic doo-wop song now But that's because every generic doo-wop song Patent itself after Earth Angel It wasn't generic when the Hollywood Flames recorded that And finally, the Hollywood Flames had, a while earlier, been asked to record a demo for a local.

songwriter Jesse Mae Robinson. That song, I went to your wedding, later became a hit for the country singer Patty Page. Listen to the middle eight of that song. Now listen to the middle eight of Earth Angel. I fell for you and I knew the vision. The vision of your love, loveliness I hope and I pray that someday I'll be the vision of your half-happiness Oh, earth angel

The song was a Frankenstein's monster bolted together out of bits of spare parts from other songs But like the monster, it took on a life of its own, and the spark that gave it life came from Dootsie Williams. Dootsie Williams was the owner of Dutton Records and was a former musician who had played trumpet in jazz and R&B bands for several years, before realizing that he could make more money by putting out records by other people. His first commercial successes came not from music at all, but from comedy. Williams was a fan of the comedian Red Fox and wanted to put out albums of Fox's live set.

Fox initially refused because he thought that if he recorded anything, then people wouldn't pay to come and see his live shows. However, he became short of cash and agreed to make a record of his third. then current live set. Laugh of the party became a massive hit and more or less started the trend for comedy albums.

He lost his reprieve and he was going down toward the door where they had the lecture chair with the juice on. And he had lived next door to this fella. The only one he had to talk to him for five years

and he looked back and said goodbye and his buddy looked and saw him leaving and he wanted to think of something to say to him and his heart swole up as big as a melon. His words choked in his throat. He couldn't think what to say

to a pal and he wouldn't see anymore ever. And he looked down to the hallway and say, George, more power to you. Williams wasn't primarily a record company owner, though. He was like San Fiv.

Phillips, someone who provided recording services. But his recordings were songwriters' demos, and so meant to be for professionals, unlike the amateurs Phillips recorded. The Penguins would record some of those demos for him, performing the songs for the songwriters who couldn't sing themselves. And as he put it, I had the Penguins doing some vocals, and they begged me,

please record us so we can get a release and go on the road and get famous, and all that. They kept bugging me till I said, OK, what have you got? Their first single, credited to the Dootsie Williams Orchestra with Vocal by the Penguins, didn't even feature the Penguins on the other side. The song itself, there ain't no muse today, wasn't an original to the band, and it bore more than a slight resemblance to records like Wynoni Harris's who threw the whiskey in the well.

No, there ain't no news today. Everything is quite okay. But the maid had a fit, because the butler quit, still there ain't no news today. But the What Have You Got question had also been about songs. Williams was also a music publisher, and he was interested in finding songs he could exploit, not just recordings.

As he put it, talking to Johnny Otis. They said, We got a song called Earth Angel and a song called Hey Senorita. Of course, Earth Angel was all messed up. You know how they come to you. So I straightened it out here and straightened it out there, and doggone, it sounded pretty good. Earth Angel was not even intended to be an A-side originally. It was tossed off as a demo, and a demo for what was expected to be a B-side. The intended A-side was Hey Senorita.

Both little girl, why don't you want me to be If you do is that a feeling, I promise we'll be part of long Yes, Signiorita, please call me on the line Both tracks were only meant to be demos, not the finished recordings, and several takes had to be scrapped because of a neighbour's dog barking, but almost straight away, it became obvious that there was something special

about Earth Angel. Dootsy Williams took the demo recording to Dolphins of Hollywood, the most important R&B record shop on the West Coast. We talked about Dolphins last episode, but as a reminder, as well as being a record shop

and the headquarters of a record label Dolphins also broadcast R&B radio shows from the shop, and Dolphins radio station and record shop were aimed, not at the black adult buyers of R&B generally, but at teenagers. And this is something that needs to be noted about Earth Angel. It's a song where the emphasis is definitely on the angel, rather than on the Earth. Most R&B songs at the time were rooted in the real world.

They were aimed at adults and had adult concerns like sex, or paying the rent, or your partner cheating on you, or your partner cheating on you because you couldn't pay the rent, and so now you had no one to have sex with. There were, of course, other topics covered, and we've talked about many of them. but the presumed audience was someone who had real problems in their life, and who therefore also needed escapist music to give them some relief from their problems. On the other hand, the romance being dealt with in Earth Angel is one that is absolutely based in teenage romantic idealisations,

rather than in anything like real-world relationships. This is, incidentally, one of the ways in which the song resembles Dream Girl, which, again, is about a fantasy of a woman, rather than about a real woman. The girl in the song only exists in her effect on the male singer. She's not described physically, or in terms of her personality, only in the emotional effect she has on the vocalist. but this non-specificity works well for this kind of song as it allows the listener to project the song onto their own crush

without having to deal with inconvenient differences in detail and as the song is about longing for someone rather than being in a relationship with someone it's likely that many of the adolescents who found themselves moved by the song knew almost as little about their crush as they did about the character in the song. The DJ who was on the air when Dootsie Williams showed up was Dick Huggy Boy Hug, possibly the most popular DJ on the station. Huggy Boy played Earth Angel and Hey Senorita, and requests started to come in for the songs almost straight away. Williams didn't want to waste

time re-recording the songs when they'd gone down so well and released it as the final record. of course as with all black records at this point in time the big question was which white people would have the bigger hit with it would georgia gibbs get in with a bland white cover or would it be pat boon as it turns out it was the crew cuts who went to number one or number three i've seen different reports in different sources on the pop chart with their version After Shabom, the crew cuts had briefly tried to go back to Barbershop Harmony, with a version of the Wiff and Puff song. But when that did nothing, in quick succession they knocked out hit bland covers, first of Earth Angel and then of Kokomo, which restored them to the top of the chart at the expense of the black originals. My darling dear, love you all the time. I'm just a fool, a fool in love with you. But it shows how times were slowly changing,

that the Penguin's version also made the top ten on the pop chart, as Johnny Ace had before them. The practice of white artists covering black artist songs would continue for a while, but within a couple of years it would have more or less disappeared, only to come back in a new form in the 60s. The Penguins recorded a follow-up single, Uki-Uk. That, however, hootty-o, hootty-o Walked to fall,

You walk three steps back That, however, wasn't a hit. Dootsie Williams had been refusing to pay the band Any advances on royalties, even as Earth Angel rose to number one on the R&B

charts. And the penguins were annoyed enough that they signed with Book Ram, the songwriter and manager, who also looked after the platters and got a new contract with mercury. Williams warned them that they wouldn't see a penny from him if they broke their contract, but they reasoned that they weren't seeing any money from him anyway, and so decided it didn't matter. They'd be big stars on Mercury after all. They went into the studio to do the same things that Jean and Eunice had done,

re-recording their two singles and the B-sides, although these recordings didn't end up getting released at the time. Unfortunately for the Penguins, they weren't really the band that Ram was interested in. Ram had used the Penguin's current success as a way to get a deal both for them and for the Platters, the group he really cared about. And once the Platters had a hit of their own,

a hit written by book Ram, he stopped bothering with the penguins. They made several records for Mercury, but with no lasting commercial success. And since they'd broken their contract with Duton, they made no money at all from having sung Earth Angel. At the same time, the band started to fracture. Bruce Tate became mentally ill from the stress of fame, quit the band and then killed someone in a hit-and-run accident while driving a stolen car. He was replaced by Randy Jones. Within a year, Jones had left the band, as had Dexter Tisby.

They returned a few months after that, and their replacements were sacked. But then Curtis Williams left to rejoin the Hollywood Flames, and Teddy Harper, who had been Dexter Tisbee's replacement, replaced Williams. The Penguins had basically become Cleve Duncan, who had sung Lead on Earth Angel, and any selection of three other singers, and at one point there seemed to have been two rival sets of penguins recording.

By 1963, Dexter Thysby, Randy Jones, and Teddy Harper were touring together as a fake version of the coasters, along with Cornell Gunter, who was actually a member of the coasters who'd split from the other three members of his group. You perhaps see now why I said that stuff at the beginning about the vocal group line-ups being confusing.

At the same time, Cleve Duncan was singing with a whole other group of penguins, recording a song that would never be a huge hit, but would appear on many do-wop compilations. So many that it's as well known as many of the big hits. It's fascinating to listen to that song, and to realize that by the very early 60s, pre-British invasion, the doo-wop and rock and roll eras were already the subject of nostalgia records. Pop will not only eat itself, but it has been doing so almost since its inception.

We'll be talking about the co-writer of that song, Frank Zappa, a lot more when he started. making his own records. And meanwhile, there were lawsuits to contend with. Earth Angel had originally been credited to Curtis Williams and Gainel Hodge, but they'd been helped out in the early stages of writing it by Jesse Belvin, and then Cleve Duncan had adjusted the melody, and Dootsie Williams claimed to have helped them fix up the song. Belvin had been drafted into the army when Earth the angel had hit, and when he got out he was broke, and he was persuaded by Dootsie Williams, who still seems to have held a grudge about the penguins breaking their contract, to sue over the songwriting royalties. Belvin won sole credit in the lawsuit, and then signed over

that sole credit to Dootsey Williams. So, according to Marve Goldberg, for a while, Doodsey Williams was credited as the only writer. Luckily, for once, that injustice was eventually rectified. These days, thankfully, the writing credits are split between Curtis Williams, Jesse Belvin and Gaynell Hodge, and in 2013, Hodge, the last surviving co-writer of the song, was given an award by BMI, for the song having been played on the radio a million.

times, and Hodge and the estates of his co-writers receive royalties for its continued popularity. Curtis Williams and Bruce Tate both died in the 1970s. Jesse Belvin died earlier than that, but his story is for another podcast. Dexter Tisby seems to be still alive, as is Gainel Hodge, and Cleve Duncan continued performing with various lines. of penguins until his death in 2012, making a living as a performer from a song that sold 20 million copies but never paid its performers a penny. He always said that he was always happy

to sing his hit so long as the audiences were happy to hear it, and they always were. A history of rock music and 500 songs is written produced and performed by Andrew Hickey. Visit 500Songs.com. 0500 the numbers, Songs.com to see transcriptions, liner notes, and links to other materials,

including a mixed cloud stream of all songs excerpted in this episode. A history of rock music and 500 songs is supported by the backers on my Patreon. Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickeg to support it. Patreon backers also get early access to my books and also support my blog

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