A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 35: “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?” by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers

Episode Date: June 3, 2019

Episode thirty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and at the terrible afterlife of child stardom. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Space Guitar” by Johnny “Guitar” Watson. (more…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs By Andrew Hake Episode 35 Why Do Fools Fall in Love By Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers The Story of Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers is, like so many of the stories we're dealing with in this series, a story of heartbreak and early death,

a story of young people of colour having their work become massively successful and making no money of it because of wealthy businessmen stealing their work. But it's also a story of what happens when you get involved with the mafia before you hit puberty and your career peaks at 13. The teenagers only had one really big hit, but it was one of the biggest hits of the 50s, and it was a song. It was a song this is almost universally known to this day. So today we're going to talk about, why do fools fall in love? The teenagers started when two black teenagers from New York,

Jimmy Merchant and Sherman Garns, left the vocal group they'd formed, which was named the Earth Angels after the Penguin's song, and hooked up with two Latino neighbors, Joe Nogroni and Herman Santiago. They named themselves of the Ermines, and soon after, they were the support act for local vocal group the Cadillacs. They were impressed enough by the Cadillacs that in honour of them they changed their name,

becoming the Coop de Villes, and after that the premieres. They used to practice in the hallway of the apartment block where Sherman Garns lived, and eventually one of the neighbours got sick of hearing them sing the same song. over and over. The neighbor decided to bring out some love letters his girlfriend had written, some of which were in the form of poems, and say to the kids, why don't you turn some of these into songs? And so they did just that. They took one of the letters containing the phrase, Why do birds sing so gay, and Santiago and Merchant worked out a ballad for Santiago to sing, containing that phrase.

Soon after this, the premieres met up with a very young kid, Frankie Lyman, who sang and played percussion in a Mambo group. I suppose I should pause here to talk briefly about the Mambo craze. Rock and roll wasn't the only musical style that was making inroads in the pop markets in the 50s, and an impartial observer, looking in 1953 or 19. might easily have expected that the big musical trend that would shape the next few decades would be calypso music, which had become huge in the US for a brief period. But that wasn't the only music that was challenging rock and roll.

There were a whole host of other musics, usually those from Pacific, Latin American and or Caribbean cultures, which tend to get lumped together as Exotica now, and Mambo was one of those. This was a craze named after a song by the Cuban bandleader Perez Prado, Mambo Jambo. That song was popular enough that soon everyone was jumping on the bandwagon, for example, Bill Haley and the Comets with Mambo rock. The rock away three. Emombo dance in a different way. They do the crazy Mambo rock all day.

Hey, Mambo rock. Hey, Mambo rock. Yeah, Mambo rock. Hey, Mambo rock. He's doing it, Mambo rock. The group that Frankie Lyman was performing with was one of those groups, but he was easily persuaded instead to join the premieres. He was the young kid who hung around with them when they practiced, not the leader, and not even a major part of the group. Not yet, anyway.

But everything changed for the group when Richie Barrett heard them singing on a street corner near him. These days, Barrett is best known for his 1962 single Some Other Guy, which was later covered by the Beatles, among others. but at the time he was the lead singer of a group called The Valentine's. He was also working for George Goldner at Drama Records as a talent scout and producer, doing the same kind of things that Ag Turner had been doing for chess and modern, or that Jesse Stone did for Atlantic. finding the act, doing the arrangements, doing all the work involved in turning some teenage kid into someone who could become a star. Goldner was someone for whom most people in the music industry

seemed to have a certain amount of contempt. He was, by most accounts, a fairly weak-willed figure who got himself into great amounts of debt with dodgy people. But one thing they're all agreed on is that he had a great ear for a hit, because, as Jerry Lieber put it, he had the taste of a 14-year-old girl. George Goldner had actually got into R&B through the Mambo craze. When Goldner had started in the music industry, it had been as the owner of a chain of nightclubs

which featured Latin music. The clubs became popular enough that he also started Tico Records, a label that put out Latin records. most notably early recordings by Tito Puente. When the Mambo Boom hit, a lot of black teenagers started attending Goldner's clubs, and he became interested in the other music they were listening to. He started first Rama Records, as a label for R&B singles, and then G Records, named after the most successful record that had been put out on Rama, G, by the Crows.

However, Goldner had a business partner, and his name was Morris Levy, and Levy was not someone you wanted involved in your business in any way. In this series, we're going to talk about a lot of horrible people, and in fact we've already covered more than a few of them, yet Morris Levy was one of the worst people we're going to look at. While most of the people we've discussed are either terrible people in their person, life, if they were a musician, or a minor con artist, who ripped off musicians and kept the money for themselves. Morris Levy was a terrible human being and a con artist, someone who used

his mafia connections to ensure that the artists he ripped off would never even think of suing him, because they valued their lives too much. We'll be looking at at least one rock and roll star in the 1960s, who died in mysterious circumstances after getting involved with Levy. Levy had been the founder of Birdland, the world-famous jazz club, in the 1940s, but when ASCAP came to him, asking for the money they were meant to get for their songwriters from live performances, Levy had immediately seen the possibilities in music publishing. Levy then formed a publishing company, Patricia Music, and a record label. roulette, and started into the business of properly exploiting young black people,

not just having them work in his clubs for a night, but having them create intellectual property he could continue exploiting for the rest of his life. Indeed, Levy was so keen to make money off dubious intellectual property that he actually formed a company with his friend Alan Freed, which attempted to trademark the phrase rock and roll, on the basis that this way any records that came out labelled as such would have to pay them for the privilege. Thankfully, the term caught on so rapidly

that there was no way for them to enforce the trademark and it became genericised. But this is who Levy was and how he made his money, at least his more legitimate money. Where he got the rest from is a matter for the true crime podcasts. There are several people who report death threats, or having to give up their careers, or suddenly move thousands of miles away from home, to avoid Levy's revenge on artists who didn't do exactly what he said. So when we're looking at a group of literal teenage kids, and black teenagers at that,

with the smallest amount of institutional privilege possible, you can be sure that he was not going to treat them with the respect that they were due. Levy owned 50% of Goldner's record companies and would soon grow to own all of them, as Goldner accumulated more gambling debts and used his record labels to pay them off. But at the start of their career, the group didn't yet have to worry about Levy. That would come later. For now they were dealing with George Goldner. And Goldner was someone who was actually concerned with the music,

and who had been producing hits consistently for the last few years. At the time the premieres signed with him, for example, he had just produced You Baby You for the Cleftones. When Richie Barrett brought the premieres to Goldner, he was intrigued because two of the members were Latino, and he was such a lover of Latin music. But he quickly latched on to the potential of Frankie Lyman as a star. Lyman was a captivating performer

and when you watch video footage of him now you can't help but think of Michael Jackson who followed almost exactly the same early career trajectory a decade later while the other band members were the normal kind of teenage kids who joined doo-op groups and were clearly a little reserved

Lyman just went for it working the crowd like a young James Brown with absolutely no self-consciousness at all. He also had a gorgeous falsetto voice and knew how to use it. As we've heard, many of the do-wop groups of the 50s weren't particularly proficient singers, but Lyman did have a real vocal talent. He was clearly a potential star. Frankie Lyman wasn't even originally meant to be the lead singer on why do fools fall in love. That distinctive falsetto that makes the record so memorable was a late edition. The song was originally meant to be sung by Herman Santiago,

and it was only in the studio that the song was rearranged to instead focus on the band's youngest and youngest sounding member. When the record came out, it wasn't credited to the premieres, but to the teenagers featuring Frankie Lyman. Goldner hadn't liked the group's name and decided to focus on their big selling point, their youth, and in particular, the youth of their new lead singer. Much of the work to make the record sound that good was done, not by the teenagers or by Goldner, but by the session saxophone player Jimmy Wright,

who ended up doing the arrangements on all of the teenagers' records, and whose idea it was to start them with Sherman Garns' bass intros. Again, as with so many of these records, there was a white cover version that came out almost immediately. This time by the Diamonds, a group of Canadians who copied the formula of their fellow countrymen the crew cut, and more or less cornered the market in white remakes of doo-wop songs. But in love But in a From off above

Why do fools fall in love Why do they fall in love? But in a sign of how the times were changing The Diamond's version of the song Only went to number 12 While the teenager's version went to number six Helped by a massive push From Morris Levy's good friend, Alan Freed.

partly this may have been down to the fact that all the diamonds were adults and they simply couldn't compete with the novelty sound of a boy who sounded prepubescent singing in falsetto falsetto had of course always been a part of the doo-wop vocal blend but it had been a minor part up to this point lead vocals would generally be sung in a smooth high tenor, but would very rarely reach to the truly high notes. Lyman, by virtue of his voice not yet having broken, introduced a new timbre into rock and roll lead vocals, and he influenced almost every vocal group that followed. There might have been a Four Seasons, or a Janandine, or a Beach Boys, without Lyman, but I doubt it. There was also

a British cover version by Alma Cogan, a middle-of-the-road singer known as the girl with the giggle in her voice. This sort of thing was common in Britain well into the 60s, as most US labels didn't have distribution in the UK. And so, if British people wanted to hear American rock and roll songs, they would often get them in native cover versions. Kogan was a particular source of these, often recording songs that had been R&B hits. We will see a lot more of this in future episodes,

as we start to look more at the way rock and roll affected the UK. The teenagers followed the success of Why the Fools Fall in Love with I Want You to Be My Girl. This one did almost as well, reaching a peak of number 13 in the pop charts. But the singles after that did less well, though I'm Not a Juvenile Delinquent, became a big hit in the UK. The record label soon decided that Lyman needed to become a solo star, rather than just being the lead singer of the teenagers. Quite why they made this decision is difficult to sell.

as one would not normally deliberately break up a hit act. But presumably the calculation was that they would then have two hit acts. Solo Frankie Lyman and the teenagers still recording together. It didn't work out like that. Lyman inadvertently caused another crisis in the ongoing battle of rock and roll versus racism. Alan Freed had a new TV series, The Big Beat, which was the toned-down version of Freed's radio show. By this point, real rock and roll was already in a temporary decline,

as the major labels fought back, and so Freed's show was generally filled with the kind of pre-packaged major label act, usually named Bobby, that we'll be talking about when we get to the later 50s. For all that Freed had a reputation as a supporter of black music, what he really was was someone with the skill to see. see a bandwagon and jump on it. But still, some of the black performers were still popular, and so Freed had Lyman on his show. But his show was aimed at a white audience, and so the studio audience was white, and dancing, and Frankie Lyman started to dance as well, a black

boy dancing with a white girl. This did not go down well at all with the Southern Network affiliate, and within a couple of weeks, Friedschau had been taken off the TV. And that appearance, the one that destroyed Fried Show, was almost certainly Lyman's very first ever solo performance. One might think that this did not or go well for his future career, and that assessment would be largely correct. Neither Lyman nor the teenagers would ever have another hit after they split. The last few records credited to Frankie Lyman and the teenagers were in fact Lyman's solo recordings performed with other backing singers.

Goody Goody did manage to reach number 20 on the pop charts. Everything after that did worse. Lyman's first solo single, My Girl, failed to chart. My Girl is a natural beauty, my girl. Oh, my girl is a genuine cutie, my girl. And there's no other girl in the whole lot made of sugar and spice, that's my girl. So treats me ever so nice, that's my girl. He continued making records for another couple of years, but nothing came of any of them,

and when his voice broke, he stopped sounding much like himself. The last recording he made that came even close to being a hit was a remake of Bobby Day's Little Bitty Pretty One from 1960. And the teenagers didn't fare much better. They went through several new lead singers. There was Billy Lebrano, a white kid who, according to Jimmy Merchant, sounded more like Eddie Fisher than like Lyman. Then there was Freddie Houston, who would go on to be the lead singer in one of the many Inkspot's lineups touring in the 60s.

And then they started trying to focus on the other original group members. For example, calling themselves Sherman and the teenagers when performing the Libre and Stoller song, The Draw. As you can hear, none of these had the same sound as they'd had with Lyman, and they eventually hit on the idea of getting a woman into the group instead. They got in Sandra Doyle, who would later be Zola Taylor's replacement in the platters, and struggled on until 1961 when they finally split up. Lyman's life after leaving the teenagers was one of nothing but tragedy. He married three times, every time bigamously, and his only child died two days after the birth.

Lyman would apparently regularly steal from Zola Taylor, who became his second wife, to feed his heroin addiction. He briefly reunited with the teenagers in 1965, but they had little success. He spent a couple of years in the army, and appeared to have got himself clean, and even got a new record deal. But the night before he was meant to go back into the studio, he fell off the wagon for what would be the last time. Frankie Lyman died, aged just 25, and a husband for almost half of his life, of a heroin overdose in 1968.

The other teenagers would reunite, with Lyman's brother joining them briefly, in the 70s. Sherman Garns died in 77, and Joe Negrooney in 1978. but Santiago and Merchant continued, off and on, with the line-up of the teenagers. A version of the band continues to this day, still featuring Herman Santiago, and Merchant remained with the band until his retirement a few years ago. But their first hit caused legal problems.

Why Do You Fall in Love was written by Herman Santiago, with the help of Jimmy Merger. but neither Santiago or merchant were credited on the song when it came out. The credited writers of the song are Frankie Lyman, who did have some input into rewriting it in the studio, and Morris Levy, who had never even heard the song until after it was a massive hit. George Goldner was originally credited as Lyman's co-writer, and of course Goldner never wrote it either. but at least he was in the studio when it was recorded. But when Levy bought out Goldner's Holdings in his companies,

he also bought out his rights to songs he was credited for, so Levy became the legal co-writer of Why Do Fools Fall in Love? In 1992, Santiago and Merchant finally won the credit for having written Why Do Fools Fall in Love, but in 1996, the ruling was overturned. They'd apparently wait a bit of it, waited too long to take legal action over having their song stolen, and so the rights reverted to Lyman and Morris Levy, who had never even met the band when they wrote the song.

But of course, Lyman wasn't alive to get the money, but his widow was, or rather his widows, plural, were. In the 1980s, three separate women claimed to be Lyman's widow, and thus his legitimate heir. One was his first wife. who he had married in 1964, while she was still married to her first husband. One was Zola Taylor, who Lyman supposedly married bigamously a year after his first marriage, but who couldn't produce any evidence of this. And the third was either his second or third wife, who he married bigamously in 1967, while still married to his first and possibly his second wife.

That third wife eventually won the various legal battles and is now in charge of the Frankie Lyman legacy. Why Do Fools Fall in Love has gone on to be a standard, recorded by everyone from Joni Mitchell to the Beach Boys to Diana Ross. But Frankie Lyman and the teenagers stand as a cautionary tale, an example that all too many people were still all too eager to follow. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast.

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