A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 58: “Mr. Lee” by the Bobbettes

Episode Date: November 25, 2019

Episode fifty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Mr. Lee” by the Bobbettes, and at the lbirth of the girl group sound. 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 “Little Bitty Pretty One”, by Thurston Harris. (more…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs by Andrew Hick Episode 58 Mr Lee By the Bobbett Over the last few months We've seen the introduction to rock and roll music Of almost all the elements that would characterize the music in the 1960s

We have the music slowly standardising on a line-up of guitar, bass and drums with electric guitar lead. We have the blues-based melodies, the backbeat, the country-inspired guitar lines. All of them are there. They just need putting together in precisely the right proportions for the familiar sound of the early 60s beat groups to come out. But there's one element, as important as all of these, has not yet turned up, and which we're about to see for the first time.

And that element is the girl group. Girl groups played a vital part in the development of rock and roll music, and are never given the credit they deserve. But you just have to look at the first Beatles album to see how important they were. Of the six cover versions on Please Please Me, three are off songs originally recorded by girl groups, two by the Cherelles and one by the cookies. And the thing about the girl groups is that they were marketed as collectives, not as individuals. Occasionally, the lead singer would be marketed as a star in her own right, but more normally it would be the group,

not the members, who were known. So it's quite surprising that the first R&B girl group to hit the charts was one that, with the exception of one member, managed to keep their original members until they died, and where two of those members were still in the group into the middle of the current decade. So today, we're going to have a look at the group that introduced the girl group sound to rock and roll, and how the world of music was irrevocably changed because of how a few young kids felt about their fifth grade teacher. Now, we have to make a distinction here when we're talking about girl groups. There had, after all, been many vocal groups in the pre-rock era that consisted entirely of women. The Andrews sisters, for example, have been hugely

popular, as had the Boswell sisters, who sang the theme song to this show. But those groups were mostly what was then called modern harmony. They were singing block harmonies, often with jazz chords, and singing them on songs that came straight from Tin Pan Alley. There was no R&B influence in them whatsoever. When we talk about girl groups in rock and roll, we're talking about something that quickly became a standard line-up. You'd have one woman out front singing the lead vocal, and two or three others behind her, singing answering phrases and providing ooh vocals. The songs they performed would be, almost without exception, in the R&B mould, but would usually have much less gospel influence than the male vocal groups or the R&B solo singers

who were coming up at the same time. While do-wop groups and solo singers were all about showing off individual virtuosity. The girl groups were about the group as a collective. With very rare exceptions, the lead singers of the girl groups would use very little malisma or ornamentation and would just sing the melody straight. And when it comes to that kind of girl group, the Bobettes were the first one to have any real impact. They started out as a group of children who sang after school, at church and at the Glee Club. The same gang of seven kids, aged between 11 and 15, would get together and sing, usually pop songs. After a little while though, Rether Dixon and Emma Port, the two girls who'd started this up, decided that they wanted to

take things a bit more seriously. They decided that seven girls was too many, and so they whittled the numbers down to the five best singers. Rether and Emma, plus Helen Gathers, Laura Webb, and Emma's sister, Janney. The girls originally named themselves the Harlem Queens, and started performing at talent shows around New York. We've talked before about how important amateur nights were for black entertainment in the 40s and 50s, but it's been a while, so to refresh your memories. At this point in time, black live entertainment was dominated by what was known as the Chitlin Circuit, an informal network of clubs and theatres around the US which put on

largely black acts for almost exclusively black customers. Those venues would often have shows that lasted all day. A ticket for the Harlem Apollo, for example, would allow you to come and go all day, and see the same performers half a dozen times. To fill out these long bills, as well as getting the acts to perform multiple times a day, several of the Chitlin Circuit venues would put on talent nights, where young performers could get up on stage and have a chance to win over the audiences, who were notoriously unforgiving. Despite the image we might have in our heads now of amateur talent night. These talent contests would often produce some of the greatest performers in the music business, and people like Johnny Otis would look to them to discover new talent. They were a way for untried

performers to get themselves noticed, and while few did, some of those who managed would go on to have great success. And so, in late 1956, the five Harlem queens, two of them aged only 11, went on stage at the Harlem Apollo, home of the most notoriously tough audiences in America. But they went down well enough that James Daly, the manager of a minor bird group called the Ospreys, decided to take them on as well. The Ospreys were a popular group around New York, who would eventually get signed to Atlantic and release records like, Do You Want to Jump Children? Daily thought that the Harlem Queens had the potential to be much bigger than the Ospreys and he decided to try to get them signed to Atlantic Records.

But one thing would need to change. The Harlem Queens sounded more like a motorcycle gang than the name of a vocal group. Laura's sister had just had a baby who she'd named Chanel Bobette. They decided to name the group after. the baby, but the Chanel's sounded too much like the Chantels, a group from the Bronx who had already started performing. So they became the Bobettes. They signed to Atlantic where Armet Ertigan and Jerry Wexler encouraged them to perform their own material. The girls had been writing songs together and they had one, essentially a playground chant that they'd been singing together for a while

about their fifth grade teacher Mr Lee. Depending on who you believe, the girls gave different accounts over the years, the song was either attacking him or merely affectionately mocking his appearance. It called him four-eyed and said he was the ugliest teacher you ever did see. Atlantic liked the feel of the song,

but they didn't want the girls singing a song that was just attacking a teacher, and so they insisted on them changing the list. With the help of Reggie Obrecht, the bandleader for the session, who got a co-writing credit on the song, largely for transcribing the girl's melody and turning it into something that musicians could play, the song became, instead, a song about the handsomest sweetie you ever did see. Incidentally, there seems to be some disagreement about who the musicians were on the track. Jacqueline Warwick in Girl Group's Girl Culture.

claims that the saxophone solo on Mr Lee was played by King Curtis, who did play on many sessions for Atlantic at the time. It's possible, and Curtis was an extremely versatile player, but he generally played with a very thick tone. Compare his playing on Dynamite at Midnight, a solo track he released in 1957, with the solo on Mr. Lee. I think it more likely,

that the credit I've seen in other places, such as Atlantic sessionographies, is correct, and that the Sax solo is played by the less well-known player Jesse Powell, who played on, for example, fools fall in love by the drifters. If that's correct, and my ears tell me it is, then presumably the other credits in those sources are also correct, and the backing for Mr. Lee was mostly provided by B-Team session players, the people who Atlantic would get in for less important sessions, rather than the first-call people they would use on their major artists.

So the musicians were Jesse Powell on tenor-sacks, Ray Ellis on piano, Alan Hanlon and Al-Caiola on guitar, Milton on bass, and Joe Marshall on drums. Mr. Lee became a massive hit, going to number one on the R&B charts, and making the top ten on the pop charts,

and making the girls the first all-girl R&B vocal group to have a hit record, though they would soon be followed by others. The Chantels, whose name they had tried not to copy, charted a few weeks later. Mr. Lee also inspired several answer records, most notably the instrumental Walking with Mr. Lee, by Lee Allen, which was a minor hit. in 1958, thanks largely to it being regularly featured on American Bandstand.

The song also came to the notice of their teacher, who seemed to have already known about the girl's song mocking him. He called a couple of the girls out of their class at school, and checked with them that they knew the song had been made into a record. He'd recognized it as the song the girls had sung about him, and he was concerned that perhaps someone had heard the girls singing their song and stolen it from them. They explained that the record was actually them, and he was, according to Rether Dixon,

ecstatic that the song had been made into a record, which suggests that whatever the girl's intention with the song, their teacher took it as an affectionate one. However, they didn't stay at that school long, after the record became a hit. The girls were sent off on package tours of the Chitlin Circuit, touring with other Atlantic artists like Clyde McFatter and Ruth Brown. And so they were pulled out of their normal school

and started attending the Professional School for Children, a school in New York that was also attended by Frankie Lyman and the teenagers and the Chantels, among others, which would allow them to do their work while on tour, and post it back to the school. On the tours, the girls were very much taken under the wing of the adult performers. Men like Sam Cooke, Clyde MacFatter and Jackie Wilson would take on somewhat paternal roles,

trying to ensure that nothing bad would happen to these little girls away from home, while women, like Ruth Brown and Laverne Baker, would teach them how to dress, how to behave on stage, and what makeup to wear. something they had been unable to learn from their male manager. Indeed, their manager, James Daly, had started as a tailor, and for a long time sewed the girl's dresses himself, which resulted in the group getting a reputation as the worst dressed group on the circuit, one of the reasons they eventually dumped him.

With Mr. Lee a massive success, Atlantic wanted the group to produce more of the same, catchy, upbeat, novelty numbers that they wrote themselves. The next single, Speedy, was very much in the Mr. Lee style, but was also a more generic song without Mr. Lee's exuberance. One interesting thing here is that, as well as touring the US, the Bobettes made several trips to the West Indies, where R&B was hugely popular. The Bobettes were, along with Gene and U.S.,

Eunice and Fats Domino, one of the US acts who made an outsized impression, particularly in Jamaica, and listening to the rhythms on their early records, you can clearly see the influence they would later have on reggae. We'll talk more about reggae and scar in future episodes, but to simplify hugely, the biggest influences on those genres as they were starting in the 50s were Calypso, the New Orleans R&B records made in Cosimo Matasas's studio and the R&B music Atlantic was putting out, and the Bobbett were a prime part of that influence. Mr. Lee, in particular, was later recorded by a number of Jamaican reggae artists, including Laurel Aitkin and the Harmonians. But while Mr. Lee was having a massive impact,

and the group was a huge live act, they were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the way their recording career was going. Atlantic was insisting that they keep writing songs in the style of Mr Lee, but they were so busy they were having to slap the songs together in a hurry, rather than spend time working on them, and they wanted to move on to making other kinds of records, especially since all the Mr. Lee sounder-likes weren't actually hitting the charts. They were also trying to expand by working with other artists. They would often act as the backing vocalists for other acts on the package shows they were on, and I've read in several sources that they performed uncredited backing vocals on some records for Clyde McFatter and Ivory Joe Hunter, although nobody

ever says which songs they sang on. I can't find an Ivory Joe Hunter song that fits the bill during the Bobbett's time on Atlantic. But I think you'll be there is a plausible candidate for a Clyde MacFatter song they could have sung on. It's one of the few records MacFatter made around this time with obviously female vocals on it. It was arranged and conducted by Ray Ellis, who did the same job on the Bobbett's records, and it was recorded only a few days after a Bobbette's session. I can't identify the voices on the record well enough to be convinced it's them, but it could well be. Eventually, after a couple of years of frustration at their being required to rework their one hit, they recorded a track which let us know how they

really felt. I think that expresses their feelings pretty well. They submitted that to Atlantic, who refused to release it and dropped the girls from their label. This started a period where they would sign with different labels for one or two singles, and would often cut the same song for different labels. One label they signed to in 1960 was Triple X Records, one of the many labels run by George Goldner, the associate of Morris Levy, we talked about in the episode on Why Did Fools Fall in Love,

who was known for having the musical taste of, a 14-year-old girl. There they started what would be a long-term working relationship with the songwriter and producer Teddy Van. Van is best known for writing love power for the sand pebbles. And for his later minor novelty hit, Santa Claus is a black band. But in 1960, what happened, Al Kim? What Akimmy? I can dig it. He was black.

Right on. But in 1960, he was just starting out, and he was enthusiastic about working with the Bobettes. One of the first things he did with them was to remake the song that Atlantic had rejected. I shot Mr. Lee. That became their biggest hit since the original Mr. Lee, reaching number 52, on the Billboard Hot 100 and prompting Atlantic to finally issue the original version of I Shot Mr. Lee to compete with it. There were a few follow-ups which also charted in the lower regions of the charts. Most of them like I Shot Mr. Lee answer records, though answers to other

people's records. They charted with a remake of Billy Ward and the Domino's have mercy baby with I don't like it like that an answer to Chris Kenner's I like it like that and finally with dance with me Georgie a reworking of the wallflower that referenced the then popular twist craze

The Bobbettes kept switching labels although usually working with Teddy Ran for several years with little chart success Helen Gathers decided to quit she stopped touring with the group in 1960, because she didn't like to travel, and while she continued to record with them for a little

while, eventually she left the group altogether, though they remained friendly. The remaining members continued as a quartet for the next 20 years. While the Bobettes didn't have much success on their own after 1961, they did score one big hit as the backing group for another singer, when in 1964 they reached number four in the charts, backing Johnny Thunder on Loop-de-Loop. The rest of the 60s saw them taking part in all sorts of side projects, none of them hugely commercially successful, but many of them interesting in their own right. Probably the oddest was a record released in 1964 to tie in with the film, Strangelove under the name Dr. Strangelove and the Fallouts.

Rether and Emma, the group's two strongest singers, also recorded one single as the Soul Angels, featuring another singer, Matty Levette. The Bobettes continued working together throughout the 70s, though they appear to have split up, at least for a time, around 9,000. But by 1977, they'd decided that 20 years on from Mr. Lee, their reputation from that song was holding them back, and so they attempted a comeback in a disco style under a new name, the sophisticated ladies. That got something of a cult following among disco lovers, but it didn't do anything commercially, and they reverted to the Bobette's name for their final single, Love Rhythm.

Tragedy struck. Janney Port was stabbed to death in the street in a random attack by a stranger in September 1980. She was just 34. The other group members struggled on as a trio. Throughout the 80s and 90s, the group continued performing, still with three original members, though their performances got fewer and fewer.

For much of that time, they still held out of the time. hope that they could revive their recording career and you see them talking in interviews from the 80s about how they were determined eventually to get a second gold record to go with Mr. Lee. They never did and they never recorded again, although they did eventually get a platinum record as Mr. Lee was used in the platinum selling soundtrack to the film Stand By Me. Laura Webb Childress died in 2001, at which point the two remaining members, the two lead singers of the group, got in a couple of other backing vocalists and carried on for another 13 years, playing on

bills with other 50s groups like the Flamingos, until Rether Dixon Turner died in 2014, leaving Emma Port patron as the only surviving member. Emma appears to have given up touring at that point and retired. The Bobbettes may have only had one major hit under their own name, but they made several very fine records, had a career that let them work together for the rest of their lives, and not only paved the way for every girl group to follow, but also managed to help inspire a whole new genre with the influence they had over reggae, not bad at all for a bunch of school girls singing a song to make fun of their teacher. 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. This week's is on Little Bitty Pretty One by Thurston Harris. Visit patreon.com.com slash Andrew Hickey. to sign up for as little as a dollar a month. This podcast is written, narrated and produced by me, Andrew Hickey. Visit 500Songs.com. That's 500 the numbers, songs.com, to read transcripts and liner notes, and get links to hear the full versions of songs accepted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing,

please do leave a review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts but more importantly tell just one person that you like this episode word of mouth more than any other form of promotion or reward is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves thank you very much for listening