A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - PLEDGE WEEK: “The Name Game” by Shirley Ellis

Episode Date: July 12, 2022

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2022. Every day this week, I’ll be posting old Patreon bonus episodes of the podcast which will have this short intro. These are short, ten- to twenty-minute bonus podcasts which get posted to Patreon for my paying backers every time I post a new main episode — there are well over a hundred of these in the archive now. If you like the sound of these episodes, then go to patreon.com/andrewhickey and subscribe for as little as a dollar a month or ten dollars a year to get access to all those bonus episodes, plus new ones as they appear. Click below for the transcript (more…)

Hello, this episode is part of Pledge Week 2022. Every day this week, I'll be posting old Patreon bonus episodes of the podcast, which will have this short intro. These are short 10 to 20 minute bonus podcasts, which get posted to Patreon for my paying backers every time I post a new main episode. There are well over 100 of these in the archive now. If you like the sound of these episodes, then go to patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey and subscribe for us. little as a dollar a month or ten dollars a year to get access to all those bonus episodes plus new ones as they appear today we're going to take a look at someone who had two big hits one of which has entered into american pop culture to a ludicrous extent long before i ever heard the

song i was familiar with references to it in everything from the simpsons to stephen king books and the other of which is known all over the world but about whom there's almost known available information outside the liner notes to one CD. We're going to look at Shirley Ellis and at the name game. Shirley Shirley, Shirley, well burly, Shirley, I say now let's play it, I bet you I could make a... When I say there's almost no available information about Shirley Ellis, I mean it. Normally, with someone who had a couple of major hits in the mid-60s, there's at least a couple of fan pages out there, but other than a more perfunctory than usual page on Spectropop, there's basically nothing about Shirley Ellis, possibly because unlike most of her contemporaries, even though she lived until

2005, she never hit the nostalgia circuit. The information that is out there is contradictory as well. Some sources have her being born in 1941, while others place her birth much further back in 1929. I suspect the latter date is more accurate, and that she trimmed a few years off her age when she became a star. Pretty much all the information I'm using here comes from the liner notes of the one CD currently imprint from a legitimate source of Ellis's work. And that CD also has a problem

which will affect this episode. Ellis released two albums, Inaction and The Name Game, which had nine tracks in common. On Inaction, they were overdugged with crowd noises, more or less at random, to make them sound like they were live recordings,

while the name game had the unadorned studio recordings. Unfortunately, the CDM using, for some unfathomable reason, chose to use the fake live versions, and so that's what I've been forced to excerpt. Ellis grew up in the Bronx, in her family with roots in the West Indies, and started out as many young singers did, winning the talent contest at the Harlem Apollo. But her initial success came as a songwriter,

when she wrote a couple of songs for the Shabooms, the group who had formerly been known as the chords, before legal problems led them to rename themselves after their biggest hit. She's pretty wild, a pretty wild young girl, she's pretty wild, young girl, she's my little twisting twirls, she's a pretty wild young girl. She's my divine, too, too divine, she's my kind, I intend to make her mind, who she's my divine. She also wrote

All About the way She breaks young boys She also wrote One Two I Love You for the Heartbreakers Which pointed the way to the kind of novelty song based around counting and clapping rhymes With which she would have her biggest hits One two, I love you

You know I really do three Lord Don't close the door to your heart I'm gonna fix the whole And I wrote Seven, eight Let's get But while she'd had these minor successes as a songwriter,

it wasn't until she teamed up with a more successful writer that she started to make the records for which she was remembered. Ellis was introduced by her husband's cousin to Lincoln Chase, who became her manager, record producer and writing partner. Chase had already written a number of hits on his own, including Such a Night for Clyde McFatter in The Drifters. Which is a night Which had also been a hit for Johnny

And for Jim Dandy For Laverne Baker As well as songs for Big May Bell, Ruth Brown and others Chase and Ellis spent a couple of years releasing unsuccessful singles under Ellis's full married name Shirley Elliston before releasing the real nitty-gritty.

Both song and artists soon had their name shortened and The Nitty Gritty by Shirley Ellis went to number eight on the pop charts. A couple of follow-ups starting with That's What the Nitty Gritty is were unsuccessful and then Shirley got very

unlucky. She recorded a version of of Chasers such a night, which had been a hit twice before. That started rising up the charts, and then RCA released Elvis's recording from four years earlier, which had just been an album track, as a single, and that went top 20, and stopped Ellis's single getting any traction. But Ellis came back with the name game, which she could, co-wrote with Chase based on a game she used to play as a child. That made number three on the chart and became an ongoing reference point for a whole generation of Americans.

The follow-up, credited to Chase alone, was based on another children's game and made the US top 10, and also made the top 10 in the UK. For a while in early 1965, Ellis was a big star, big enough that her songs were getting novelty cover versions by people like Soupy Sales. Pooh-foo-foo-Panah,

Foo-Pee-Fi-Fi-Fi-Fi-Fi-Fi-Fo-Moopee, Suppy. Mousy, Mousy, Mousy, Mousy, Banana-Fo-Pau-Bousy Fousy Fousy P-5-Mousey, Mousy. Come on everybody. I say, now let's see, now let's see, But unfortunately, her next couple of singles flopped, and people seemed to want only one kind of record from Shirley Ellis.

She and Chase came up with some unsuccessful experiments, like You Better Be Good World, an attempt at getting on the protest song bandwagon by singing about nuclear war, while also recording a Christmas song. The two didn't really mix. After that, more attempts at songs along the lines of her hits followed, like The Puzzle Song, and Ever See a Diver Kisses Wife while the Bubbles Bounce About Above the Water. But there were no more hits, and Ellis retired in 1968. Chase went on to record a solo album under his own name, which has sadly never been reissued on CD,

but I found a vinyl rip on a dodgy MP3 site a while back, and it's fascinating stuff, somewhere between Frank Zappa and George Clinton at points, and quite politically pointed. Chase would die in the early 80s, but he and Ellis would go on to get credit for a hit song written almost 20 years after his death. In 1981, the disco artist Stacey Latislaw

would record Attack of the Name game, which was inspire Bay Alice's hit, and so Chase and Ellis got co-writing credit for it. That wasn't a hit, but in 1999 Mariah Carey and Jay-Z built the number one hit Heartbreaker around a sample of that record

meaning that Ellis and Chase got credit for that too. That's not the only influence Ellis had in more recent times. Several people have pointed out the similarity and style between some of Amy Winehouse's records like Rehab and Alice's big hits.

Shirley Ellis, unlike many of her contemporaries, never came out of retirement and she died in 2005, probably aged 76.