The Honey Dreamers with Hits (?) from 1956

The Honey Dreamers vocal group has appeared on this blog and the main blog several times. In today's installment, the RCA Camden folks have them perform four of Today's Hits. "Today" in this case is defined as 1956.

Camden put out any number of such low-price records - both as EPs, as here, and in the LP format. The idea was to combat the budget labels that were cranking out cover records day and night. On this blog, we recently heard from Camden's Snooky Lanson; there also were older entries by Bob Carroll and Gisele MacKenzie. The main blog has played host to Stuart Foster and various artists.

On today's EP, the Honey Dreamers take on two songs that really were hits and two that were better defined as aspirants.

The biggest chart success was surely "Why Do Fools Fall in Love," an infectious number that brought young Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers to prominence. One of the female voices in the Honey Dreamers takes over from high-voiced Lymon for this one, and isn't terribly convincing. The harmonies, the Earl Sheldon band and the recording are fine, however.

Incidentally, the label credits the composition to Lyman and label honcho George Goldner, but the song seems to have been mostly written by another Teenager, Herman Santiago.

There were several iterations of the Honey Dreamers - this is the group shown on the label above

"Rock Island Line" is another song with a murky past. It may have had a folk origin, but first came to wider notice after folklorist John Lomax recorded a prison group singing it in 1934. Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly) adapted the number and recorded it several times. Finally, over in England Lonnie Donegan modelled his version on Leadbelly's - himself adapting the lyrics - and it became a massive hit there in 1955-56. Bobby Darin and Don Cornell, among others, then recorded it in the US. The Honey Dreamers' version is surprisingly good.

"Molly-O" is another oddity. This folk-like song comes from Elmer Bernstein's music for the 1955 film The Man with the Golden Arm. That score is mostly in what is now called the "crime jazz" style - and it's a great achievement. The record credits "Molly-O" to Bernstein and lyricist Sylvia Fine. As far as I know, the most popular version of this song was called "Main Title and Molly-O" by Coral's Dick Jacobs, whose arrangement incongruously plopped Molly in the middle of Bernstein's extraordinarily tense main theme for the film. (You can hear Jacobs' version here.) The Honey Dreamers focus only on "Molly-O" in their version.

Finally, we have "The Campus Rock," which was a new item for me. It was a song by Glen Moore and Buddy Dufault that the Philadelphia group the Tyrones put out on the Wing label. I don't think it was a big hit, but maybe it was popular regionally - and Camden, NJ is just across the Delaware River from Philly. The Honey Dreamers do the number quite well.

If the trade papers of the time are to be believed, the Camden label and the group hoped that their version would be a hit in its own right. And it was indeed issued on a single along with its EP appearance.

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