I had a request for this particular EP from musicman1979, who likes to hear the hits not by the original artists but by stand-ins as recorded for dime-store labels.
In this case, we have Snooky Lanson as the budget-label baritone. I'm sure no one younger than me would have any knowledge of him.
Snooky was a featured performer on the Your Hit Parade television show, sharing the airwaves with such as Gisele MacKenzie, who herself came out with one of these "Today's Hits" packages in 1955.
As a show, Your Hit Parade worked well enough in the 1940s on radio, when the likes of Frank Sinatra were intoning the romantic songs then in vogue.
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| Snooky Lanson |
But by the mid-50s, R&B and its pale cousin rock 'n' roll were taking over. So you had the specter of a crooner like Lanson taking on songs that had originated with the Penguins ("Earth Angel"), the Moonglows ("Sincerely") and LaVern Baker ("Tweedlee Dee"). Not that Snooky does them poorly - as Billboard opined in its review, "Lanson sings the current material with engaging charm, backed in listenable fashion by the Johnny Guarnieri ork."
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| The Penguins - The Crew-Cuts |
Actually, many of not most of the buyers of Camden's 79 cent package would be more familiar with the cover versions of these songs by the Crew-Cuts, the McGuire Sisters and Georgia Gibbs. respectively, so Snooky would not have been that far off the mark for them.
Both Guarnieri and Lanson had big band backgrounds. Johnny was pianist for Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw at times, and Snooky was a Ray Noble vocalist. The latter's strength, other than his charm, was his legato, hardly an asset with R&B material. His weakness was intonation, which did not matter so much with these selections.
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| Johnny Guarnieri |
The final number - "Unsuspecting Heart" - was more in Snooky's comfort zone. The ballad had moderate success as a vehicle for the then-popular Sunny Gale and Terri Stevens. Camden's parent, RCA Victor, may have had a stake in the song itself - Gale was one of its artists. The song in any case was not a huge hit on the scale of the other three selections.
This blog has been in slumber mode for a few months, but I thought I might revive it to feature some of my collection of EPs, starting with Snooky.
