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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Lee Konitz' First Recordings as Leader

Alto saxophonist Lee Konitz (1927-2020) was prominent in the jazz scene almost from the time he became a professional musician.

He first came to notice with the Claude Thornhill band in 1947, soon moving on to work with pianist Lennie Tristano. Miles Davis then hired him for the so-called "birth of the cool" sessions in 1949 and 1950.

By that time, Konitz had already recorded with Tristano, whose ideas were influential in the altoist's development. And he was in the process of making a few records for the New Jazz label under his own name, in June and September 1949.

This post brings together those four 1949 sides via a 1953 EP issued by Prestige records, New Jazz's successor. As a bonus, there's a January 1949 Lennie Tristano number featuring the saxophonist. I believe all five selections were written by Konitz.

Warne Marsh and Lee Koiitz

The Prestige EP features tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh, another legendary player who was in the Tristano orbit. Also on the sessions were pianist Sal Mosca, who feeds chords to the saxophonists and contributes a few good solos, bass player Arnold Fishkin and Denzil Best or Jeff Morton on drums.

Lennie Tristano

The Tristano school stressed harmonic and rhythmic complexity, and linear, sometimes intertwined solos. The Konitz sides show these characteristics well. All have a sinuous quality with the saxophonists seemingly of one mind about the music - although their tones are much different.

Some will find Konitz's vibratoless sound to be uningratiating. Marsh's tone is not as keening, with something of a Lester Young influence. The soloists play together mainly in the opening and out choruses.

The Tristano number - "Subconscious-Lee" - is from a similar sound world, but differs from the above in several respects. First, the pianist is far more active. Second, Marsh is absent; the additional solo line is taken by guitarist Billy Bauer, a much different musician. Finally, the piece greatly benefits from the propulsive drumming of Shelly Manne.

At the time some listeners considered Tristano and his followers to be emotionally distant and their music esoteric. Today, they seem exciting and still innovative. Their music was perhaps less popular than their skills and imagination warranted.

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Teddi King's 1954 Brunswick EP

The recent George Shearing Cool Canaries share on my other blog featured singer Teddi King during her 1952-54 tenure with the pianist.

Soon thereafter, King had an opportunity to record four songs for the Decca group of labels, issued first on Coral singles and then on this Brunswick EP.

They were the only records she made for Decca at the time, but she returned in 1959 for the LP All the King's Songs.

Teddi was a gifted singer who continued to grow as an artist throughout this period. This is demonstrated by her performances on this EP, where she elevates three little-known songs and one peerless standard.

The pleasing backings are by Dick Jacobs, who contributed to countless recordings in the 1950s.

Dick Jacobs

The EP starts off with "In the Year You've Been Gone," an affecting recital of loneliness by Larry Coleman, Don Wolf and Irvin Niles. Coleman had just come off three hits in 1953 - "Changing Partners" (Patti Page), "Ricochet" (Teresa Brewer) and "Tennessee Wig Walk" (Bonnie Lou). Teddi did not have similar success with "In the Year You've Been Gone," but it is nonetheless a good song.

"I'll Never Be the Same" is the only standard in the set. It's a superior number by Matty Malneck, Frank Signorelli and Gus Kahn. Dating from 1932, the song began life earlier as an instrumental called "Little Buttercup," before Kahn added the lyrics and Ruth Etting sang them.

Songwriter Wally Gold had not had any big hits before his "My Funny Little Lover," but he was to have much more luck later with "Because They're Young," "Good Luck Charm," "Half Heaven, Half Heartache" and "It's My Party," all quasi-rock tunes that are much different from the ballad that Teddi recorded,

"The Dragon" is a contrived concept by Gladys Shelley, a prolific composer whose best-known works range from 1940's "How Did He Look?" to 1958's "My, My, How the Time Goes By."

None of these authors had any reason to be upset with the meticulous performances on this record by King and the band. Teddi was a supreme professional.

The main blog will present a collection of her RCA Victor singles in the relatively near future.

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Snooky Lanson with Today's (Actually 1955's) Hits

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.

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."

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.

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.

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Helen Ward - 1934-40 SIngles

The vocalist Helen Ward became very popular in the 1930s, mostly because of her status as the singer for Benny Goodman's influential band. But she recorded before that association and after it, as well.

This post includes 11 of the songs she released in the 1934-40 period - a few with Benny, but mostly with others, including Teddy Wilson and Joe Sullivan. 

These items are a companion post to a set of Ward's 1950s records that is new on the main blog.

As far as I can tell, Helen did not record with a Goodman band until late 1934. Her first records in this set were done with an ARC/Brunswick studio band and were issued under the pseudonym of Ed Loyd and His Orchestra - although Ward herself was identified correctly. First is "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams," which Warren and Dubin wrote for the film Moulin Rouge. I don't believe the song was a hit until Tony Bennett made it one in 1950, but to me Ward is much more convincing than Tony. "Here is where you'll find me / Walking up and down. / But I left my soul behind me / In an old cathedral town" is clearly the lament of a streetwalker in Pigalle. Helen sounds appropriately bitter and jaded; not histrionic like Bennett.

"Let's Put Two and Two Together," with music and lyrics by Con Conrad, Sidney Mitchell and Archie Gottler, is a standard pop tune of the day. Here, Helen sounds less brittle than on "Bouleard of Broken Dreams," appropriately so. Also, "Ed Loyd" has found a Hawaiian guitarist for this one.

In November 1934, Helen had her first real success with one of the songs from Cole Porter's Anything Goes score - "You're the Top" backed by the racy "All Through the Night," where she is persuasive.  The label reads "The Broadway Bandits," but the band is supposedly led by Harry Rosenthal. I've no information on him - the only musician by that name I've come across is a songwriter. The group includes Benny Goodman and is similar to a Goodman aggregation that Ward would record with later that month. "All Through the Night," by the way, has a prominent accompaniment by a harpist who is unidentified but could well be Casper Reardon.

Helen Ward and Benny Goodman

The first of two Goodman sides in this collection are from January 1935 - the first recording of "The Dixieland Band" by Johnny Mercer and Bernie Hanighen. We've recently featured this song in Jack Jones' recording. Ward was skilled with this type of light material.

We move on to a February 1936 session led by Goodman's drummer Gene Krupa. The number is "I'm Gonna Clap My Hands" by Riley and Farley, a follow-up to the duo's big hit of the year before, "The Music Goes 'Round and 'Round." The band is a who's-who of jazz at the time - Roy Eldridge on trumpet, Goodman on clarinet, Chu Berry on tenor sax, Jess Stacy on piano, Allan Reuss on guitar, Israel Crosby on bass, and of course Krupa. This is a powerfully swinging record that shows off Helen's superior sense of rhythm. It features Eldridge and of course Benny.

The second number by the Goodman band is from June of the same year - a Jimmy Mundy arrangement of "There's a Small Hotel" from Rodgers and Hart's On Your Toes. Ward is good, but it's hard to sound romantic at such a fast tempo.

The next item comes from July 1937, by which time Ward had left Goodman to get married. This is with Larry Kent, of whom I know nothing. Whether a pseudonym or not, Kent recorded at least three singles for ARC at this time. Helen's only vocal was on the current tune "One Never Knows - Does One," written by Harry Revel and Mack Gordon for the film Stowaway. This studio band is by no means a swing outfit. Good performance, though.

Joe Sullivan

We skip ahead to 1940 and "I Cover the Waterfront" by Joe Sullivan and His Cafe Society Orchestra, which must have been named ironically because it was a Dixieland band. The song was a big hit for Johnny Green and Edward Heyman in 1933. It's a great song, here done justice by Ward and Sullivan's excellent ensemble. Benny Morton is the trombonist. His tone seemed to overload the microphone but I've done my best to minimize the distortion.

Helen is also heard on Sullivan's "I've Got a Crush on You," the Gershwin perennial. She is winning on this one - and was seldom in better voice - but this female version of the lyrics is clumsy. The first stanza doesn't rhyme, and then in one line she calls the man "handsome," and in the next says he's not attractive.

Teddy Wilson

We conclude with another famed pianist, Teddy Wilson, who made many records with vocalists, notably Billie Holiday. I'm not sure that Helen was all that attuned to Wilson, but "But Not for Me" goes well anyway, except for the interpolated "oh baby," which I doubt would have been approved by Lorenz Hart (or Richard Rodgers), and a minor misreading of the lyrics.

I wish I had more from this fine singer, but I have never collected Goodman records, and the pickings on Internet Archive have been impaired by the removal of many major-label 78s.

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A Few Early 78s of Ives and Ruggles

Charles Ives

New on my other blog are remastered versions of six early LP discs of Charles Ives' music, presented to mark the sesquicentennial of his birth. The composer had to wait until late in his life for interest in his work to take root, but by his death in 1954, the record companies had begun to take notice.

I am not sure which record of his music was made first, but it may well be the initial selection under consideration today - a 78 dating back to 1934 issued by the New Music Quarterly.

The conductor was Nicolas Slonimsky, best known these dates as a musicologist and writer. The composer possibly provided subvention for the disc.

Slonimsky conducted the Pan American Orchestra in Ives' "Barn Dance" and "In the Night," No. 3 of the composer's Set of Pieces (aka Set for Theater Orchestra).

Carl Ruggles

On the reverse side, Slonimsky coupled two works by another American iconoclast, Carl Ruggles - "Lilacs" from Men and Mountains, and the only vocal work ever written by the composer, "Toys," with a penetrating solo by Judith Litante.

Nicolas Slonimsky, Werner Janssen

Janssen's disc has been dated to 1949, and is a fill up to a 78 set of Henry F. Gilbert's Dance in the Place Congo (not included here). The conductor presents Ives' "The Housatonic at Stockbridge," one of the Three Places in New England. It was made with the Janssen Symphony, a group that Janssen conducted in Los Angeles in the 1940s.

LINK to early Ives and Ruggles on 78

Betty Johnson's RCA Victor Pop Recordings

The excellent pop/gospel singer Betty Johnson released three singles on RCA Victor in 1955, collected for this post.

This is a companion post to one on my other blog hat features her first pop recordings, made for Bell in 1954. 

Betty, born in 1929, was a member of the gospel group the Johnson Family Singers from the time she was 10.

The group had recorded extensively for Columbia before Betty set off on her career as a pop singer when she was 25.

After Bell (and Columbia), Victor engaged both Betty and the family group . The Family Singers made gospel records, and Betty herself joined the prestigious Victor pop roster.

The Johnsons recorded two LPs for RCA, both of which have appeared on my other blog: you can find Old Time Religion here and Sing Hymns with the Johnson Family Singers here. Both are newly remastered (and in one instance re-recorded).

Meanwhile, Betty was to release six pop songs on Victor as collected in this post. They are well worth hearing - Betty was very skillful - but none was a hit. The material just isn't strong enough, which was a problem for any artist moving to a major label with established stars. The big acts got the best songs.

Billboard February 19, 1955

RCA did a good job in promoting Betty's releases, starting with the ad above. The plug side was a Hal David waltz fantasia called "Seven Pretty Dreams," with music by Leon Carr. It's probably the best song she recorded, but it also is annoyingly repetitive, a la "The Twelve Days of Christmas."

The flip side, "Be a Lover," is a mild R&B effort by Cy Coben. Betty seems uncomfortable, and Hugo Winterhalter's cluttered arrangement is slow-moving and cumbersome.

"Beginner's Luck" is a pleasant number by the brother team of Earl and Alden Shuman. It was backed by "I'm a Sinner." Cash Box liked that one, praising Betty for her "tender, sincere delivery of a warm ballad." But the disc didn't stand out in a crowded market.

Billboard June 25, 1955

Betty's best performance (and Hugo's best chart) was probably for "Give Me Something I Can Dream About." She is on top of the lyrics, and Winterhalter's pizzicato arrangement doesn't get in her way. This is another Hal David-Leon Carr composition.

Her final entry was "That's Happiness," another good reading of a conventional lyric. This one was by the young Fred Ebb, working with Paul Klein. (This was before Ebb's famed partnership with John Kander.) Betty's performance is suitably impassioned, but the song was not successful. She or her manager must have liked Ebb's material - he and Klein wrote one of the songs she recorded for Bally ("I'll Wait") and her later novelty hit on Atlantic "The Little Blue Man." (That's the one where Ebb himself appeared as the little blue man, assuring Betty "I rov you ... to bits.")

A Pop Item from the Johnson Family Singers

The Johnson Family Singers seldom if ever recorded pop songs, although they did perform such material on the radio. One exception was the odd "Shifting Whispering Sands," a quasi-profound Western song by Vivian Clark Gilbert and his wife Mary Margaret Hadler. In brief (which the song is not) it is the tale of a prospector lost in the desert listening to the sound of the sands moving and thereby achieving zen knowledge of some kind. It incorporates every possible desert cliché; nevertheless it was a hit for Rusty Draper in 1955 and even more so for Ken Nordine and Billy Vaughn in 1962.

RCA had the Johnsons record the song its first time around, with Pa Jesse portraying the old prospector. The two-sided performance is a good one, even if Pa could have used another take on side 2. You'll enjoy it if you like this kind of nonsense.

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