Chart position: #1 R&B, #8 Pop
Category: Doo-wop
Writers: Jesse Belvin, Curtis Williams, Gaynel Hodge
Label and number: Dootone 348, Los Angeles
Flipside: "Hey, Senorita" (the A-side)
When and where recorded: September/ October 1954, in Los Angeles
When released: October 1954
Why important: "Earth Angel" 's success heralded a new era in which rhythm
and blues itself, instead of pale imitations by white artists, made noise on
a national scale. Soon the rock'n'roll revolution would sweep the country. It
was the first of many hits based on the so-called "Blue Moon" changes.
Influenced by: "Dream Girl" (#2 R&B,1953) by Jesse and Marvin, "I
Know" by the Hollywood Flames (1953), "I Went to Your Wedding" (written by Jesse
Mae Robinson, 1953 ), "Blue Moon" (written by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart,
1934)
Influenced: Shep and the Limelights' "Daddy's Home" (#2 Pop, 1961) and
dozens of other doo-wop recordings.
Important cover versions: The Crew-Cuts (#3 Pop), Gloria Mann (#18 Pop)
Important remakes: Johnny Tillotson (#57 Pop, 1960), the Cleftones (1962),
the Vogues (#42 Pop, 1969), New Edition (#21 Pop, 1986)
The story behind the record: "There are two types of hit record," said
Dootsie Williams, president of Dootone Records. "The most common is the promoted
hit, and if it's not promoted it's not a hit. The other is the natural hit.
It's a rarity, there's one maybe about once a year, and all it needs is a few
plays on the radio. It's a one in a lifetime thing. I only had one. It was called
'Earth Angel.' "
The story of "Earth Angel" and the teenage vocal group that made it a hit is emblematic of America's bizarre, freewheeling rock 'n' roll era. No fiction writer in his or her right mind could have dreamed it up.
Walter "Dootsie" Williams had been a professional trumpet player and bandleader since he graduated from a Watts high school in 1930. In 1953, when he was leading the house band at the Brown Sisters Harlem Club on 118th Street in Los Angeles, Dootsie noticed that the younger habitues favored the new vocal groups performing there. Since he already had a demo record label, Dootone, which he'd begun two years earlier, he began looking around for a group to record and found a foursome called the Medallions. Their first record, "Buick 59," became a big seller around Southern California.
And then in the fall of 1954 he found a quartet with that one-in-a-lifetime song. They called themselves the Penguins. The leader of the group was a handsome kid from Jefferson High School named Curtis Williams (no relation to Dootsie). Curtis had started his singing career with a neighborhood quintet called the Flamingos, which never recorded but from whose ranks would come several seminal vocal groups: when the Flamingos broke up, one member (Alex Hodge) formed the Platters, two others (Richard Berry and Cornelius Gunter) founded the Flairs, and Curtis Williams (along with Alex Hodge's brother Gaynel) joined the Hollywood Flames, a local aggregation that had been performing since 1949.
Curtis stayed only a few months with the Hollywood Flames, but in that time he and Gaynel Hodge perfected a ballad called "Earth Angel," which Hodge said they picked up from their mentor, Jesse Belvin. Certainly the song bears some resemblance to "Dream Girl," a 1952 hit that Belvin and Marvin Phillips had recorded as a duo for Specialty Records. The structure of the melody was very similar: "Dream girl, dream girl" evolved into "earth angel, earth angel," and the distinctive "why-oh" hook of the original became a background chant in "Earth Angel."
As Gaynel Hodge tells it, "Curtis and I had met in the Jefferson High choir in 1951. I was fourteen, Curtis was about sixteen. After Jesse started writing 'Earth Angel,' Curtis got interested in it and worked with him on it. After Jesse went into the army and Curtis and I went with the Hollywood Flames, we took the song with us and sang it for about a year. When we were with the group, a black lady we knew named Jessie Mae Robinson hired us to do a demo of one of her songs, 'I Went to Your Wedding.' We borrowed the bridge and put it into 'Earth Angel.'"
Mrs. Robinson had been writing blues hits since the 1940s for everyone from Dinah Washington and T-Bone Walker to Louis Jordan and Charles Brown. She would later write "Party" for Elvis Presley, though Wanda Jackson would be the one to make it a rockabilly hit. But in 1953 Jessie Mae Robinson's big song was "I Went to Your Wedding," which Damita Joe recorded with Steve Gibson's Red Caps. Mercury Records' current sensation, Patti Page, turned it into a major pop hit. But not before the two young singers, Hodge and Williams, purloined most of the bridge's melody and a lyric about "a vision of your loveliness" and made them a part of "Earth Angel."
If you're looking for a hint of an early "Earth Angel," listen to a 1953 Hollywood Flames recording for the tiny Lucky label called "I Know," featuring the creamy-voiced Gaynel Hodge on lead and Curtis Williams singing baritone. The song begins with the same Curtis Williams piano intro that later distinguished "Earth Angel." The chord progression is almost identical, and when the song reaches its bridge, Hodge hands over the vocals to the group's second tenor. Cleve Duncan would do the same thing on "Earth Angel" a year later when he passed the lead on the song's bridge to Dexter Tisby.
Both songs are structured on Rodgers and Hart's "Blue Moon"-beginning with what musicians call the 1chord, moving to the 6-minor, the 4-chord, the 5-chord and then back to the one. This progression is known as ice cream or "Blue Moon" changes. The simple songs built on this pattern could be sung on top of a recording of "Blue Moon," and the worst musicians could play along. "Earth Angel" was an amateur's dream: anybody could sing it. (That common chord structure now enables oldies groups to sing endless, seamless medleys of old doo-wop hits. Incidentally, "Blue Moon" 's original title was "The Bad in Every Man," which would have provided a rather awkward description for chord changes.)
Curtis Williams split from the Hollywood Flames and found his destiny with a young tenor from nearby Fremont High School named Cleveland "Cleve" Duncan. As Cleve recalled, "I was singing at a talent show at the California Club on Santa Barbara Avenue [now Martin Luther King Boulevard], and Curtis came up afterward and wanted to know if I'd form a group with him. So he got [baritone] Bruce Tate from his school and I got [second tenor] Dexter Tisby from mine, and we learned a couple of songs and got on some talent shows. Curtis already had 'Earth Angel' but we worked on it some and changed it around to fit my style."
They named themselves the Penguins after the cartoon logo of Kool cigarettes, one of the early mentholated brands. "One of the fellows," said Duncan, "happened to be smoking a pack of Kools and we got to kidding each other about the picture of Willie the Penguin on it. We wanted to be cool." And what was cooler than an Arctic bird? There was also the tradition of ornithological names: the Ravens, Orioles, Robins, Cardinals, Larks and Crows had already set the standard for '50s black vocal groups.
Both Cleve Duncan and Dootsie Williams agreed that the man who brought them together was Ted Brinson, a relative of Duncan's. Brinson was working as a mailman at the time, but in the big band era he had played bass for Jimmie Lunceford and Andy Kirk's outfits, and more recently he'd built a studio in the garage attached to the rear of his house at 2190 West 30th Street, just off Arlington. That's where, on Brinson's single-track Ampex tape recorder, Jessie Mae Robinson recorded all her demos and Dootsie recorded his Dootone artists.
He first brought the Penguins into Brinson's studio to back up a blues singer named Willie Headen, but during the session he had them record a song called "No There Ain't No News Today." What piqued his interest in the quartet, however, was an original Curtis Williams song called "Hey, Senorita," which had started life as "Ese Chiquita." Since Dootsie had been involved for several years with the music publishing business, having a group that could create its own songs appealed to his capitalist instincts.
As Dootsie recalled, "The Penguins were pop-oriented, and my distributors told me they wanted blues with a beat and that the Penguins just didn't have it. Well, the distributors were the ones who made the deals and called the shots in those days, so I listened to them. When we went into Ted's studio we concentrated on 'Hey, Senorita' and put a beat behind it. I had some people in, clapping along, to give it that beat. We threw in 'Earth Angel' afterward just to have a second number."
The session was supposed to be for demonstration only. "We had a drummer whose name I can't remember [Duncan claims that Preston Epps sat in on bongos on 'Hey, Senorita'], Curtis played piano, and Ted would turn on his recorder and then pick up his bass. He played in that steady, fundamental style from the big bands. We muffled the drums with pillows because we didn't want the lower register to drown out the voices. Every time the dog barked next door I'd have to go out and shut him up and then we'd do another take. I was planning to put an electric guitar and a saxophone on the song later on, but first I wanted to get the recordings down and go talk to John Dolphin and get his opinion on them."
John Dolphin's opinion meant a lot in 1954 Los Angeles. His all-night record store, Dolphin's of Hollywood, at the corner of Vernon and Central, was the hub of the city's R&B activity. KRKD radio shows emanating from the front window of his store created many local hits, as well as early-morning traffic jams along Vernon. So Dootsie stopped by Dolphin's with a lacquer acetate (a test pressing) from his Penguins session. Dolphin wanted the disk jockey on duty in the window, a white kid named Dick "Huggy Boy" Hugg, to give it a spin. "I tried to tell him it wasn't complete," said Dootsie, "but he insisted that Huggy play it over the air. Huggy played both sides, then I took it on home. Next day Huggy called me up and said everybody was calling in asking for 'Earth Angel.'"
Despite the spare instrumentation and the unfinished, homemade quality of the recordings, Dootsie Williams hurriedly released them "as is" in October 1954 on his Dootone label. "Hey, Senorita" got the early play, but before long the jocks flipped it over. In December the simple, unsophisticated love ballad entered Billboard's R &B chart. On January 19,1955, it reached number one and stayed there for three weeks, until Johnny Ace's posthumous "Pledging My Love" dislodged it.
In the natural order of those days, a major company would have covered the song with a popular white artist and buried the original before it had a chance to cross over to the pop charts. In fact, Mercury Records did cover the Penguins record with the Crew-Cuts, whose version climbed to number three nationally. But instead of fading away, the Penguins' "Earth Angel" went toe-to-toe with the Crew-Cuts' recording and followed it into the Top Ten (to number eight). "It seems that every time the radio played their version, ours would go a little bit higher," said Cleve Duncan.
The reason for this sudden change in the fortunes of a black record was that, for the first time, independent distributors were having an influence on the pop market. Thanks to new but hefty-sized independent labels like Essex, Epic and Dot, which peddled mostly white but some black music, local distribution companies like Sid Talmadge's Record Merchandising got entry to larger record stores, pop radio stations and pop jukeboxes. Talmadge had enough pull around Los Angeles to get "Earth Angel" outside of the black market. Then, once the recording had demonstrated its effect on the West Coast market, other indie distributors were anxious to make deals with Talmadge. Slowly, following the same pattern as the Crows' "Gee," the single made its way from west to east, from one indie distribution territory to another, till Alan Freed got hold of it and made "Earth Angel" a New York hit. On May 21, 1955, when Dootsie received his gold record for "Earth Angel" at the popular 5-4 Ballroom, he made sure that Sid Talmadge also got one.
The Penguins themselves wouldn't share the spoils, however. They recorded four more excellent sides, and for a time it looked like their infectious follow-up, "Ookey Ook," might catch on. But the members of the group got into a squabble over royalties with Dootsie Williams ("We had a hit record and we couldn't get any advance royalties from the company, not even $50," said Duncan) and therefore allowed themselves to be pawns in the machinations of a Chicago-born songwriter-manager named Samuel "Buck" Ram. It didn't take much for this influential white hustler (he had produced Charlie Parker's first Savoy Records session) to convince the black teenagers that he could do much more for them than Dootsie Williams. And at first it looked as if their switch from Williams to Ram would pay off. They got signed to the Crew-Cuts' label, Mercury Records. As Cleve Duncan recalled, "After he took over, we branched out, toured back east, played the Apollo and the Brooklyn Paramount with Alan Freed, and sang on the 'Ed Sullivan Show.' " But lurking behind their initial flush of success lay disaster.
Before his death on New Year's Day, 1991, Ram admitted to a British magazine, Now Dig This, that he used the Penguins to further the career of another group he managed called the Platters. "Mercury [Records] wanted only the Penguins," he said. "But I took both groups to the recording session." The Penguins rerecorded "Earth Angel," "Hey, Senorita" and "Ookey Ook" at the February 1955 session, all of which remained unreleased for many years. The Platters recorded one of Ram's songs, "Only You."
"We had to do what [Ram] wanted us to do," Duncan said. "Our sound was still there, but they wanted us to project it a different way. We lost control over production. At Dootone it was a group effort. We'd come in with a song or idea, present it to Dootsie, and sometimes he'd add to it. But Ram called all the shots at Mercury, and it seemed like everything he wrote for us sounded like 'Earth Angel.' He saved his best stuff for the Platters."
Duncan claims Ram lost interest in the Penguins when he couldn't take control of their name. "He put together this film called Rock All Night with the Platters and offered us a part in return for signing over the Penguins name to him, but I didn't go along with that." Ram was also focusing on the Platters because they had a soaring lead tenor (Tony Williams) and a sophisticated sound. One of the first groups he had written a song for back in the early '40s was the Ink Spots, whose smooth pop harmonies he clearly understood. The Platters, in effect, became a '50s version of the Ink Spots. They were also very much Buck Ram's creation: even at the height of Plattersmania, the five members of the group received a rather low salary, while Ram became a multimillionaire.
Despite recording some good material for Mercury, the Penguins had no more hits. They also lost all rights to their first recording of "Earth Angel." According to Dootsie Williams, "When they went to Mercury, I told them that by the terms of their contract they would lose their royalties. They said, 'To hell with your royalties, we're gonna make it big.' " Curtis Williams resold "Earth Angel" to a large publishing firm, Peer International. Dootsie sued for $750,000 and got back all rights to the song when a Los Angeles Superior Court judge determined that Jesse Belvin and Gaynel Hodge had written most of the song.
In 1956 the Penguins left Mercury and sojourned briefly with Atlantic Records in New York. When they returned to California, they were demoralized and in debt. Bruce Tate, who in Dootsie's words was "kind of slow," was no longer with the group; he had killed a woman in a hit-and-run accident on Central Avenue on Thanksgiving Eve, 1955, and been arrested for manslaughter. Randy Jones had stepped in to replace him. The other three were simply wearied by it all. As Dootsie remembered, "Dexter's credit card was $1500 in the hole and Standard Oil had attached his car. Cleve was in hock and he needed an operation on his throat. Curtis was being sued [by his wife] for non-support and they were going to put him in jail. So they asked if I'd clean up their debts and obligations. Well, they had made me a lot of money so I advanced them enough to get them out of hock, but in exchange I made them sign away any claims on future royalties [on their early Dootone recordings]."
Starting from scratch, the Penguins were again recording for Dootsie Williams. Their sound was considerably different now, in 1957. For one, Curtis Williams was gone, replaced by Teddy Harper. "Curtis wasn't welcome back [to Dootone]," said Dootsie, who blamed the Penguins' defection to Mercury on him. Also, Curtis had fled the state to avoid being jailed. But in retrospect, Dootsie realized that the group missed his contributions as pianist, songwriter and sparkplug. "Curtis lacked the usual restraints that most people have, but he was the real talent behind the Penguins."
The Penguins and Dootsie Williams soon parted company for the last time. Dexter Tisby eventually moved to Hawaii and became a businessman. Curtis Williams and Bruce Tate died. Dootsie Williams abandoned rock 'n' roll and became a millionaire producing Redd Foxx party albums. He died in the late summer of 1991.
But Cleve Duncan remained a Penguin. In 1963 he reformed the group with two new vocalists and returned to the charts that year with "Memories of El Monte," a song written and produced by Frank Zappa, which paid homage to several mid-'50s doo-wop songs, including "Earth Angel." The Penguins' act today is hokey, designed for an undemanding "oldies" audience, but when Cleve sings "Earth Angel," he still sounds very much like the 1954 record, and all those years just fall away.