Chart position: #2 R&B, #5 Pop
Category: Doo-wop
Writers: Keyes, Feaster, McRae, Edwards
Label and number: Cat 104, New York
Flipside: "Cross Over the Bridge" (the A-side) and, later, "Little Maiden"
When and where recorded: March 15, 1954, in New York City
When released: Late April 1954
Why Important: It was one of the first "doo-wop" or nonsense lyric hits,
and the first independent-label single to go Top-10 pop in the 1950s and focus
serious industry attention on the growing R&B market.
Influenced by: "Gently Down the Stream" (traditional), "Oh Baby Mine
(I Get So
Lonely)" by the Four Knights (#2 Pop, 1954), "You Could Be My Love" by the Five
Crowns (1953)
Influenced: A dozen nonsense doo-wop songs, "Life Is But a Dream" by
the Harptones (1956)
Important cover versions: The Crew-Cuts (#1 Pop), a satire by Stan Freberg
(#14 Pop), the Billy Williams Quartet (#21 Pop), Leon McAuliffe
The story behind the record: The tale of "Sh-Boom" is an odd saga with
a few odd turns. It begins with an independent label trying to turn a Mercury
Records pop hit into black gold by covering Mercury's popular white songstress
with an R&B group, without much success. Then disk jockeys turn the black
record over and make the B-side a hit. Then Mercury Records doubles back on
the group by covering their B-side and almost pushing their little hit aside.
And then, in a weird turn of events, the black original comes out a winner in
the end.
In 1954 who would have guessed that New York City was about to become the world trade center of doo-wop music? To be sure, there was the random uptown vocal group hit like "Gee" by the Crows, early releases by the Five Willows and the various black group records produced up in Harlem by Bobby Robinson like "I" by the Velvets and "Dear One" by the Scarlets (later known as the Five Satins of "In the Still of the Nite" fame). There were the inevitable neighborhood vocal groups practicing hits by the Drifters, the Clovers and the Ravens, but there was yet to develop the burgeoning Brill Building doo-wop factory that would spit out dozens of disks by groups like Dion and the Belmonts or Little Anthony and the Imperials. Producer George Goldner had already established his independent Rama Records, but most of the hundreds of vocal group labels (including Goldner's Gee, Gone and End) were a ways off.
One of the first of these group labels, Cat Records-a "cat" in black jazz slang was a musician, a hip guy-was started by Atlantic Records in April 1954, in order "to cash in on the tremendous expansion of R&B," as one executive told Billboard. Cat tossed four very different records on the market simultaneously: number 101 was a "blues-mambo" orchestra, 102 was "Little" Sylvia Vander. pool (later of Mickey and Sylvia), 103 was R&B crooner Jimmy Lewis and 104 was "a blues quartet" (sic), the Chords.
In a July 3,1954, editorial in Cash Box, Atlantic heads Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun talked about the new
"cat music" that was catching on. "The Southern bobbysoxers [the first white teenagers to pick up on R&B
in a big way] began to call the R &B records that move them 'cat' music . . . Not all R&B qualifies as cat
music. It has to kick, it has to move, and it has to have a message for the sharp youngsters who dig."
As it turned out, the ultimate cat group with the ultimate cat song was the Chords, and their record would be Cat's only hit. But what a hit!
The Chords formed as the Tunetoppers at Morris High School in the Bronx neighborhood of Morrisiana, rehearsing either in one of the school's music rooms or standing around a piano at the home of a local prodigy, Rupert Branker, at his home on Tinton Avenue, near 166th Street. Branker would remain with the group as an informal musical director. The singers were lead tenor Carl Feaster, tenors Jimmy Keyes and Floyd "Buddy" McRae, baritone Claude Feaster and bass singer William "Ricky" Edwards-the Ricky being a nod to the Ravens' popular bass man Jimmy Ricks.
The group showed up one day at Atlantic's office at 234 West 56th Street and auditioned their jaunty song, punctuated with all sorts of wonderful nonsense. "Sh-Boom" was cat music all right, but something had to be done with the Tunetoppers' name, which sounded a mite square even then. Cat music implied jazz, not pop, influences. They were duly named the Chords, though Jerry Wexler, who produced their sessions, doesn't recall whether the group or Atlantic came up with the new moniker.
Atlantic's veteran black A&R man, Jesse Stone, rehearsed them relentlessly to give them the same tight sound that other company groups, such as the Clovers and the Drifters, took into the studio. Still, when the Chords finally recorded their four-song session in late April, they required twenty-two takes of "Sh-Boom" before they got it right.
The song had a couple of influences. Earlier that year a black pop group on Capitol Records called the Four Knights had registered a major shaker with a peppy novelty called "Oh Baby Mine (I Get So Lonely). " Written by a Pennsylvania country singer named Pat Ballard, "Oh Baby Mine" was a very curious record. The Four Knights sounded white, and the style of "Oh Baby Mine" was very close to barbershop quartet music (the song was based on the nineteenth-century tune, "Gently Down the Stream")-except for the bass voice of Oscar Broadway, who delivered the hook, "Oh baby mine." Though the Four Knights are never credited in doo-wop history, Broadway's booming catch-phrase caught the ear of every young black group on the street corner, and even today it sounds jarringly '50s in what was essentially a '40s-style recording. The Tunetoppers had based their own ditty, "Sh-Boom," on the chord structure and some of the melody of "Oh Baby Mine," and even expropriated part of the last line of the refrain: "Life could be so fair," turning it into "Life could be a dream, sweetheart." "Sh-Boom" also had roots in the obscure "You Could Be My Love" by another New York City group, the Five Crowns (later to become the Drifters of "There Goes My Baby" fame in 1959). "Sh-Boom" could easily have been called "Life Could Be a Dream," the lead lyric, but those in charge of Cat titles settled for the catchier title.
According to Chords member and cowriter (everyone in the group got a piece of the song) Jimmy Keyes: "Around New York, the slang word was `boom, dig, boom, dig man, did you see that beautiful girl?' We kicked around 'Sh-Boom' close to a year, writing it and singing it for close to a year before we recorded it. We argued about it and tossed it around. Because of the excitement and the fear of this [hydrogen] bomb, it affected everyone. We'd be walkin' down the street, we hung out in the swimming pools a lot, Carl [Feaster] bugged me about this idea, 'Life could be a dream, man, we've got to do something about this.' Carl was a hippy dippy, bebop guy. He had that groove that helped to inspire that kind of lyric, `hello hello again,' maybe I'd say 'here's hopin' we'd meet again,' we'd come up with `boom boom,' these different fillers. We were a cappella, never rehearsed with instruments."
"Life could be a dream, life could be a dream, do-do-do-do sh-boom, life could be a dream (sh-boom), if I could take you up to paradise up above (sh-boom) . . . " In keeping with vocal group tradition, the bass man comes in with the chorus that skips the nonsense and gets to the nitty gritty: "Every time I look at you, something is on my mind, if you do what I want you to, baby we'll be so fine."
What sells "Sh-Boom" as much as the joyful vocals and silly lyrics is the extraordinary, sixteen-bar tenor sax solo by Sam "the Man" Taylor, which builds to a crest in the first two bars and soars all the way to the end. Sixteen bars of improvisation was a privilege for a musician-the standard solo was eight bars-which suggests that Jesse Stone or Jerry Wexler thought the song needed a little more punch to round it out. Taylor, a native of Lexington, Tennessee, where he was born in 1916, was an alumnus of Lucky Millinder's and Cab Calloway's bands and one of New York's premier session saxophonists.
According to Wexler, Atlantic recorded "Sh-Boom" only because they needed four songs for the Chords' first session. "We thought it was just ineffable nonsense akin to 'Three Little Fishes.' We had no idea it would be a seminal record. We were more interested in recording 'Cross Over the Bridge.' "
"Cross Over the Bridge" was a cover of Patti Page's corny pop hit on Mercury Records. "We weren't trying to make a serious attack on Mercury's record," Wexler laughed. "It was simply the custom in those days for R&B companies to cover pop hits to catch the overflow." So Cat assigned "Cross Over the Bridge" to the Aside of the record and slapped "Sh-Boom" on the back. But when they sent the Chords' record to disk jockeys, someone flipped it over and discovered that the word-jazz harmony shuffle was the side to go with. By late May "Sh-Boom" was clicking in several major cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Cleveland.
In his book The Rockin '50s, the late Arnold Shaw gave some insight into how the business of covering records and nailing down publishing copyrights worked in the late spring of 1954. Shaw at the time plugged songs for the major publishing firm of Hill and Range Songs. He discovered from a West Coast source that "Sh-Boom" had become the surprise number one hit on the Los Angeles R&B regional chart. Sensing that boom times were on the way, he made a deal with Atlantic's publishing company to buy half of "Sh-Boom" 's copyright for a $6,000 advance. Atlantic was happy to make the deal because it could use the extra $6,000, and besides, having a big publisher like Hill and Range pushing a song could make the remaining half interest very lucrative. But when Shaw tried to convince his boss, Jean Aberbach, to buy fifty percent of "Sh-Boom," he balked. It was too much money for an unknown black song.
By chance, Aberbach learned two days later that Mercury Records in Chicago had secretly recorded "ShBoom" with one of its white cover groups, a Canadian quartet from the Toronto Cathedral Choir School called the Crew-Cuts. He gave Shaw the word to buy the fifty percent of "Sh-Boom" as soon as possible. "Had the Atlantic people waited little more than a week," Shaw wrote, "they would have had no reason to part with half of the income, as they did."
In July of 1954 the Chords' recording shot well into the Top Ten, prompting Snooky Lansen and Dorothy Collins to give "Sh-Boom" a bland, sugary treatment on the weekly TV show "Your Hit Parade." However, the pop version by the Crew-Cuts surpassed the Chords' and boomed from the very top of the charts. "Once they got going," said Jerry Wexler, "they killed us everywhere except in Southern California." Listening to both versions of "Sh-Boom" today, it's easy to spot the phony: besides being much, much squarer, the Crew-Cuts' cover version features a bass drum going boing between choruses of "sh-boom, sh-boom." The Chords were too cool for that.
Now here comes the twist: the Crew-Cuts' mega-hit was released on Mercury, the same label the Chords had covered with "Cross Over the Bridge." The moment that Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun realized that "Sh-Boom" was the hot side, they dropped "Cross Over the Bridge" off the flip and replaced it with another Chords-written track, "Little Maiden," whose publishing Atlantic owned. After all, the publisher of a song on the B-side earned just as much royalty as whoever owned the A-side, so why pay somebody else? A June item in Billboard said Cat "promised to hold `Cross Over the Bridge' for future release, since the company still has faith that the song will be a hit," but they never got around to it.
"Sh-Boom" immediately came under attack from funnyman Stan Freberg, who had taken leave of his sense of humor. He recorded a parody of "Sh-Boom" in which the producer has his hands full trying to make the song as unintelligible as possible. "Hey, I can still understand you!" he admonishes one singer. The satire was funny until Freberg guested on Peter Potter's CBS-TV show, "Juke Box Jury." "I hope this [record] puts an end to rhythm and blues," Freberg told the national audience when he played it. Soon afterward, Potter, lamenting the poor taste of 1954 music, complained in print: "Is it possible that twenty years hence the record companies will be reissuing such songs as 'Sh-Boom'?"
The Chords' follow-up record, "Zippity Zum," carried on the nonsense of "Sh-Boom," but without the pizzazz or the oomph. Despite the quintet's appearances on several national TV shows, "Zippity Zum" was a zip that failed to zoom.
In late 1954 a preexisting black Chords group that had at least one earlier release (but no hits) on the obscure Gem label, challenged the "Sh-Boom" group's right to use that name. Cat relented, releasing the next couple of records under the unfortunate name the Chordcats, then changing their name again in 1955 to the Sh-Booms in order to maintain their connection with the hit record. In 1958 the group recorded "Blue Moon" as by the Sh-Booms, three years before the Marcels' eccentric doo-wop hit of the song. But eventually, like other R&B vocal groups before them, the Chords had to give up their car- a blue Chrysler limo with their logo painted on the side-and walk back into the anonymity of the ghetto. "They were destined for self-destruction," said Wexler. "They had no discipline, they weren't a centered group. They messed up all over, tore up hotel rooms. When they went out on tour, all we got back were disaster stories." At last report, Jimmy Keyes was the only member still living.
Atlantic Records folded the Cat label after twenty releases and replaced it with another subsidiary, Arco, whose purpose was to introduce the company's newest line of music: watered-down, crossover R&B with softer arrangements.
"Sh-Boom" continued in our consciousness for years. The spirit (if not the lyrics) of the song was borrowed by the Harptones in their 1955 hit, "Life Is But a Dream," and in 1957 by the Willows in the refrain of "Church Bells May Ring." In a fitting tribute, Atco reissued the Chords' "Sh-Boom" in 1961 during the great doo-wop revival. And of course "Sh-Boom" has appeared on Atlantic anthology albums ever since.
When one of the authors of this book was asked by publisher Larry Flynt in 1989 to put together a national newsstand oldies magazine, he called it Sh-Boom. The magazine lasted for eight issues.
" 'Sh-Boom' was . . . part of the changeover when the white mainstream industry recognized what was there."-George Carlin, comedian
"My all-time favorites growing up had to be 'Sh-Boom' and 'Earth Angel' and 'Bo Diddley.' They made me want to write and rock 'n' roll."-Sharon Sheeley, songwriter