Chart position: #1 R&B (for 14 weeks), #17 Pop
Category: R&B novelty
Writers: Billy Ward, Rose Marks
Label and number: Federal 12022, Cincinnati
Flipside: "I Can't Escape from You"
When and where recorded: December 30,1950, in New York City When released:
April/May 1951
Why Important: It was the first R&B hit to cross over to the pop
charts, the first double-entendre hit and the first million-seller by a formative
R&B vocal group.
Influenced by: "Dancin' Dan" by the Black Dominoes (1923 ), "Hustlin'
Dan" by Bessie Smith (1930), "Dan the Backdoor Man" by the Four Southerners
(1937)
Influenced: The Swallows' "It Ain't the Meat (It's the Motion)" (1952)
and a spate of answer records like the Du-Droppers' "Can't Do Sixty No More"
(1952), the Checkers' "Don't Stop, Dan" (1954), the Robins' "The Hatchet Man"
(1954), the Cadets' "Dancin' Dan" (1956) and many others. The Dominoes recorded
their own "Can't Do Sixty No More" in 1955, but it was a different song than
the Du-Droppers'.
Important cover versions: The Jive Bombers, Hardrock Gunter and Roberta
Lee, the York Brothers
Important remakes: The Untouchables (1960), Clarence Carter (#17 R&B,
#65 Pop, 1973)
The story behind the record: There was nothing subtle about "Sixty Minute
Man," sung in a sly voice by bass man Bill Brown: "Listen here, girls, I'm telling
you now, come up and see of Dan. I rock 'em, roll 'em all night long, I'm a
sixty-minute man." What was a sixty-minute man? Bill explained it clearly enough:
"There'll be fifteen minutes of kissin', till you holler please don't stop (group:
`Don't stop!'), there'll be fifteen minutes of teasin', fifteen minutes of pleasin',
and fifteen minutes of blowin' my top!"
This kind of double-entendre blues recording had been around for decades. Julia Lee's "Snatch and Grab It," Helen Humes's "Million Dollar Secret" and Billy Mitchell's "The Ice Man" had been stirring up rent parties and pool rooms since the'40s, and before them there'd been all sorts of naughty-hell, dirty-ditties to amuse the most jaded listeners and back-door lovers, beginning with "Frankie and Johnny" and Lucille Bogen's no-punches-pulled "Shave 'em Dry." But none of 'em sold a million copies or flaunted themselves high in the pop charts, in front of God and everybody.
Lovin' Dan, the "Sixty Minute Man," had a long, disreputable pedigree. In nineteenth-century minstrel shows he was Dan Tucker, or Jim Dandy. (Dandy would show up again in 1956, when LaVern Baker courted him on the pop charts; and Jesse Belvin celebrated "Deacon Dan Tucker" in 1958.) The sheet music still exists for a 1921 song called "The Lady's Man, Dapper Dan from Dixieland," which is notable for a section in which Dan, a Pullman porter, shouts out the names of passing towns on the railroad where he's got women stashed away. The gimmick of shouting out stations was later used on many records, including Louis Jordan's "Salt Pork, West Virginia" and James Brown's "Night Train."
The Black Dominoes, a jazz band with a vocalist that recorded "Dancin' Dan (Fox Trot)" in 1923, were probably the first to put the tradition on wax. Seven years later Dan reappeared as Bessie Smith's infamous "Kitchen Man"-"Wild about his turnip tops, like the way he warms my chops"; the following year she moaned her praises of "Hustin' Dan." In 1937 Georgia White sang "Dan the Backdoor Man"; a vocal group called the Four Southerners recorded their version of it later that year. Songwriters welcomed Dan as a handy man to have around, simply because his name rhymed with handy man, or lover man, or back-door man-an old blues term for a woman's secret lover who sneaks in the back while her husband is leaving for work out the front. The odd thing about "Sixty Minute Man," though, was that it was out of character for the Dominoes, a smooth, professionally-run vocal group that depended mostly on its sweet tenor voices.
Billy Ward, born in Los Angeles on September 19,1921, was raised as a choirboy in a church family. He also played the organ. During a stint in the army he sang in the Coast Artillery Choir. After he got his discharge, Ward-now grown but still small-boned, fastidious and as proper-looking as a choirboy-went to New York City to be a vocal coach. In 1950 he joined forces with a talent agent named Rose Marks, who convinced him that he should put together a nice, proper vocal group like the Ink Spots. Marks was aware of how successful another ambitious young white woman like herself named Deborah Chessler had been, managing and writing songs for a black vocal group called the Orioles [see //10, "It's Too Soon to Know"]. Now it was her turn.
At Marks's suggestion, Ward assembled a quartet in Harlem which he called the Dominoes. Like most names of black groups in those days, Dominoes was slightly self-deprecating. Whereas ink spots are dark figures against a white background, dominoes are white spots against black-like the bulging white eyeballs of black film comics. Or maybe Ward had a copy of one of those old Gennett 78s of "Dancin' Dan" by the Black Dominoes. He later changed the group's billing to Billy Ward and the Dominoes, though Ward himself never sang. He didn't have to, because he was the group's coach, pianist-organist and, along with Rose Marks, the owner of the Dominoes trademark, which gave him the power to hire and fire at will and pay his artists a weekly salary. The owners of the Platters and the Drifters later followed the same policy. The group in 1950 consisted of tenor Clyde McPhatter, second tenor Charlie White, baritone Willie Lamont and bass Bill Brown.
In October, Rose Marks, following Deborah Chessler's lead, landed the Dominoes a spot on "Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts," a popular talent showcase on radio, singing "Goodnight Irene," which the Orioles had recently recorded. Enter Rene Hall, a black arranger and guitarist-about-town. "I was working with Syd Nathan who owned King Records," Hall said before his death several years ago. "And he told me if I saw any talent around New York City, to give him a call, he'd okay permission to audition them, send him a copy, eventually he'd send them a contract. I saw this group on the Arthur Godfrey show and also noticed the audience reaction to their presentation. I gave Syd a call."
King was already an entrenched R&B indie label based in Cincinnati, with dozens of smash hits under its belt, but so far the company hadn't ventured too deeply into the vocal group market outside of buying up some masters by the Ravens from a sinking New York label and issuing them. Unsure of what he should do, Nathan referred the group to the New York office of his ace A&R man, Ralph Bass, a white hipster who had already produced at least two major hits, Jack McVea's "Open the Door, Richard" and T-Bone Walker's "Call It Stormy Monday."
"The cat [Ward] had a dub of an aircheck," Bass told writer Michael Lydon. "I said, 'I can't use this, it hasn't got it.' " At Ward's insistence, however, Bass agreed to hear the group in person. But, as Bass complained later, the Dominoes weren't "pop enough to be pop [or] R&B enough to be R&B." When Bass played them some records by the Orioles as examples of what he wanted, Ward told him, "I can write songs like that all the time." As it turned out, he was right.
So confident was Syd Nathan of Ralph Bass's eye for talent and nose for hits that he set him up with his own King subsidiary label, Federal Records, in order that the producer could share in any of the talent he discovered. "Ralph Bass didn't want to put the Dominoes on King," said Hall. "He [put them] on his own label: they made the very first record for Federal. We went into the old National Studios on 48th Street and cut four tunes."
Their debut, "Do Something for Me," a weepy, high-strung ballad led by eighteen-year-old Clyde McPhatter, jumped high into the R&B charts. "The flip, `Chicken Blues,' had the more rockin' feel," said Hall, "and the Bill Brown lead. It was a warm-up for `Sixty Minute Man,' saying `Chicken, stay away from me.' " Listening to both sides today, you can hear that Ward was hedging his bets, patterning McPhatter's ballad after Sonny Til of the Orioles and Brown's up-tempo blues after deep-voiced Jimmy Ricks of the Ravensthe two most popular vocal groups in 1950. But "Chicken Blues"-despite its catchy opening lines, "If you don't like chicken, leave that hen alone, she'll give you so much chicken you cannot do a thing but moan" faded quickly, and Billboard snubbed it: "Falls short on material; the bass lead is no Ricky [Ricks]."
For the next session, the group went back into National Studios in New York and recorded two songs. The first one, "Harbor Lights," was the number Ward was most interested in, probably because the 1940 ballad was currently (in 1950) a major pop hit for Sammy Kaye's orchestra. McPhatter gave it an eccentric but powerful rendering, and Federal rushed it onto the market as a follow-up to "Do Something for Me." But the company held back the second song they did that day, "Sixty Minute Man," for another couple of months. And then "Sixty Minute Man," according to Rene Hall, "went to number one despite the fact it was banned from radio broadcast; they said it was too suggestive. Today it would be too tame." Billy Ward, the choirboy, had learned his lesson well: when you write double-entendre blues, you can't pussyfoot around. "Sixty Minute Man" didn't leave much to the imagination.
Public reaction was unequivocal: thirty weeks on the R&B charts, and nearly half that time at number one. "Sixty Minute Man" even crossed over to the pop charts. It was indeed a strange record to be rubbing elbows (and who knows what else) in that ratified atmosphere with orchestras and crooners.
Always the shrewd businessman, Syd Nathan covered his own hits for other segments of the musical population. Since King Records produced both R&B and hillbilly acts, he covered "Sixty Minute Man" with a country duo, the York Brothers. But like all other covers of "Sixty Minute Man" it didn't do much of anything. The original was simply too strong, too distinctive, and buyers wanted the real thing. So Nathan did the next best thing: he made answer records. With his new group, the Swallows, which also had a distinctive lead tenor, he moved the bass man up front to copy Dan's (Bill Brown's) voice on "It Ain't the Meat (It's the Motion)," and had a small hit. Two years later, when Bill Brown defected from the Dominoes and formed his own group called the Checkers, also on King Records, Bill resumed his old persona with "Don't Stop, Dan." (In 1960, Syd Nathan committed the ultimate offense against "Sixty Minute Man": he overdubbed a female chorus over the original recording and released it in hopes of cashing in on a remake by the Untouchables. The record sounded awful.)
Despite its national popularity, "Sixty Minute Man" didn't break down the barriers between R&B and pop in 1951. When all was said and done, the song was a novelty, a throwback to minstrel songs like "Open the Door, Richard," in which black performers winked and rolled their eyes. Brown's delivery was more humorous than sincere or threatening, more in the "coon-shout" tradition of years earlier than the soulful R&B tradition that was to follow. The Dominoes wouldn't truly break through for another year, with Clyde McPhatter back in the lead [see #29, "Have Mercy Baby"].
"'Sixty Minute Man' by the Dominoes was the first rock 'n' roll record in my opinion, as it was the first sexually explicit black record that sold white as well as black. Additionally, the Dominoes gave us Clyde McPhatter and Jackie Wilson, two of the most important, seminal artists in rock history. As rock 'n' roll is another black euphemism for sexual intercourse, what other record could more aptly be called the first?" Michael Ochs, rock archivist