Monday, June 25, 2007 The McGuire Sisters, "Sincerely" (February 12, 1954) Another slick white-on-black cover, but judging from this, doo-wop and mainstream pop contradicted each other the least when the romance was dripped molasses-slow. Not a revelation, but no embarrassment, either: by the time the final key change rolls around, it even sounds like they're trying to make a point. Of what, who knows? 5 (link)

The Fontane Sisters, "Hearts of Stone" (February 5, 1955) Rock & roll! Sort of! Like the Crew-Cuts' "Sh-Boom," this is a smoothed-out cover of an R&B tune. Unlike "Sh-Boom," or most of the pop covers of country hits from a few years prior, the arrangement here doesn't obliterate its origins, perhaps in consideration of the kids who were propelling R&B originals to places on the charts alongside their pop counterparts. (The year before, the Chords' original version "Sh-Boom" went to #9.) In another win for pop minimalism, there's the Fontane 3, there's drums, upright bass, a sax, a few male background singers who might actually be African-Americans murmuring doo-doo-wa doo-doo-wa-dah-doo -- and that's it. Speed? Oh, it's got speed alright; it's even markedly faster than the original. And yet it's pop's superficial solution to the R&B question, tight-assed in a way neither R&B or pop never rarely was. Is it unfair that I'm viewing this record through the prism of rock history? Possibly. I can see why the record companies found a lot to like in R&B. One of the key tenets of mainstream advertising in the fifties is the repetition, repetition, repetition of key selling points; with a bare minimum of effort, a producer or group could take the hooks of an R&B tune and make them so repetitious the song becomes an advertisement for itself. In the folds of this song the sax repeats a series of notes squeaked so perfectly it could be a loop, and the rhymes here are so obvious (break/take/break/take) they might as well be saying the same words, over and over again, as they actually do with a string of thirteen "no"s followed by a "everybody knows." So, the song's sure catchy -- but as the history of rock (and pop) tells us, this is never enough. 3 (link)

Sunday, June 24, 2007 Joan Weber, "Let Me Go Lover" (January 22, 1955) You have to hear this: Weber oversings in ways Whitney, Mariah, and Celine never dreamed. There's explosive consonants and vibrato OH GOD is there ever vibrato, applied to lyrics with weep/deep/sleep and loose/use rhymes that belong in the kiddie pool. But where Weber really lays it on thick is when she cascades from the top of her register, so sweet and girlish, to a bellowing bottom that turns "lover" into a gasp of "luuuhffher." It calls up so many unsexy aural referents -- asthma, drowning victims, Carol Burnett doing one of her funny grunting sounds -- you have to wonder (once again) what people saw in it. Were they bowled over by Weber's incaution? Did they think that it's only when you sound crazy that you really mean it? That true singing, like true love, is a trial? Did they treat her as a wonder of nature? Was her eccentricity the attraction? The online biographies cite Mitch Miller as having a heavy helping hand in her career, so it's plausible her oversing was as much a "novelty" as his other tracks Miller had a hand in, like Rosemary Clooney's "ethnic" hits or Johnnie Ray's alluring wheeze. (Why hasn't Miller written his memoirs yet?) That said, it's pretty much an Elvis ballad. Elvis' gasps and growls are far more suave than Weber's, but they're more like than unlike, and the record even features a solo electric guitar and Jordanaires analogues to boot. Indeed, it's not hard to believe Elvis ballads like "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" or "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You" are as much attempt to recreate the sensibility of a record like this as much as any gospel or R&B track you'd care to name. So this an oddity in an era of oddities, and yet an appropriate bit of accidental prescience in that pop chart interzone of the pre-rock era. 4 This was her only charting song, by the way. She had the nasty luck of giving birth right when this song hit, killing all the momentum in her career. She died of heart failure in a mental institution at 45. Christ. (link)