Episode 94: “Stand By Me”, by Ben E. King

A history of folk music and 500 songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 94

Stand By Me by Benny King.

Today we're going to look at a song that ties together several of the threads we've looked at in previous episodes.

We're going to look at a song that had its roots in a gospel song that had been performed by Sister Rosetta Tharp, that involves the Drifters, Lieber and Stoller, and Phil Spector, and which marks the high point of the crossover from gospel to pop audiences that have been started by Ray Charles.

We're going to look at Stand By Me by Ben E.

King.

And the land is dark,

and the moon

is the only

light we'll see.

No, I won't be afraid.

Oh, I won't be afraid.

Just as long

as you stand,

stand by me.

So darling, darling, stay.

When we left the drifters, they'd hit a legal problem.

When the contract for the individual members had been sold to George Treadwell, the owner of the drifters' name, Benny King's contract had not been sold with the rest.

This had meant that while while King continued to sing lead on the records, including the first few big hits of this new line-up of drifters, he wasn't allowed to tour with them, and so they'd had to bring in a sound-alike singer, Johnny Lee Williams, to sing his parts on stage.

So there were now five drifters in the studio, but only four of them in the touring group.

That might seem like an unworkable arrangement for any length of time, and so it turned out.

But at first this was very successful.

Lieber and Stoller continued producing records for this new Drifters lineup, but didn't tend to write for them.

They were increasingly tiring of writing to a teenage audience that didn't really share their tastes, and were starting to move into writing for adult stars like Peggy Lee.

And so Lieber and Stoller increasingly relied on songs by other writers, and one team they particularly relied on was Thomas and Schuman.

You'll remember we've talked about them in association with both the Drifters and Lieber and Stoller previously, and that they'd been the ones who'd discovered the Benny King line-up of the Drifters.

Doc Pomas was one of the great RB songwriters of the 50s, but by 1960, he and Mort Schuman, who was 13 years younger than him, had written a whole string of hits for white performers like Fabian, Bobby Rydell, Frankie Avalon, and Bobby Darin.

A typical example of the stuff they were writing was Two Fools for Frankie Avalon.

They were one of the hottest teams in the Brill building, but they still had a sensibility for the RB music that the Drifters had their roots in, and so they were the perfect writers to provide crossover hits for the group, and that's what they did.

They'd already written If You Cry, True Love, True Love for the group, which had gone to number 33, and which had been the only Drifters single on which Williams had taken a lead vocal, and now they wrote a song for King to sing, This Magic Moment.

new, was like any other

until I kiss you

and then it happened.

It took me by surprise, I knew that you felt it too

by the look in your eyes,

sweeter than wine.

That made number 16 on the pop charts.

But the next song they wrote for the group was a much bigger success, and a far more personal song.

Thomas was paraplegic after having had polio as a child, and either used crutches or a wheelchair to get around.

His wife, though, was younger, and was an actor and dancer.

On their wedding day, Thomas was unable to dance with her himself, and watched as she danced with a succession of other people.

The feeling stayed with him.

and a few years later he turned those thoughts into a set of lyrics which Schumann then put to music with a vaguely Latin feel, like many of the drifters' recent hits.

The result was a number one record, and one of the old-time classic songs of the rock and roll era.

taking you home and in whose arms you're gonna be

so darling say the last dance for me

that song has gone on to be one of the most covered songs of all time with recordings by tina turner leonard cohen buck owens jerry lee lewis the swinging blue jeans harry nilsson and Bruce Willis, among many others.

It would be the Drifters' only number one on the pop charts, and it was also Benny King's last single with the Drifters, after King's manager Lover Patterson came to an agreement with the Drifters' manager George Treadwell that would let King move smoothly into a solo career.

There might have been more to it than that, as there seems to have been a lot of negotiation going on around the group's future at this time.

There were reports, for example, that King Records were negotiating to buy the Drifters contract from Atlantic, which would have been interesting.

It's hard to see the group continuing to have success at King, which didn't have Libra and Stoller, and which put out very different records from Atlantic.

But either way, the result was that Ben E.

King started performing solo, and indeed by the time Save the Last Dance came out, he had already released a couple of solo records.

The first of these was not a success, and nor was the second, a duet with Laverne Baker.

that

I

am yours?

I'm yours and yours

alone.

But the third was something else.

At this point, point, as a favour to their old friend Lester Sill, Lieber and Stoller were mentoring a kid that Sill thought had promise, named Phil Spector, who we've talked about before in the episode on the Gamblers, but who had now moved over to New York for a time.

Spectre was staying with Lieber and would follow him around literally everywhere, claiming that he was so traumatised by his father's death that he couldn't be left alone at any time.

Lieber found Spectre annoying, but owed Sill a favour, and so kept working with him.

And Spectre kept pestering Lieber to collaborate with him on some songs.

Lieber told Spectre, No, I write with Mike Stoller, to which Spectre would reply, Well, he can write with us, too.

Lieber explained to him that that wasn't how things worked, and that if there was any collaboration, it would be Lieber and Stoller letting Spectre write with them, not Spectre graciously allowing Stoller to write with him and Lieber.

Spectre said that that was what he had meant, of course.

Lieber and Stoller reluctantly agreed that Spectre could write with them, but then Stoller was unable to turn up to the writing session.

Spectre persuaded Lieber to go ahead and just write a song with him, since Stoller wasn't around.

He agreed, and they came up with a song called Spanish Harlem, to which Stoller later added a prominent instrumental line, for which he didn't claim credit, because he thought that Spectre would only whine and he didn't need the hassle.

Or at least that's the story that normally gets told.

There are people who knew Richie Valens who say that the Marimba riff on the record, which became the most defining feature of the song, was actually something that Valens had been regularly playing in the months before he died.

According to them, Spectre, who moved in the same circles as Valens, must have stolen the riff from him.

I tend to believe Stoller's version of the story myself, but either way, Lieber, Stoller, and Spectre played the song to Jerry Wexter and Armet Ertigan as a trio, with Stoller on piano, Spectre on guitar, and Lieber singing.

They agreed it should be on the B side of the next single by King, though the song was popular enough that the record was soon flipped, and Spanish Harlem made the top ten.

But that wasn't even the most important record they made at that session, because after recording it, they decided to record a song that King had written for the drifters, but which they had turned down.

King had brought in the basic idea for the song, and Lieber had helped him finish off the lyric, while Stoller had helped with the music.

The resulting songwriting credit gave 50% of the royalties to King, and 25% each to Lieber and Stoller as a result.

King's song had a long prehistory before he wrote it, and like many early soul songs, it had its basis in gospel music.

The original source for the song is a spiritual from 1905 by Rev.

Charles Albert Tindley, which had been recorded by various people, including Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Lightning flash, thunder roll,

stand by me.

But the proximate influence for the song was a song that Sam Cook had written for his old group, The Soul Stirrs, the year before, which had in turn been inspired by Tindley's song.

The lead vocal on the Soul Stirrers record was by Johnny Taylor, a friend of Cook's, who had replaced Cook in his first group, The Highway QCs, and then replaced him in his second one, because he sounded exactly like Cook.

I want you to

stand by,

stand by

where

all of my money and

King idolised Cook and was inspired by that record to come up with his own variant on the song.

Working with Lieber and Stella, he carefully crafted his secular adaptation of it, writing a lyric that worked equally well as a gospel song or as a song to a lover, other than the words darling, darling in the chorus.

The chord sequence they used was a simple adaptation of the standard doo-wop chord changes.

On a normal doo-wop song, the chords would go one, minor sixth, fourth, fifth, with each chord taking up the same amount of time, like this.

Stoller took those changes and made the one and minor sixth last two bars each.

Then had the four and five chords both last a bar, and then go to two more bars of the one chord.

That bar of four, bar of five, two bars of one thing, is almost what you get at the end of a twelve bar blues, except there you go, five, four, one, one, rather than four, five, one, one.

So to compare, here's the end of a twelve bar blues.

And here's what Stoller did again.

So effectively, Stoller has taken the two most hackneyed chord sequences in rock and roll music and hybridized them to turn them into a single new sequence that's instantly recognizable.

In later years, Lieber always gave Stoller the credit for the song's success, saying that while the lyrics and melody were good, and King's performance exceptional, it was the bass line that Stoller came up with which made the song the success it was.

I agree to a large extent, but that bass line is largely just following the root notes of the chord sequence that Stoller had written, but it's one of the most immediately recognizable pieces of music of the early sixties.

The record sounded remarkably original for something that was made up almost entirely out of repurposed elements from other songs, and it shows more clearly than perhaps any other song that originality doesn't mean creating something entirely ab initio, but can mean taking a fresh look at things that are familiar and putting just a slight twist on them.

In particular, one thing that doesn't get noted enough is just how much of a departure the song was lyrically.

People have been reworking gospel ideas into secular ones for years.

We've already looked at Ray Charles doing this, and at Sam Cook, and there were many other examples, like Little Walter turning this train into My Babe, but in most cases those songs required wholesale lyrical reworking.

Stand by Me is different.

It brings the lyrical concerns and style of gospel firmly into the secular realm.

If the sky that we look upon should tumble and fall, and the mountains should crumble to the sea, is an apocalyptic vision.

Not Candy's sweet and honey too, there's not another quite quite as sweet as you, which were the lyrics Sam Cook wrote when he turned a song about how God is wonderful into one about how his girl is lovable.

This new type of more gospel-inflected lyric would become very common in the next few years, especially among black performers.

Another building block in the music that would become known as Soul had been put in place.

The record went to number four on the charts, and it looked like he was headed for a huge career, but the next few singles he released didn't do so well.

He recorded a version of the old standard Amore, which made number 19, and then his next two records topped out at 66 and 56.

He did get back in the pop top 20 with a song co-written by his wife and Ahmet Ertigan, Don't Play That Song You Lied, which reached number 11 and became an RB standard.

away.

I remember just a word it just said.

It said,

You know that you lie,

I love you.

You know that you lie,

I love you.

You know that you lie,

you lie,

but as many people did at the time, he tried to move into the more lucrative world of adult supper club singers, rather than singing R and B.

While his version of I Who Have Nothing, a French song that has since become a standard, and whose English lyrics were written for King by Lieber and Stoller, managed to reach number twenty nine, everything else did terribly.

He sang I Could Have Danced All Night and What Now, My Love perfectly well, but that wasn't what the audience wanted from him.

He made some great records in the later sixties, like What is Soul?

with you?

You don't know what I'm going through.

Hold me so tight, so tight, I can't breathe.

Can't you feel it, girl?

Don't you know what I mean?

This is soul.

But even teaming up with Solomon Burke, Don Cove, Joe Tex, and Arthur Connolly as the Soul Clan didn't help him kick-start his recording career.

He asked to be let go from his contract with Atlantic in 1969 and spent a few years in the early 70s recording for small labels.

Meanwhile, the Drifters were continuing without King.

After King left, Atlantic started releasing whatever material they had in their vaults, both songs with King's leads leads and older records from the earlier line-up of Drifters.

But they were about to have even more personnel shifts.

When they were on tour and got to Mobile, Alabama, Johnny Lee Williams said that he was just going to stay there and not continue on the tour.

He was sick of not getting to sing lead vocals, and he came from Mobile anyway.

Williams went on to join a group called the Embraceables, who released this with him singing lead.

I love sitting here wondering what is in my eyes.

Why must I cry?

Put it on

me.

My coolest pride.

That was later re-released as by The Implaceables, for reasons I've not been able to discover.

The Drifters got in a replacement for Williams, James Poindexter, but he turned out to have stage fright, and the group spent several months as a trio, before being joined by new lead singer Rudy Lewis.

And then Ellsberry Hobbs, the group's bass singer, was drafted, and the group got in a couple of different singers before settling on Tommy Evans, who had sung with the old versions of the Drifters in the 50s.

The new line-up, Rudy Lewis, Charlie Thomas, Doc Green, and Tommy Evans, would be one of the group's longest-lasting line-ups, lasting more than a year, and would record hits like Up on the Roof by Goffin and King.

But then Doc Green left the group.

He and Tommy Evans joined another group, even though Evans was also still in the Drifters.

The Drapers, the group they joined, was managed by Lover Patterson, Benny King's manager, and had been given a name that sounded as much like the Drifters as possible.

As well as Green and Evans, it also had Johnny Moore and Carnation Charlie Hughes, who had been in the same 1956 lineup of the Drifters that Tommy Evans had been in.

That lineup of the Drapers released one single that didn't do particularly well.

Your love has gone away.

There'll be no more walking you home.

There'll be no more you walk on the phone.

And I know,

I know.

Your love has gone away.

Your love has gone away.

The new drifters line-up, Without Doc Green, recorded on Broadway, a song that Libra and Stoller had co-written with the drill building team of Man and Wild.

The guitar on the record was by Phil Spector.

He was by that point a successful producer, but Lieber and Stoller had bumped into him on the way to the session and invited him to sit in.

But when you're walking down the street

and you ain't had enough to eat,

the glitter of light off, and you're nowhere.

Tommy Evans then also left the Drifters and was replaced by Johnny Terry, leaving a line-up of Rudy Lewis, Charlie Thomas, Gene Pearson, and Johnny Terry.

But Rudy Lewis, the lead singer of the group since just after King had left, was thinking of going solo and even released one solo single.

And now you say you're gone,

gone, baby,

away from me,

away from me.

That wasn't a success, but George Treadwell wanted some insurance in case Lewis left.

So he got Johnny Moore, who had been in the group in the 50s and had just left the Drapers, to join, and for a few months Lewis and Moore traded off leads in the studio.

One song that they recorded during 1963, but didn't release, was Only in America, written for them by Lieber and Stoller.

Lieber and Stoller had intended the song to be a sly satire, with black people singing about the American dream.

But Atlantic worried that in the racial climate of 1963, the satire would seem tasteless, so they took the Drifters' backing track and got Jay and the Americans, a white group, to record new vocals, turning it into a straightforward bit of boosterism.

Only in America

can a guy from anywhere

go to sleep apart

and wake up a millionaire.

Only in America

can a kid without a cent

get a break and maybe

grow up to be present.

Only in America

land of opportunity and

tragedy struck on the day the drifters recorded what what would be their last US top ten hit, the 21st of May 1964.

Johnny Moore bumped into Sylvia Vantapool of Mickey and Sylvia, and she said, Thank God it wasn't you.

He didn't know what she was talking about, and she told him that Rudy Lewis had died suddenly earlier that day.

The group went into the studio anyway, and recorded the songs that had been scheduled, including one called, I Don't Want to Go On Without You, which took on a new meaning in the circumstances.

But the hit from the session was Under the Boardwalk with lead vocals from Moore.

And your shoes get so hot, you wish your tired feet were fireproof

under

the street

on a blanket with

This version of the group, Johnny Moore, Charlie Thomas, Gene Pearson, and Johnny Terry, would be the longest-lasting of all the versions of the group managed by George Treadwell, staying together a full two years.

But after Under the Boardwalk, which went to number four, they had no more top ten hits in the US.

The best they could do was scrape the top 20 with Saturday Night at the Movies.

There were several more line-up changes, but the big change came in 1967, when George Treadwell died.

His wife, Faye, took over the management of the group, and shortly after that, Charlie Thomas, the person who had been in the group for the longest continuous time, nine years at that point, decided to leave.

There were a lot more squabbles and splinter groups, and by 1970, the Drifters' career on Atlantic was over.

By this point, there were were three different versions of the Drifters.

There was a group called the Original Drifters, which had formed in 1958 after the first set of drifters had been fired, and was originally made up entirely of members of the early 50s line-ups, but which was now a revolving door group based around Bill Pinckney, the bass singer of the Clyde McFatter line-up, and stayed that way until Pinckney's death in 2007.

Then there was a version of the Drifters that consisted of Doc Green, Charlie Thomas and Ellsberry Hobbs, the people who had been in Ben E.

King's version of the group.

Charlie Thomas won the right to use the name in the USA in 1972, and continues touring with his own group there to this day, though no more of that line-up of the Drifters are with him.

And then there was a UK-based group, managed by Faye Treadwell, with Johnny Moore as lead singer.

That group scored big UK hits when they moved to the UK in 1972, with re-releases of mid-sixties records that had been comparative flops at the the time.

Saturday Night at the Movies, At the Club, and Come On Over to My Place all made the top 10 in 1972, and Moore's Drifters would have nine more top 10 hits with new material in the UK between 1973 and 1976.

And Benny King, meanwhile, had signed again to Atlantic and had a one-off top 10 hit with Supernatural Thing in 1975.

supernatural thing.

Your love, your love

supernatural thing.

Oh, babe.

Your love, your love

supernatural thing.

Oh, babe.

Your love, your love.

But other than that, he continued to have far less chart success than his vocal talents deserved, and in the 80s he moved to the UK and joined the UK version of the Drifters, singing his old hits on the nostalgia circuit with them and adding more authenticity to the Johnny Moore line-up of the group.

He spent several years like that, until in 1986 his career had a sudden resurgence, when the film Stand By Me came out, and his single was used as the theme.

On the back of the film's success, the song re-entered re-entered the top ten 25 years after its initial success and made number one in the UK.

As a result, King became the first person to have hit the top ten in the US in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s.

A remarkable record for someone who had had relatively few hits.

A greatest hits collection of King's records made the top 20 in the UK as well, and King left the Drifters to once again become a solo artist.

But this is where we say goodbye to King, and to the Drifters, and to Lieber and Stoller as songwriters.

The UK version of the Drifters carried on with Johnny Moore as lead singer until he died in 1998, and up to that point it was reasonable to think of that group as a real version of the Drifters, because Moore had sung with the group on hits in the 50s and 60s, and in the UK in the 70s.

Roughly 80% of records released as by the Drifters have had Moore singing on them.

But after Moore's death, it gets very confusing, with the Treadwell family apparently abandoning the trademark and moving back to the US, and then changing their mind, resulting in a series of lawsuits.

The current UK version of The Drifters has nobody who was in the group before 2010, and is managed by George and Faye Treadwell's daughter.

They still fill medium-sized theatres on large national tours, because their audiences don't seem to care, so long as they can hear people singing up on the roof and on Broadway.

There goes my baby, and save the last dance for me.

In total, thirty four different people were members of the Drifters during their time with Atlantic Records.

It's the only case I know where a group identity was genuinely bigger than the members, where whoever was involved, somehow they carried on making exceptional records.

Lieber and Stoller, meanwhile, will turn up again, once more, next year, as record executives, collaborating with another figure we've we've seen several times before, to run a record label.

But this is the last record we'll look at with them as a songwriting team.

We've been following their remarkable career since episode fifteen, and they would continue writing great songs for a huge variety of artists, but Stand By Me would be the last time they would come up with something that would change the music industry.

It was the end of a truly remarkable run, and one which stands as one of the great achievements in twentieth century popular music.

And Benny King, who was, other than Clyde McFatter, the only member of the Drifters to ever break away and become a solo success, spent the last 29 years of his life touring as a solo artist after the renewed success of his greatest contribution to music.

He died in 2015, but as long as people listen to rock, pop, soul, or RB, there'll be people listening to Stand By Me.

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