Episode 58: “Mr. Lee” by the Bobbettes

A History of Folk Music and 500 Songs

by Andrew Higgins.

Episode 58

Mr.

Lee

by the Bobbettes

Over the last few months, we've seen the introduction to rock and roll music of almost all the elements that would characterize the music in the 1960s.

We have the music slowly standardizing on a line up of guitar, bass and drums with electric guitar lead.

We have the blues based melodies, the backbeat, the country inspired guitar lines.

All of them are there.

They just need putting together in precisely the right proportions for the familiar sound of the early sixties beat groups to come out.

But there's one element, as important as all of these, which has not yet turned up, and which we're about to see for the first time, and that element is the girl group.

Girl groups played a vital part in the development of rock and roll music, and are never given the credit they deserve.

But you just have to look at the first Beatles album to see how important they were.

Of the six cover versions on Please Please Me, three are of songs originally recorded by girl girl groups, two by the Shirelles and one by the Cookies.

And the thing about the girl groups is that they were marketed as collectives, not as individuals.

Occasionally, the lead singer would be marketed as a star in her own right, but more normally it would be the group, not the members, who were known.

So it's quite surprising that the first R ⁇ B girl group to hit the charts was one that, with the exception of one member, managed to keep their original members until they died, and where two of those members were still in the group into the middle of the current decade.

So, today, we're going to have a look at the group that introduced the girl group sound to rock and roll and how the world of music was irrevocably changed because of how a few young kids felt about their fifth-grade teacher.

one, two, three

Look at Mr.

Lee

Three, four, five,

look at him, John, Mr.

Lee, Mr.

Lee, I'm Mr.

Lee, Mr.

Lee, Mr.

Lee, Hop, Mr.

Lee, Mr.

Lee, Mr.

Lee, Hop, Mr.

Lee, Mr.

Lee

I've met my sweetie, Mr.

Lee, Mr.

Lee.

His name is Mr.

Lee, Mr.

Lee, Mr.

Lee.

I've met my sweetie, Mr.

Lee, Mr.

Lee.

Now, we have to make a distinction here when we're talking about girl groups.

There had, after all, been many vocal groups in the pre-rock era that consisted entirely of women.

The Andrews sisters, for example, had been hugely popular, as had the Boswell sisters, who sang the theme song to this show.

But those groups were mostly what was then called modern harmony.

They were singing block harmonies, often with jazz chords, and singing them on songs that came straight from Tin Pan Alley.

There was no RB influence in them whatsoever.

When we talk about girl groups in rock and roll, we're talking about something that quickly became a standard line-up.

You'd have one woman out front singing the lead vocal, and two or three others behind her singing answering phrases and providing ooh vocals.

The songs they performed would be, almost without exception, in the R and B mould, but would usually have much less gospel influence than the male vocal groups or the R and B solo singers who were coming up at the same time.

While doo wop groups and solo singers were all about showing off individual virtuosity, the girl groups were about the group as a collective.

With very rare exceptions, the lead singers of the girl groups would use very little melisma or ornamentation and would just sing the melody straight.

And when it comes to that kind of girl group, the Bobbettes were the first one to have any real impact.

They started out as a group of children who sang after school, at church, and at the glee club.

The same gang of seven kids, aged between eleven and fifteen, would get together and sing, usually pop songs.

After a little while, though, Reather Dixon and Emma Port, the two girls who'd started this up, decided that they wanted to take things a bit more seriously.

They decided that seven girls was too many, and so they whittled the numbers down to the five best singers Reather and Emma, plus Helen Gathers, Laura Webb, and Emma's sister Janny.

The girls originally named themselves the Harlem Queens and started performing at talent shows around New York.

We've talked before about how important amateur nights were for black entertainment in the 40s and 50s, but it's been a while, so to refresh your memories, at this point in time, black live entertainment was dominated by what was known as the Chitlin Circuit, an informal network of clubs and theatres around the US which put on largely black acts for almost exclusively black customers.

Those venues would often have shows that lasted all day.

A ticket for the Harlem Apollo, for example, would allow you to come and go all day and see the same performers half a dozen times.

To fill out these long bills, As well as getting the acts to perform multiple times a day, several of the Chitlin Circuit venues would put on talent nights, where young performers could get up on stage and have a chance to win over the audiences, who were notoriously unforgiving.

Despite the image we might have in our heads now of amateur talent nights, these talent contests would often produce some of the greatest performers in the music business, and people like Johnny Otis would look to them to discover new talent.

They were a way for untried performers to get themselves noticed, and while few did, some of those who managed would go on to have great success.

And so, in late 1956, the five Harlem Queens, two of them aged only eleven, went on stage at the Harlem Apollo, home of the most notoriously tough audiences in America.

But they went down well enough that James Daly, the manager of a minor bird group called the Ospreys, decided to take them on as well.

The Ospreys were a popular group around New York, who would eventually get signed to Atlantic and release records like Do You Wanna Jump Children?

He said,

Daly thought that the Harlem Queens had the potential to be much bigger than the Ospreys, and he decided to try to get them signed to Atlantic Records.

But one thing would need to change.

The Harlem Queens sounded more like a motorcycle gang than the name of a vocal group.

Laura's sister had just had a baby, who she'd named Chanel Bobbette.

They decided to name the group after the baby, but the Chanels sounded too much like the Chantelles, a group from the Bronx who had already started performing.

So they became the Bobbettes.

They signed to Atlantic, where Armet Ertigan and Jerry Wexler encouraged them to perform their own material.

The girls had been writing songs together, and they had one, essentially a playground chant, that they'd been singing together for a while, about their fifth grade teacher, Mr.

Lee.

Depending on who you believe, the girls gave different accounts over the years, the song was either attacking him or merely affectionately mocking his appearance.

It called him four-eyed and said he was the ugliest teacher you ever did see.

Atlantic liked the feel of the song, but they didn't want the girls singing a song that was just attacking a teacher, and so they insisted on them changing the lyrics.

With the help of Reggie Obrecht, the bandleader for the session, who got a co-writing credit on the song, largely for transcribing the girl's melody and turning it into something that musicians could play, the song became, instead, a song about the handsomest sweetie you ever did see.

My heart is egging this lady,

for you and Mr.

Lake, misses Lee Miss Lee, my heart is eggin'.

Incidentally, there seems to be be some disagreement about who the musicians were on the track.

Jacqueline Warwick, in Girl Groups Girl Culture, claims that the saxophone solo on Mr.

Lee was played by King Curtis, who did play on many sessions for Atlantic at the time.

It's possible, and Curtis was an extremely versatile player, but he generally played with a very thick tone.

Compare his playing on Dynamite at Midnight, a solo track he released in 1957.

With the solo on Mr.

Lee.

I think it more likely that the credit I've seen in other places, such as Atlantic Sessionographies, is correct, and that the Saks solo is played by the less well-known player Jesse Powell, who played on, for example, Fools Fall in Love by the Drifters.

If that's correct, and my ears tell me it is, then presumably the other credits in those sources are also correct, and the backing for Mr.

Lee was mostly provided by B team session players, the people who Atlantic would get in for less important sessions, rather than the first call people they would use on their major artists.

So the musicians were Jesse Powell on tenor sacks, Ray Ellis on piano, Alan Hanlon and Al Cayola on guitar, Milt Hinton on bass, and Joe Marshall on drums.

Mr.

Lee became a massive hit, going to number one on the RB charts and making the top ten on the pop charts, and making the girls the first all-girl RB vocal group to have a hit record, though they would soon be followed by others.

The Chantelles, whose name they had tried not to copy, charted a few weeks later.

Mr Lee also inspired several answer records, most notably the instrumental Walking with Mr.

Lee by Lee Allen, which was a minor hit in 1958, thanks largely to it being regularly featured on American Bandstand.

The song also came to the notice of their teacher, who seemed to have already known about the girls' song mocking him.

He called a couple of the girls out of their class at school, and checked with them that they knew the song had been made into a record.

He'd recognised it as the song the girls had sung about him, and he was concerned that perhaps someone had heard the girls singing their song and stolen it from them.

They explained that the record was actually them, and he was, according to Reather Dixon, ecstatic that the song had been made into a record, which suggests that whatever the girls' intention with the song, their teacher took it as an affectionate one.

However, they didn't stay at that school long after the record became a hit.

The girls were sent off on package tours of the Chitlin Circuit, touring with other Atlantic artists like Clyde McFetter and Ruth Brown.

And so they were pulled out of their normal school and started attending the Professional School for Children, a school in New York that was also attended by Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers and the Chantelles, among others, which would allow them to do their work while on tour and post it back to the school.

On the tours, the girls were very much taken under the wing of the adult performers.

Men like Sam Cook, Clyde MacFetter, and Jackie Wilson would take on somewhat paternal roles, trying to ensure that nothing bad would would happen to these little girls away from home, while women like Ruth Brown and Laverne Baker would teach them how to dress, how to behave on stage, and what make-up to wear, something they had been unable to learn from their male manager.

Indeed, their manager, James Daly, had started as a tailor, and for a long time sewed the girls' dresses himself, which resulted in the group getting a reputation as the worst dressed group on the circuit, one of the reasons they eventually dumped him.

With Mr.

Lee a massive success, Atlantic wanted the group to produce more of the same catchy, upbeat novelty numbers that they wrote themselves.

The next single, Speedy, was very much in the Mr.

Lee style, but was also a more generic song, without Mr.

Lee's exuberance.

One interesting thing here is that as well as touring the US, the Bobbettes made several trips to the West Indies, where RB was hugely popular.

The Bobbettes were, along with Gene and Eunice and Fats Domino, one of the US acts who made an outsized impression, particularly in Jamaica, and listening to the rhythms on their early records, you can clearly see the influence they would later have on reggae.

We'll talk more about reggae and scar in future episodes, but to simplify hugely, the biggest influences on those genres as they were starting in the 50s were Calypso, the New Orleans RB records made in Cosimo Matas's studio, and the RB music Atlantic was putting out, and the Bobbettes were a prime part of that influence.

Mr.

Lee, in particular, was later recorded by a number of Jamaican reggae artists, including Laurel Aitken.

Mr.

Lee,

Mr.

Lee,

Mr.

Lee

and the harmonians

One, two, three,

look at Mr.

B.

Four, five, six,

live down music street.

Mr.

B, Mr.

B, the good and beat, Mr.

B, Mr.

B, the good and beating

But while Mr.

Lee was having a massive impact, and the group was a huge live act, they were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the way their recording career was going.

Atlantic was insisting that they keep writing songs in the style of Mr.

Lee, but they were so busy they were having to slap the songs together in a hurry rather than spend time working on them, and they wanted to move on to making other kinds of records, especially since all the Mr.

Lee soundalikes weren't actually hitting the charts.

They were also trying to expand by working with other artists.

They would often act as the backing vocalists for other acts on the package shows they were on, and I've read in several sources that they performed uncredited backing vocals on some records for Clyde McFetter and Ivory Joe Hunter, although nobody ever says which songs they sang on.

I can't find an Ivory Joe Hunter song that fits the bill during the Bobbetts time on Atlantic, but I think You'll Be There is a plausible candidate for a Clyde McFatter song they could have sung on.

It's one of the few records McFater made around this time with obviously female vocals on it.

It was arranged and conducted by Ray Ellis, who did the same job on the Bobbettes records, and it was recorded only a few days after a Bobbettes session.

I can't identify the voices on the record well enough to be convinced it's them, but it could well be.

I have

no child,

and I don't know where to start.

I know

I'll find

you dear

if I follow my heart.

Eventually, after a couple of years of frustration at their being required to rework their one hit, they recorded a track which let us know how they really felt.

I think that expresses their feelings pretty well.

They submitted that to Atlantic, who refused to release it and dropped the girls from their their label.

This started a period where they would sign with different labels for one or two singles, and would often cut the same song for different labels.

One label they sang to in 1960 was Triple X Records, one of the many labels run by George Goldmer, the associate of Maurice Levy we talked about in the episode on Why Do Fools Fall in Love, who was known for having the musical taste of a 14-year-old girl.

There they started what would be a long-term working relationship with the songwriter and producer Teddy Van.

Van is best known for writing Love Power for the Sand Pebbles.

Sometimes we're up,

sometimes we're down, But our feet are always

all the rounds.

We always laugh, we don't have to cry.

And for his later minor novelty hit, Santa Claus is a black man.

Yes, Akimi.

Do you know what happened last night?

What happened, Arkim?

Well, I saw Santa Claus.

And do you know what?

What Akimi?

He looked a lot like you.

He was handsome.

I can dig it.

He was black.

He had an apple.

He was barely out of sight.

Now I'm going to tell everybody that I saw Santa.

Santa Claus is a black man.

Santa Claus is a black man.

And then I'm gone for days.

But in 1960, he was just starting out, and he was enthusiastic about working with the Bobbettes.

One of the first things he did with them was to remake the song that Atlantic had rejected: I Shot Mr.

Lee.

I shot Mr.

Lee.

Three, four, five,

I got tired of his job.

That became their biggest hit since the original Mr.

Lee, reaching number 52 on the Billboard Hot 100 and prompting Atlantic to finally issue the original version of I Shot Mr.

Lee to compete with it.

There were a few follow-ups, which also charted in the lower regions of the charts.

Most of them, like I Shot Mr.

Lee, answer records, though answers to other people's records.

They charted with a remake of Billy Ward and the Domino's Have Mercy, Baby, with I Don't Like It Like That, an answer to Chris Kenner's, I like it like that, and finally with Dance with Me, Georgie, a reworking of the wallflower that referenced the then popular twist phrase.

The Bubbettes kept switching labels, although usually working with Teddy Van, for several years with little chart success.

Helen Gathers decided to quit.

She stopped touring with the group in 1960 because she didn't like to travel, and while she continued to record with them for a little while, eventually she left the group altogether, though they remained friendly.

The remaining members continued as a quartet for the next 20 years.

While the Bobbettes didn't have much success on their own after 1961, they did score one big hit as the backing group for another singer, when in 1964 they reached number four in the charts, backing Johnny Thunder on Loop De Loop.

Here we go, loop, and loop.

Everybody loop.

Here we go, loop, tuck, loop, a loop, tuck.

Here we go, loop, and loop, loop a loop a loop.

The rest of the 60s saw them taking part in all sorts of side projects, none of them hugely commercially successful, but many of them interesting in their own right.

Probably the oddest was a record released in 1964 to tie in with the film Doctor Strangelove under the name Doctor Strange Love and the Fallouts.

Vether and Emma, the group's two strongest singers, also recorded one single as The Soul Angels, featuring another singer, Matty Levette.

The Barbettes continued working together throughout the 70s, though they appear to have split up, at least for a time, around 1974.

But by 1977, they'd decided that 20 years on from Mr.

Lee, their reputation from that song was holding them back, and so they attempted a comeback in a disco style under a new name, The Sophisticated Ladies.

Kept holding back on my father.

How can we make love to each other?

If they keep running away,

I've done everything in my power to make it safe.

Oh, yeah, oh yeah,

yeah.

That got something of a cult following among disco lovers, but it didn't do anything commercially, and they reverted to the Bobbett's name for their final single, Love Rhythm.

Rock in my body, do what you love.

But then tragedy struck.

Janny Port was stabbed to death in the street in a random attack by a stranger in September 1980.

She was just 34.

The other group members struggled on as a trio.

Throughout the 80s and 90s, the group continued performing, still with three original members, though their performances got fewer and fewer.

For much of that time, they still held out hope that they could revive their recording career, and you see them talking in interviews from the eighties about how they were determined eventually to get a second gold record to go with Mr.

Lee.

They never did, and they never recorded again, although they did eventually get a platinum record, as Mr.

Lee was used in the platinum selling soundtrack to the film Stand By Me.

Laura Webb Childress died in 2001, at which point the two remaining members, the two lead singers of the group, got in a couple of other backing vocalists and carried on for another 13 years, playing on bills with other fifties groups like the Flamingos, until Weather Dixon Turner died in 2014, leaving Emma Port's patron as the only surviving member.

Emma appears to have given up touring at that point and retired.

The Bobbettes may have only had one major hit under their own name, but they made several very fine records, had a career that let them work together for the rest of their lives, and not only paved the way for every girl group to follow, but also managed to help inspire a whole new genre with the influence they had over reggae.

Not bad at all, for a bunch of schoolgirls singing a song to make fun of their teacher.

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