Episode 25: “Earth Angel” by the Penguins

A History of Folk Music and 500 Songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 25 Earth Angel by The Penguins

When you're dealing with music whose power lies in its simplicity, as early rock'n'rolls does, you end up with music that relies on a variety of formulae, and whose novelty relies on using those formulae in ever so slightly different ways.

This is not to say that such music can't be original, but that its originality relies on using the formulae in original ways, rather than in doing something completely unexpected.

And one of the ways in which early rock and roll was formulaic was in the choice of chord sequence.

When writing a fifties rock and roll song, you basically had four choices for chord sequence, and those four choices would cover more than ninety per cent of all records in the genre.

There was the twelve bar blues.

Songs like Hound Dog, or Roll Over Beethoven, or Shake Rattle and Roll are all based around the twelve bar blues.

There's the variant eight bar blues, which most of the R and B we've talked about uses.

That's not actually one chord sequence, but a bunch of related ones.

Then there's the 3-chord trick, which is similar to the 12-bar blues, but just cycles through the chords 1, 4, 5, 4, 1, 4, 5, 4.

This is the chord sequence for Labamba.

and Louie Louie and Twist and Shout and Hang on Sloopy.

And finally, there's the doo-wop chord sequence.

This is actually two very slightly different chord sequences.

There's one minus sixth minus second fifth

and there's one minus sixth fourth fifth.

But those two sequences are so similar that we'll just lump them both in under the single heading of the doo-wop chord sequence from now on.

When I talk about that in future episodes, that's the chord sequence I mean.

And that may be the most important chord sequence ever, just in terms of the number of songs which use it.

It's the progression that lies behind 30s songs like Blue Moon and the version of Heart and Soul Most People Can Play on the Piano.

The original version is slightly different.

But it's also in Oliver's Army by Elvis Costello, Inola Gay by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Million Reasons by Lady Gaga, and The One by DJ Khalid.

Whatever genre of music you like, you almost certainly know and love dozens of songs based on that progression, and you almost certainly hate dozens more.

It's also been used in a lot of big ballads that get overplayed to death, and if you're not the kind of person who likes those records, you might end up massively sick of them.

a love of my own

And I

will always

love you

Will always

love you

We the best music

Another one

DJ Key looking at the truth the money never lie No,

I'm the one yeah I'm the one Early morning in the dawn Oh yeah wanna ride now

I'm the one yeah

But while it has been used in almost every genre of music The reason why we call this progression the doo-wop progression is that it's behind almost every doo-wop song of the 50s and early sixties.

Duke of Earl, Why Do Fools Fall in Love?

In the Still of the Night, Shaboom.

It forms the basis of more hit records in that genre than I could name even if I spent the whole of this podcast naming them.

And today we're going to talk about a song that cemented that sequence as the doo-wop standard, imitated by everyone, and which managed to become a massive hit hit despite containing almost nothing at all original.

The Penguins were a vocal group that formed out of the maelstrom of vocal groups in LA in the 50s, in the scene around Central Avenue.

One thing you'll notice when we talk about vocal groups, especially in LA, is that it gets very confusing very fast, with all the different bands swapping members and taking each other's names.

So for cleverty, the Hollywood Flames, featuring Bobby Bird, were different from the Famous Flames, who also featured Bobby Bird, who wasn't the same Bobby Bird as the Bobby Bird who was a Hollywood Flame.

And when we talk about bird groups, we're talking about groups named after birds, not groups featuring Bobby Bird.

And the two members of the Hollywood Flames, who were previously in a bird group called the Flamingoes, weren't in the bird group called the Flamingos that people normally mean when they talk about the Flamingos, they were in a different band called the Flamingos that went on to become the Platters.

Got that?

I'm sorry.

I'll now try to take you slowly through the convoluted history of the penguins in a way that will hopefully make sense to you.

But if it doesn't, just remember.

not what I actually just said, but how hard it was to follow.

Even the sources I'm consulting for this, written by experts who've spent decades trying to figure out who was in what band, often admit to being very unsure of their facts.

Vocal groups on the west coast in the US were far more fluid than on the east coast, and membership could change from day to day and hour to hour.

We'll start with the Hollywood Flames.

The Hollywood Flames initially formed in 1948 at one of the talent shows that were such important incubators of black musical talent in the nineteen fifties.

In this case, they all separately attended a talent show at the Largo Theatre in Los Angeles, where so many different singers turned up that instead of putting them all on separately, the theatre owner told them to split into a few vocal groups.

Shortly after forming, the Hollywood Flames started performing at at the Barrel House Club, owned by Johnny Otis, and started recording under a variety of different names.

Their first release was as The Flames, and came out in January 1950.

before

we play

good night,

my dear.

Another track they recorded early on was this song by an aspiring songwriter named Murray Wilson.

Yes, I met her at the town.

lonely autonomy,

we were dancing to a star

of dreams.

I was holding her so tight.

Even now, I hear her laugh.

Murray Wilson would never have much success as a songwriter, but we'll be hearing about him a lot when we talk about his three sons, Brian, Carl, and Dennis, once we hit the nineteen sixties and they form the Beach Boys.

At some point in late 1954, Curtis Williams, one of the Hollywood Flames, left the group.

It seems likely, in fact, that the Hollywood Flames split up in late 1954 or early fifty five and reformed later.

Throughout 1955 there were a ton of records released featuring various vocalists from the Hollywood Flames in various combinations under other band names.

But in the crucial years of 1955 and 1956 when rock and roll broke out the Hollywood Flames were not active, even though later on they would go on to have quite a few minor hits.

But while the band wasn't active, the individuals were, and Curtis Williams took with him a song he had been working on with another member, Gaynell Hodge.

That song was called Earth Angel, and when he bumped into his old friend Cleve Duncan, Williams asked Duncan if he'd help him with it.

Duncan agreed, and they worked out an arrangement for the song, and decided to form a new vocal group, each bringing in one old friend from their respective high schools.

Duncan brought in Dexter Tisbee while Williams brought in Bruce Tate.

They decided to call themselves the Penguins after the mascot on cool cigarettes.

Williams and Tate had both attended Jefferson High School and now is as good a time as any to talk about that school, because Jefferson High School

more great jazz and R and B musicians than you'd expect from a school ten times its size or even a hundred.

Eta James, Dexter Gordon, Art Farmer, Johnny Guitar Watson, Barry White, Richard Berry.

The great jazz trumpeter Don Cherry actually got in trouble with his own school because he would play truant in order to go and play with the music students at Jefferson High.

And this abundance of talent was down to one good teacher, the music teacher Samuel Brown, who, along with Hazel Whitaker and Marjorie Bright, was one of the first three black teachers to be employed to teach secondary school classes in LA.

Several of the white faculty at Jefferson asked to be transferred when he started working at Jefferson High, but Brown put together an astonishing program of music lessons at the school, teaching the children about the music that they cared about, jazz and blues, while also teaching them to play classical music.

He would have masterclasses taught by popular musicians like Lionel Hampton or Natkin Cole, and art musicians like William Grant Still, the most important black composer and conductor in the classical world in the mid-twentieth century.

It was, quite simply, the greatest musical education it was possible to have at that time, and certainly an education far beyond anything that most poor black kids of the time could dream of.

Half the great black musicians in California in the 40s and 50s learned in Brown's lessons.

And that meant that there was a whole culture at Jefferson High of taking music seriously, which meant that even those who weren't Brown star pupils knew it was possible for them to become successful singers and songwriters.

Jesse Belvin, who had been a classmate of Curtis Williams and Gaynell Hodge when they were in the Hollywood Flames, was himself a minor RB star already, and he would soon become a major one.

He helped Williams and Hodge with their song Earth Angel, and you can see the resemblance to his first hit, a song called Dream Girl.

I love

you so.

I hide you,

you did,

I

don't.

Note how much that melody line sounds like this bit of Earth Angel.

But that's not the only part of Earth Angel that was borrowed.

There's the line, Will You Be Mine?

which had been the title of a hit record by the Swallows.

I

always

been the same

so my darling

who's to blame.

Then there's this song by the Hollywood Flames, recorded when Williams was still in the band with Hodge.

I know

I'll never

ever let you go

because

I know I love you so

that's why I'll never let you go.

That sounds like a generic doo-wop song now, but that's because every generic doo-wop song patterned itself after Earth Angel.

It wasn't generic when the Hollywood Flames recorded that.

And finally, the Hollywood Flames had, a while earlier, been asked to record a demo for a local songwriter, Jesse Mae Robinson.

That song, I Went to Your Wedding, later became a hit for the country singer Patty Page.

Listen to the middle eight of that song.

You came down

the aisle,

wearing

a smile,

a vision

of labeliness.

I uttered a sigh

and then whispered goodbye

goodbye

to my happy name

now.

Listen to the middle eight of Earth Angels.

I fell for you

and I knew

the vision of your love, loveliness.

I hope and I pray

that someday I'll be the vision of your half happiness.

Oh,

oh, Earth Angels.

The song was a Frankenstein's monster, bolted together out of bits of spare parts from other songs.

But like the monster, it took on a life of its own.

And the spark that gave it life came from Dootsy Williams.

Dootsy Williams was the owner of Dewtone Records and was a former musician who had played trumpet in jazz and R and B bands for several years before realising that he could make more money by putting out records by other people.

His first commercial successes came not from music at all, but from comedy.

Williams was a fan of the comedian Red Fox and wanted to put out albums of Fox's live set.

Fox initially refused, because he thought that if he recorded anything, then people wouldn't pay to come and see his live shows.

However, he became short of cash and agreed to make a record of his then-current live set.

Laugh of the Party became a massive hit, and more or less started the trend for comedy albums.

to say to him and his heart swelled up as big as a melon.

His words choked in his throat.

He couldn't think what to say to a palette.

He wouldn't see anymore ever.

And

he looked down in the hallway and said, George,

more power to you.

Williams wasn't primarily a record company owner, though.

He was like Sam Phillips, someone who provided recording services.

But his recordings were songwriters' demos, and so meant to be for professionals, professionals, unlike the amateurs Phillips recorded.

The Penguins would record some of those demos for him, performing the songs for the songwriters who couldn't sing themselves.

And as he put it, I had the penguins doing some vocals, and they begged me,'Please record us, so we can get a release and go on the road and get famous,' and all that.

They kept booging me till I said,'Okay, what have you got'?

Their first single, credited to The Dootsy Williams Orchestra with Vocal by the Penguins, didn't even feature the Penguins on the other side.

The song itself, There Ain't No News Today, wasn't an original to the band, and it bore more than a slight resemblance to records like Winoni Harris's Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well.

okay.

But the maid had a bit,

cause the butler quit.

Still, there ain't no news today.

But the what have you got question had also been about songs.

Williams was also a music publisher, and he was interested in finding songs he could exploit, not just recordings.

As he put it, talking to Johnny Otis,

they said, we got a song called Earth Angel and a song called Hey Senorita.

Of course, Earth Angel was all messed up.

You know how they come to you.

So I straightened it out here and straightened it out there, and doggone, it sounded pretty good.

Earth Angel was not even intended to be an A-side originally.

It was tossed off as a demo, and a demo for what was expected to be a B-side.

The intended A-side was Hey, Senorita.

Hey, Senorita, Senorita,

Senorita, let me take you, let me take you home.

Hey, Senorita, let me take you home.

If you do inside the meeting,

Both tracks were only meant to be demos,

not the finished recordings, and several takes had to be scrapped because of a neighbour's dog barking.

But almost straight away, it became obvious that there was something special about Earth Angel.

Dootsy Williams took the demo recording to Dolphins of Hollywood, the most important RB record shop on the west coast.

We talked about dolphins last episode, but as a reminder, as well as being a record shop and the headquarters of a record label, Dolphins also broadcast RB radio shows from the shop.

And Dolphins radio station and record shop were aimed not at the black adult buyers of RB generally, but at teenagers.

And this is something that needs to be noted about Earth Angel.

It's a song where the emphasis is definitely on the angel, rather than on the earth.

Most RB songs at the time were rooted in the real world.

They were aimed at adults and had adult concerns like sex, or paying the rent, or your partner cheating on you, or your partner cheating on you because you couldn't pay the rent, and so now you had no one to have sex with.

There were, of course, other topics covered, and we've talked about many of them, but the presumed audience was someone who had real problems in their life, and who therefore also needed escapist music to give them some relief from their problems.

On the other hand, the romance being dealt with in Earth Angel is one that is absolutely based in teenage romantic idealisations,

rather than in anything like real world relationships.

This is, incidentally, one of the ways in which the song resembles Dream Girl, which, again, is about a fantasy of a woman, rather than about a real woman.

The girl in the song only exists in her effects on the male singer.

She is not described physically or in terms of her personality, only in the emotional effect she has on the vocalist.

But this non-specificity works well for this kind of song, as it allows the listener to project the song onto their own fush, without having to deal with inconvenient differences in detail.

And as the song is about longing for someone, rather than being in a relationship with someone, it's likely that many of the adolescents who found themselves moved by the song knew almost as little about their crush as they did about the character in the song.

The DJ who was on the air when Dootsy Williams showed up was Dick Huggy Boy Hug, possibly the most popular DJ on the station.

Huggy Boy played Earth Angel and Hey Senorita, and requests started to come in for the songs almost straight away.

Williams didn't want to waste time re recording the songs when the gun down so well, and released it as the final record.

Of course, as with all black records at this point in time, the big question was which white people would have the bigger hit with it.

Would Georgia Gibbs get in with the bland white cover, or would it be Pat Boone?

As it turns out, it was the Crew Cuts who went to number one,

or number three, I've seen different reports in different sources, on the pop charts with their version.

After Shaboom, the Crew Cuts had briefly tried to go back to Barbershop Harmony with a version of the Wiffinpuff song, but when that did nothing, in quick succession they knocked out hit bland covers first of Earth Angel and then of Kokomo, which restored them to the top of the chart at the expense of the black originals.

My darling dear,

love you all the time.

I'm just a fool,

a fool in love with you.

But it shows how times were slowly changing that the Penguins version also made the top ten on the pop charts, as Johnny Ace had before them.

The practice of white artists covering black artists' songs would continue for a while, but within a couple of years it would have more or less disappeared, only to come back in a new form in the sixties.

The Penguins recorded a follow-up single, Ookie Ookie.

You walk free to back.

You stand and fishing

penny from him if they broke their contract, but they reasoned that they weren't seeing any money from him anyway, and so decided it didn't matter.

They'd be big stars on Mercury, after all.

They went into the studio to do the same thing that Gene and Eunice had done, re-recording their two singles and the B sides, although these recordings didn't end up getting released at the time.

Unfortunately for the Penguins, they weren't really the band that Ram was interested in.

Ram had used the Penguins' current success as a way to get a deal both for them and for the Platters, the group he really cared about.

And once the Platters had a hit of their own, a hit written by Book Ram, he stopped bothering with the Penguins.

They made several records for Mercury, but with no lasting commercial success.

And since they'd broken their contract with Dewtone, they made no money at all from having sung Earth Angel.

At the same time, the band started to fracture.

Bruce Tate became mentally ill from the stress of fame, quit the band, and then killed someone in a hit-and-run accident while driving a stolen car.

He was replaced by Randy Jones.

Within a year, Jones had left the band, as had Dexter Tisbee.

They returned a few months after that, and their replacements were sacked.

But then Curtis Williams left to rejoin the Hollywood Flames, and Teddy Harper, who had been Dexter Tisbee's replacement, replaced Williams.

The Penguins had basically become Cleve Duncan, who had sung Leed on Earth Angel, and any selection of three other singers, and at one point there seemed to have been two rival sets of penguins recording.

By 1963, Dexter Tisbee, Randy Jones and Teddy Harper were touring together as a fake version of the Coasters, along with Cornell Gunter, who was actually a member of the Coasters who'd split from the other three members of his group.

You perhaps see now why I said that stuff at the beginning, about the vocal group line-ups being confusing.

At the same time, Cleve Duncan was singing with the whole other group of penguins, recording a song that would never be a huge hit, but would appear on many doo-wop compilations.

So many that it's as well known as many of the big hits.

If only they have

those dances again,

I'd know where to find you

and all my old friends.

The Shields would sing, you cheated,

you lied,

and the heartbeats,

it's fascinating to listen to that song and to realize that by the very early 60s, pre-British invasion, the doo-wop and rock and roll eras were already the subject of nostalgia records.

Pop Pop will not only eat itself, but it has been doing so almost since its inception.

We'll be talking about the co-writer of that song, Frank Zapper, a lot more when he starts making his own records.

And meanwhile, there were lawsuits to contend with.

Earth Angel had originally been credited to Curtis Williams and Gaynelle Hodge, but they'd been helped out in the early stages of writing it by Jesse Belvin, and then Cleve Duncan had adjusted the melody, and Dootsy Williams claimed to have helped them fix up the song.

Belvin had been drafted into the army when Earth Angel had hit, and when he got out he was broke, and he was persuaded by Dootsy Williams, who still seems to have held a grudge about the penguins breaking their contract, to sue over the songwriting royalties.

Belvin won sole credit in the lawsuit, and then signed over that sole credit to Dootsy Williams.

So, according to Marv Goldberg, for a while Dootsy Williams was credited as the only writer.

Luckily, for once, that injustice was eventually rectified.

These days, thankfully, the writing credits are split between Curtis Williams, Jesse Belvin, and Gaynell Hodge, and in 2013, Hodge, the last surviving co-writer of the song, was given an award by BMI for the song having been played on the radio a million times, and Hodge and the estates of his co-writers received royalties for its continued popularity.

Curtis Williams and Bruce Tate both died in the 1970s.

Jesse Belvin died earlier than that, but his story is for another podcast.

Dexter Tisbee seems to be still alive, as is Gayenel Hodge, and Cleve Duncan continued performing with various line-ups of penguins until his death in 2012, making a living as a performer from a song that sold 20 million copies but never paid its performers a penny.

He always said that he was always happy to sing his hit, so long as the audiences were happy to hear it, and they always were.

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is written, produced, and performed by Andrew Hickey.

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