The Spaniels and the Five Satins and the Vocaleers, the Drifters and the Fleetwoods and the Moonglows, the Coasters and the Platters and on to Frankie Valli and modernity.
Doo-wop was among the inheritors, a thousand street-corner groups and a thousand one-hit wonders. In America, beginning in the 1930s, the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots were the popularizers of those intricate harmonies we recognize today as proto-rock ’n’ roll. You can trace doo-wop back to the Psalms, hear it bubble up in the a cappella harmonies of Gregorian chant, or, by way of Africa and the Caribbean, from gospel quartets. Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, with their tight, upbeat harmony, were an important part of it, too. Raucous and brawny, electrified, it felt like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis all fell from the sky at once. Race integration in pop music was never going to be simple.Īmerica in the 1950s: postwar economy roaring, a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage of the split-level house in Levittown, every cliché of union-made American middle-class prosperity held to be self-evident.Īnd music was a big part of that. Less than two years later, Frankie danced with a white girl on a national television show, and the show was swiftly canceled. While kids my age were playing stickball and marbles, I was working in the corner grocery store carrying orders to help pay the rent.”Ī few days before Frankie and his friends from the corner recorded the song that made them famous, Rosa Parks was pulled off a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
#Idol manager influence driver#
My father was a truck driver and my mother worked as a domestic in white folks’ homes. There were five children in my family and my folks had to scuffle to make ends meet. In the neighborhood where I lived, there was no time to be a child. “I was a man when I was 11 years old, doing everything that most men do. “I never was a child, although I was billed in every theater and auditorium where I appeared as a child star,” Lymon told Art Peters, a reporter for Ebony magazine, in 1967. Truth is, Frankie Lymon grew up too fast in every way imaginable. Berry Gordy may not have modeled the Jackson 5 on Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, as is often said, but it sure sounded as if he had. Even Diana Ross charted a cover of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” 25 years after its release. The high, clear countertenor, like something out of Renaissance church music, found its way from the Temptations to the Beach Boys to Earth, Wind & Fire. That voice and that style influenced two generations of rock, soul and R&B giants. He was a founding father of rock ’n’ roll even before his voice had changed. That made him the first black teenage pop star, a gap-toothed, baby-faced, angel-voiced paragon of show business ambition, and a camera-ready avatar of America’s new postwar youth movement. Overnight, Frankie Lymon was the hottest singer in America, off on a world tour. A few months later their first record, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” made it to the top of the national charts. They were discovered by the Valentines’ lead singer Richie Barrett while the kids were rehearsing in an apartment house.
They sang doo-wop under the streetlight on the corner of 165th and Amsterdam. And it was a great story, too: Up from nothing! A shooting star! So when they found Frankie Lymon dead at the age of 25 one February morning in 1968, in the same apartment building where he’d grown up, it was the end of something and the beginning of something, but no one was quite sure what.įrankie Lymon and the Teenagers were five kids from Washington Heights, just north of Harlem.
That beautiful soprano flying high, talent and presence and just enough ham to sell it all. That voice! Those apple cheeks! Arms wide, head back, he radiates joy, even in antique black and white.
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