Rhythm and Blues (Music)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Huey ‘Piano’ Smith, New Orleans Rock ’n’ Roll Cornerstone, Dies at 89

      by

      With songs like “Don’t You Just Know It,” “Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” and “Sea Cruise,” he put a firm backbeat behind joyful nonsense.Huey “Piano” Smith, whose two-fisted keyboard style and rambunctious songs propelled the sound of New Orleans R&B into the pop Top 10 in the late 1950s, died on Feb. 13 at his home in Baton Rouge. He was 89.His daughter Acquelyn Donsereaux confirmed his death.Mr. Smith wrote songs that became cornerstones of New Orleans R&B and rock ’n’ roll perennials, notably “Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu,” “Don’t You Just Know It” and “Sea Cruise.”As a pianist and bandleader, Mr. Smith was known for strong left-hand bass lines, splashy right hand and forceful backbeat. He didn’t take center stage; his band, the Clowns, was fronted by a group of dancing lead vocalists, among them Bobby Marchan, who often performed wearing women’s clothes.Mr. Smith’s lyrics were full of droll wordplay and irresistible nonsense-syllable choruses. “I use slangs and things like that,” he was quoted as saying in John Wirt’s biography, “Huey ‘Piano’ Smith and the Rockin’ Pneumonia Blues” (2014), “When you put the music with words and things together, the songs just make themselves. And after you listen at it, it says something its own self, that you hadn’t planned.”Mr. Smith’s songs have been covered by Aerosmith, the Grateful Dead, Johnny Rivers, Patti LaBelle, Deep Purple and many others. But he struggled to collect royalties through more than a decade of lawsuits, and in the 1990s he filed for bankruptcy. His song “Sea Cruise” was handed over by his label to a white singer, Frankie Ford, whose voice was overdubbed atop the backing track recorded by Mr. Smith and his band.A publicity photo of Mr. Smith from early in his career. He and his group, the Clowns, had a national hit in 1957 with “Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu.”Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesHuey Pierce Smith was born on Jan. 26, 1934, in New Orleans, the son of Arthur Smith, a roofer and sugar cane cutter, and Carrie Victoria (Scott) Smith, who worked at a laundry. He taught himself to play boogie-woogie piano, strongly influenced by the New Orleans master Professor Longhair, and by his teens he was performing regularly at the Dew Drop Café, a top Black club in what was still a segregated city. He formed a duo with Eddie Lee Jones, who performed and recorded as Guitar Slim and who gave him the “Piano” moniker. He also backed Lloyd Price and other New Orleans performers onstage.Mr. Smith also became a regular session player at J&M, the recording studio owned by Cosimo Matassa, where the sound of classic New Orleans R&B was forged. His piano opens the Smiley Lewis hit “I Hear You Knocking,” and he was also heard on recordings by Earl King, Little Richard and many others.He formed the Clowns in 1957 and had a nationwide hit that year with “Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” (later versions often rendered it as “Rockin’”), which reached No. 5 on Billboard’s rhythm-and-blues chart and No. 52 on the pop chart. A medical-minded follow-up, “Tu-Ber-Cu-Lucas and the Sinus Blues,” didn’t fare as well.With his new career as a bandleader thriving, Mr. Smith married Doretha Ford in 1957. They had five children before they divorced in the mid-1960s.Mr. Smith and the Clowns reached the pop Top 10 in 1958 with the wry “Don’t You Just Know It.” The title was a phrase often used by the band’s bus driver, Rudy Ray Moore, who would go on to a career as a bawdy comedian and the star of the “Dolemite” movies.That same year, Mr. Smith recorded “Sea Cruise.” Johnny Vincent, the owner of his label, Ace Records, was a partner in a distribution company, Record Sales Inc., with Johnny Caronna. The day after Mr. Smith recorded the music for “Sea Cruise,” planning to have the Clowns add vocals, Mr. Caronna claimed the song for a teenage singer he was managing, Frank Guzzo, professionally known as Frankie Ford.According to Mr. Wirt’s biography, Mr. Smith was told, “Johnny Vincent agreed that if you can sell a million on this record, Frankie can sell 10 million” — and, he later recalled, “It hurt me to my heart when he told me he was taking that.”Mr. Vincent, who died in 2000, also claimed co-writing credits on many songs Mr. Smith wrote and recorded for Ace, including his hits, although he later relinquished those credits. Mr. Smith moved to Imperial Records as the 1950s ended, but he returned to Ace to record a rollicking holiday album, “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” on which he declaimed the title poem over a jaunty horn section.With the British Invasion of the 1960s, guitar-driven rock supplanted piano-centered New Orleans R&B on the pop charts. Mr. Smith continued to record on the Pitter Pat and Instant labels through the late 1960s, under his own name and others, and he had some regional hits. He also wrote and produced songs for other performers, notably Skip Easterling, who had a hit across the South in 1970 with Mr. Smith’s funk reworking of the Muddy Waters standard “Hoochie Coochie Man.”Mr. Smith married Margrette Riley in 1971. She survives him, along with his children Ms. Donsereaux, Sherilyn Smith, Huerilyn Smith, Hugh Smith, Katherine Smith, Tanisha Smith, Tyra Smith and Glenda Bold; his stepson, James L. Riley Jr.; 18 grandchildren; and 47 great-grandchildren.Barely able to make a living from his music in the early 1970s, Mr. Smith turned to other work. He started a gardening business, Smith’s Dependable Gardening Service. He also became a Jehovah’s Witness and gave up drinking and smoking.Meanwhile, the value of his old songs was increasing. In 1972, Johnny Rivers’s remake of “Rocking Pneumonia” reached No. 6 on the pop chart. Dr. John included a medley of Mr. Smith’s songs on his album “Dr. John’s Gumbo,” and Ace Records rereleased Mr. Smith’s songs on compilation albums. Mr. Smith performed occasionally as the 1970s ended. At the New Orleans club Tipitina’s and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 1979 and 1981, he reunited with singers from the Clowns’ peak years. At the 1981 festival, his musicians included the Meters’ rhythm section: George Porter on bass and Zigaboo Modeliste on drums.Mr. Smith moved to Baton Rouge in 1980 and stopped performing soon after that. His catalog continued to be heard — in cover versions, on movie soundtracks, in commercials and in reissues — but bad deals deprived him of much of his royalty income.In a series of lawsuits from 1988 to 2000, Artists Rights Enforcement Corporation — a company Mr. Smith had engaged in 1982 to help collect back royalties and then fired in 1984 — demanded and won a 50 percent share of Mr. Smith’s ongoing royalty income from four of his biggest songs, including “Rocking Pneumonia.”Mr. Smith declared bankruptcy in 1997; by then, he had pawned his piano. When full rights to the four songs were sold for $1 million to the publisher Cotillion Music in 2000, Mr. Smith remained entitled to foreign royalties but netted less than $100,000 to escape bankruptcy.The Rhythm & Blues Foundation gave Mr. Smith its $15,000 Pioneer Award in 2000, and he gave his last major performance at the foundation’s gala. He was inaugurated into the Louisiana Blues Hall of Fame in 2001.Mac Rebennack, the New Orleans pianist, guitarist and singer who recorded as Dr. John, received vital early songwriting guidance from Mr. Smith, according to Mr. Wirt’s biography. “Anyone who can talk can write a song,” he recalled being told. “So whatever you got to say, play good music and say it. You just put it where you need to say it.”Mr. Smith, Mr. Rebennack said, also advised, “If you don’t have a song that’s got some kind of simple melody people can hum, sing with and roll with, it’s like, what do you got?” More

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      SZA’s Very Roundabout Path to Success

      by

      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicSZA’s second major label album, “SOS,” spent its first seven weeks atop the Billboard album chart, a startling feat for a performer who has at almost every turn made choices inconsistent with the demands of pop stardom.Five years have passed since her debut album, “Ctrl.” She generally makes music with a small circle and doesn’t collaborate widely. Until lately, she has largely shunned the press.But the release of “SOS” appears to mark a new chapter for the singer, who at 33 is one of the most forthright songwriters working, and who has a flexible vocal approach that’s only expanding.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about SZA’s lyricism and production choices, her deliberate and slow career path and new models of star-making in the contemporary pop marketplace.Guest:Danyel Smith, author of “Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop”Connect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

    • 138 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      SZA’s ‘SOS’ Is the No. 1 Album for an Eighth Time

      by

      The R&B singer-songwriter has matched Taylor Swift’s run with “Folklore,” the last time a female artist held the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s chart for eight weeks.SZA is not done with No. 1 yet.After a one-week dip to second place on the Billboard album chart, SZA — the genre-blurring R&B singer-songwriter born Solána Imani Rowe — returns to No. 1 this week for an eighth time with “SOS,” the hottest LP of the season.“SOS,” SZA’s long-awaited second studio album, had the equivalent of 100,000 sales in the United States in its most recent week out. Virtually all of that activity was attributed to the album’s popularity on streaming services, drawing 135 million clicks, according to the tracking service Luminate. Since “SOS” came out nine weeks ago, it has been streamed 1.7 billion times in the United States alone.With eight weeks at the top, “SOS” has tied the chart run of Taylor Swift’s “Folklore” in 2020, the last time a female artist racked up as many times at No. 1. (For both albums, the accomplishment came in nonconsecutive spans; it took Swift 13 weeks to notch an eighth No. 1 for “Folklore.”) In the last few years, the only albums that have had more are Disney’s “Encanto” soundtrack (nine weeks), Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” (10) and Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” (13).Also this week, Swift’s “Midnights” rises one spot to No. 2, while the K-pop group Tomorrow X Together, which opened at No. 1 last week with big CD sales of its new five-song EP, “The Name Chapter: Temptation,” fell to No. 3. Wallen’s “Dangerous” is in fourth place — its 106th time in the Top 10 — and Metro Boomin’s “Heroes & Villains” is No. 5.The country-pop star Shania Twain opened at No. 10 with her latest release, “Queen of Me.” More

    • 163 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Lizzo and SZA Spin Up a Fresh ‘Special,’ and 7 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Luke Combs, Jessie Ware, Indigo de Souza and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Lizzo featuring SZA, ‘Special’Lizzo’s soulful, gospel-choir-backed performance of “Special,” the title track from her 2022 album, was a highlight of this year’s Grammys telecast, and now she’s recruited SZA to provide a fresh spin on the song. “You call it sensitive, and I call it superpower,” SZA sings, nimbly skipping across the beat, while Lizzo offers her a message of solidarity: “I thought that I’d let you know, in case nobody told you today, you’re special.” If the original version was a more general anthem of uplift, SZA’s presence gives the song a more intimate call-and-response quality, as if she and Lizzo were two girlfriends exchanging words of support after a long day. LINDSAY ZOLADZBeyoncé, ‘Cuff It (Wetter Remix)’It’s easy, and expected, to think about Beyoncé from the top down. On Sunday, she won four Grammys, giving her a career total of 32 and making her the most decorated performer in the show’s history. Conversations about her music, how she assembles it and how she releases it often take on a world-historical tone. She is the defining superstar of the stan era, publicly available only every once in a while.The Emotionally Charged Sound of SZAThe artist, whose real name is Solána Imani Rowe, has become a dominant figure in American pop.View From the Top: Her moody, enigmatic music made SZA a megastar. Can she learn to live with success?‘Ctrl’: The artist’s first album for a major label, released in 2017, held on to the electronics and the leisurely tempos of her past work. But it placed her fully in command of her songs.Interview: After receiving five Grammy nominations for “Ctrl,” the singer sat down to discuss her journey to success and facing her inner critic.‘SOS’: On her second album, SZA presents herself not as a heroine but as a work in progress who knows she’ll make more mistakes.But she is listening. One of the more gratifying and unexpected turns of the “Renaissance” era has been her acknowledgment of how fans listen to her, responding in something like real time. First, in August, she formally released a mash-up of “Break My Soul” and Madonna’s “Vogue” that had been floating around online.Now, she’s done it again. A few months ago, the D.J. and producer esentrik made a mash-up of “Cuff It” with “Wetter,” a temperate love rap from 2009 by the Chicago fast talker Twista, produced by the Legendary Traxter. It was a hit on TikTok, and now, it’s become something even more substantive. Beyoncé recorded new vocals for this version, which takes the sauciness of the original and cools it down slightly, leaning into afterglow.Making this remix official is savvy acknowledgment that fans listen to music in ways artists can’t anticipate, and it behooves artists to be mindful of how they’re being consumed. And it is savvy business too, a way of formalizing the chaos of TikTok and bringing it under the umbrella of the empire. JON CARAMANICAJessie Ware, ‘Pearls’Jessie Ware’s latest disco-inspired track is an effervescent invitation to, as she puts it, “shake it til the pearls fall off.” The single from her April album “That! Feels Good!” is thick with sumptuous atmosphere and Ware’s signature sass. But most impressively, its chorus’s ascending melody is a dazzling showcase of Ware’s stratospheric upper register. Sing along at your own risk. ZOLADZMegan Moroney, ‘I’m Not Pretty’A razor-sharp premise for a song: “Somewhere out there my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend is scrolling through my Instagram/Tearing me down, passing the phone around.” A young country singer with a voice that mixes sweetness with wryness, Megan Moroney targets this charming, funny, exhausted song at women who tear other women down. CARAMANICALuke Combs, ‘Love You Anyway’In midcareer mode, Luke Combs doesn’t let it rip quite as often as he once did. His bellow is more stable, his emotional presence more dignified. But there’s still something of a purring engine inside songs like “Love You Anyway,” which in the hands of a lesser singer, would be a familiar, cloying ode to a love so strong, it’s worth the pain of potentially losing it. But when Combs sings, “If your kiss turned me to stone, I’d be a statue standing tall in ancient Rome,” he sounds like he’s thoroughly pondered the consequences — the likelihood of heartbreak — and is pressing on with force nonetheless. CARAMANICAIndigo de Souza, ‘Younger & Dumber’“Younger & Dumber,” from the Asheville singer-songwriter Indigo De Souza, is a slow-burning tear-jerker, a gradual accumulation of heartbreaking lines that takes flight in a soaring climax. “Sometimes I just don’t want to be alone, and it’s not because I’m lonely,” De Souza sings in a wearied croon. “It’s just that I get so tired of filling the space all around me.” But just then, her voice swells in intensity and fills that space with her own wrenching emotion. ZOLADZYaya Bey, ‘Exodus the North Star’Brooklyn’s Yaya Bey brings a light touch to “Exodus the North Star,” the title track from an upcoming EP that follows her excellent 2022 album “Remember Your North Star.” “Exodus” is a love-struck reverie that begins as a sparse arrangement — just Bey’s voice and some celestial keys — but soon explodes into a joyful, horn-kissed celebration. “Baby, it’s the way you make me feel like your girl could get up and fly,” Bey sings and, accordingly, the song suddenly takes flight. ZOLADZFrench Montana featuring 2Rare, “Ratataaaaa’Turns out that French Montana’s meandering smears, typically at home over lightly galloping production, sound equally intriguing over sounds twice as quick. This song (which perhaps is an allusion to an old TikTok meme) is jubilant and spacious, and a little odd. The Philadelphia club rapper 2Rare, who guests here, is more naturally bouncy than his host, but his antic energy is mostly a counterweight to French Montana’s impressionistic almost-raps. CARAMANICA More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Soul Told Black Musicians’ Stories. Its Archives Are Going Digital.

      by

      The newspaper, which started in 1966 with a focus on R&B, funk and disco, shut down in 1982. But one of its founders’ grandsons is devoted to finding it a new online audience.The rock ’n’ roll bible Rolling Stone was founded in 1967. The renegade music magazine Creem started in 1969. But another publication predated them both: Soul.Motown, Stax and Phil Spector’s Philles Records were busting out (and Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International label was on the horizon), but until Soul, no publication had been feeding the growing appetite for even the most basic information about Black artists like Marvin Gaye, Carla Thomas or the Isley Brothers. The world knew the names of the Beatles’ wives, but not of the Ikettes.With the smoke barely cleared from the Watts riots, two men saw an opening: Ken Jones, Los Angeles’s first Black television anchor, and Cecil Tuck, who revitalized KRLA Beat, an early rock title. But the face of Soul, the one who told record company bosses where to get off and had artists calling her at night with scoops, was Regina Jones, Ken’s wife. Fly, flinty and self-created, Regina was at one time both the paper’s publisher and editor in chief.Soul was groundbreaking, but it flamed out in 1982. Now Matt Jones, Ken and Regina’s grandson, is giving the publication a second life, creating an online archive of its issues for paying subscribers and uploading select audio from interviews. (Hard copies — dead stock — are also for sale.)“We have bound volumes of all the issues that have been in my grandmother’s home for as long as I can remember,” Jones, 39, said. He has digitalized 82 issues with 291 to go, and is leaning on Regina, now 80, for historical context. (The two talk every day; Ken died in 1993.)As the most granular source of news and images of soul, R&B, funk and disco artists in the Golden Age of those genres, Soul is a gold mine for Black history and pop culture scholars. It “documents an important turning point in U.S. race relations and the arts,” Susan D. Anderson, who stewarded Regina’s gift of Soul’s archive to the U.C.L.A. Library in 2010, wrote in an email.Few people, she added, know that Soul, “in its drive to document African Americans’ perspective in a self-representative way, was a pivotal vehicle” powering the shift from “race records” to America “becoming the locus of popular culture production,” with Black artists the prevailing force.Selling originally for 15 cents, the biweekly also covered jazz, television, Black Power, Hollywood and theater. Page Six-style columns delivered gossip in bites. Style was a de facto component: the Pointer Sisters in high-’40s drag, Al Green in hot pants and over-the-knee boots. A glossy sister was spawned, Soul! Illustrated.Soul threw down the gauntlet from the first issue. James Brown and Mick Jagger shared a split cover under the headline “White Artists Selling Negro ‘Soul.’” Daphne A. Brooks, professor of African American studies at Yale, singled it out for “the audacity of its critical focus,” stunned that in 1966 a music publication would lead with a piece on the politics of cultural appropriation. “Are you kidding me?!” she wrote over email. Other covers the first year featured Stevie Wonder, the Impressions and Sam Cooke. The website highlights major interviews with Aretha Franklin, Rick James and Bob Marley.Soul “helps to fill out and complicate our understanding of a seminal moment,” Gayle Wald, author of “It’s Been Beautiful: ‘Soul!’ and Black Power Television,” wrote in an email. “Soul!,” a variety show, was unrelated to the paper but had a similar mission. “Serious cultural journalism about pop music was just emerging,” Wald added.Regina and Ken bought out Tuck in 1967, producing Soul from their home near Watts while raising five children. Regina said she did not view Rolling Stone as competition but did “resent” it covering Black artists: her territory. In 1975, both publications printed Labelle covers; Jones enjoyed a measure of satisfaction when she beat Jann Wenner’s magazine to the newsstands by four months. Nona Hendryx, a member of Labelle, purveyors of a landmark mash-up of funk, rock, R&B and gospel, said that “for an African-American artist, Soul was definitely more important than Rolling Stone.” Fans approached her in public: “Hey, I saw you in Soul.”“You got your feedback directly from the people,” Hendryx added. “It had more weight than Rolling Stone because it kept us in the community.”In a novel marketing gambit, Soul partnered with 30 Black radio stations across the country, printing a different edition for each. Stations had their call letters on the cover and a spread inside for rotation charts and advertisers. Bruce W. Talamon, Soul’s star photographer, said that in turn, “D.J.s gave us on-air promotion — ‘Buy your Soul newspaper!’”Regina’s unfiltered access to artists could mean fielding a call from David Ruffin announcing he’d just been fired from the Temptations — and wanted to tell his story. “That speaks to how highly he felt about Soul,” she said. “It was almost like going to your parents.” Diana Ross kissed the Supremes goodbye in 1970 during their final performance at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, then slipped into a booth beside Berry Gordy, still in her Bob Mackie stage velvets, to spill tea with Soul.Sublime talent showed up on Regina’s doorstep unbidden, including Leonard Pitts Jr., the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, and Talamon, whose book, “Soul. R&B. Funk. Photographs 1972-1982,” is a definitive visual record of artists in the idioms and period it covers.Before freelancing for Soul in 1976, Pitts said in a video interview from the 2000s, “I was there every day on the day” Soul came out, waiting for it to go on sale, to learn that the Temptations had suffered yet another personnel change, that King had been assassinated. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, what’s happening? My world is crumbling.’”Pitts, who later held the top editorial position, said in the video that he admired Soul because it didn’t pander, printing that there was no love lost between Rick James and George Clinton. Nobody else, he noted, thought Black music warranted that kind of attention: “No one else was telling you, you know, ‘This is why Philippé Wynne left the Spinners.’ It wasn’t what the press releases say. It’s because they had a fight.”Nichelle Gainer, author of “Vintage Black Glamour,” noted in an email that Soul’s “coverage of hot-button topics” like the Motown star Tammi Terrell’s illness was “steadier,” with “consistent updates,” compared with general interest Black publications. But the paper’s quality was not always how alumni and scholars remember it. The writing could be crude; handout images were sometimes accepted as cover photos. And as the ’70s wound down, Soul lost its teeth. The Joneses’ marriage was unraveling. Regina admitted she was no longer minding the store. In 1980, ‌J. Randy Taraborrelli, who followed Pitts as editor in chief and would go on to write “Call Her Miss Ross,” a biography of the supreme Supreme, pushed successfully for a cover the publication’s readership could not abide: Barry Manilow.Matt Jones will dutifully digitalize the issue. But he won’t be sad if it goes unnoticed among firebombs like the Brown/Jagger story. Before Soul, he said, Jet and Ebony talked about soul music “as this weird kind of niche thing — they had trouble describing it. The press packets of many Black musicians in the ’60s consisted of a single one-page write-up: ‘Here’s who I am. Here’s this great interview on me in Soul newspaper.’” More

    • 163 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Charlie Thomas, a Drifter Nearly All His Life in Song, Dies at 85

      by

      He was heard on hits like “There Goes My Baby,” “Under the Boardwalk” and “Up on the Roof.” He kept singing them for decades.Charlie Thomas, who recorded memorable songs like “There Goes My Baby” and “Under the Boardwalk” with the Drifters, the silken-voiced R&B group that had a long string of hits from 1959 to 1964 and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Fame, died on Jan. 31 at his home in Bowie, Md. He was 85.The singer Peter Lemongello Jr., a close friend, said the cause was liver cancer.Mr. Thomas, a tenor, was a Drifter for more than 60 years, from the version of the group that had its first hits in the late 1950s to the version he led and toured with until the pandemic struck.“He was aging, but he was active almost every weekend,” Mr. Lemongello, a former lead singer of the Crests, which performed on bills with Mr. Thomas, said in a phone interview. “Unfortunately, he went from being active to being at home and he started going downhill.”Mr. Thomas became a Drifter by chance. He was singing with the Crowns, an R&B group, at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1958 when they came to the attention of George Treadwell, the manager of the original Drifters, who were also on the bill.After one of the Drifters got drunk and cursed out the owner of the Apollo and the promoter of the show, the music historian Marv Goldberg wrote, Mr. Treadwell, who owned the name, fired all its members and replaced them with members of the Crowns, including Mr. Thomas and Ben Nelson, who would later be known as Ben E. King, and rechristened them the Drifters.Asked how it felt to suddenly become a Drifter, Mr. Thomas told Mr. Goldberg: “As a kid, I used to play hooky to see the Drifters at the Apollo. It felt good!”The new Drifters fulfilled the former group’s road obligations and began recording the next year for Atlantic Records, produced by the songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.Mr. King had written “There Goes My Baby” for Mr. Thomas to sing. But Mr. Thomas froze at the studio microphone, according to Billy Vera’s liner notes for “Rockin’ and Driftin’: The Drifters Box” (1996), and Mr. King took over. The song rose to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959.The hits continued for several years, as the Drifters became one of the most successful groups of the era. They followed “There Goes My Baby” with songs like “This Magic Moment,”“Up on the Roof,” “Under the Boardwalk,” “On Broadway” and “Saturday Night at the Movies.” “Save the Last Dance for Me” was their only song to reach No. 1.Mr. Lewis in performance in Holmdel, N.J., in 2016. He performed for many years with a group billed as Charlie Thomas’s Drifters.Bobby Bank/Wireimage, via Getty ImagesCharles Nowlin Thomas was born on April 7, 1937, in Lynchburg, Va. His father, Willis, was a minister, and his mother, Lucinda (Nowlin) Thomas, was a homemaker whose singing voice Charlie admired.“My dad was a holy roller preacher down in Virginia,” Mr. Thomas said in an interview in 2013 with Craig Morrison, a musician and ethnomusicologist. “At my father’s church, I used to take the tambourine and do collection, and my mother used to sing in the choir. That’s where I really got my training from singing.”He moved to Harlem with his mother and a sister when he was 10 and eventually got a job pushing a hand truck in the garment district. He sang on street corners and came to the attention of Lover Patterson, the Crowns’ manager, who hired him in 1958. The group recorded “Kiss and Make Up” for the songwriters’ Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman’s short-lived RnB label before Mr. Treadwell turned them into the Drifters.The lead singers on most of the group’s hits were Mr. King and, after he left for a solo career in 1960, Rudy Lewis and Johnny Moore, who had been in the group’s first incarnation and rejoined it in 1964.But Mr. Thomas sang lead on “Sweets for My Sweet,” which reached No. 16 on the Hot 100 in 1961, and “When My Little Girl Is Smiling,” which peaked at No. 28 the next year. Mr. Thomas also took over the lead on the ballad “I Don’t Want to Go On Without You” a day after Mr. Lewis’s death in a hotel room in 1964.“When he died, I was the one who closed his eyes,” Mr. Thomas told Goldmine magazine in 2012. He added, “I really do love that song because that one, in particular, brings back a lot of memories.”The Drifters broke up in the late 1960s, but they didn’t disappear. Some members headed to England, where they performed as the Drifters and were managed by Mr. Treadwell’s widow, Faye, who vigorously defended her legal right to the name.Bill Pinkney, a member of the mid-1950s lineup fired by Mr. Treadwell, went on to form a group called the Original Drifters. He died in 2007, but the group continues to perform under that name.Mr. Thomas later joined them briefly before starting Charlie Thomas’s Drifters, which performed until 2020. Still other groups have claimed the Drifters name over the years as well.Mr. Thomas is survived by his wife, Rita Thomas; his daughters, Crystal Thomas Wilson and Victoria Green; his sons, Charlie Jr., Michael Sidbury and Brian Godfrey, and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.When the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducted seven of the Drifters in 1988, it recognized members of the 1953-58 lineup — Mr. Pinkney, Clyde McPhatter, Gerhart Thomas and Johnny Moore — as well as those from the later years: Mr. Thomas, Mr. King and Mr. Lewis.“Time has hardly made their work seem quaint,” Michael Hill wrote in the induction essay, “rather their work has withstood the ravages of the years to become even more special, more knowing.” More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      K-Pop Group Tomorrow X Together Ends SZA’s Seven-Week Run at No. 1

      by

      The boy band topped the Billboard album chart for the first time thanks to an array of collectible CDs for sale.Riding intense fan interest in its collectible CDs, the K-pop quintet Tomorrow X Together scored its first No. 1 album on the Billboard chart this week, ending a seven-week run on top for the R&B singer SZA.“The Name Chapter: Temptation,” a five-song EP by the South Korean boy band that clocks in under 15 minutes, sold a total of 161,500 equivalent units, including physical sales, downloads and streams, according to the tracking service Luminate. Nearly all of that sales activity — 98 percent, Billboard reported — was on that quaint technology known as the CD. The group released 14 different editions, including autographed versions and some with mystery bonuses like photo books and postcards.The No. 1 debut marks the third Top 5 release for Tomorrow X Together — made up of the musicians Soobin, Yeonjun, Beomgyu, Taehyun and Hueningkai — after the group landed “Minisode 2: Thursday’s Child” at No. 4 last year and “The Chaos Chapter: Freeze” at No. 5 in 2021. Its pure sales numbers for “The Name Chapter: Temptation” were the highest on the chart since Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” in November, Billboard said.SZA’s “SOS,” a consistent hit on streaming services, falls to No. 2 for the first time, with another 100,000 units in its eighth week of release. Overall, the album has topped more than one billion streams and one million in equivalent sales.Swift’s “Midnights” comes in at No. 3 with 68,000 units; the rap producer Metro Boomin’s “Heroes & Villains” is No. 4 with 47,000; and Drake and 21 Savage’s joint release, “Her Loss,” is No. 5 with 44,000.Further down in the Top 10 were debuts by Sam Smith, whose “Gloria” hit No. 7 (and took home a Grammy on Sunday night for the single “Unholy”), while Lil Yachty’s “Let’s Start Here,” a psychedelic foray that strays from rap music, lands at No. 9. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Beyoncé Has The Most Grammys Ever After Winning 32nd Award

      by

      Move over, Sir Georg Solti — Beyoncé reigns at the Grammy Awards.After 88 career nominations, the R&B singer and pop superstar won her 32nd Grammy on Sunday, for best dance/electronic music album, giving her the record for most Grammy victories. Solti, a Hungarian-born conductor who was the previous leader, won his last award in 1998, the year after his death.Beyoncé’s fourth win of the night — after taking home best R&B song for “Cuff It” and two awards at the preshow ceremony — came in a category that showed the breadth of her two-decade career: “Renaissance,” her tribute to Black and queer dance music, beat work by Bonobo, Diplo, Odesza and Rüfüs du Sol. Beyoncé became the first Black woman to win in the dance album category, which has been awarded since 2005.Earlier, her No. 1 single “Break My Soul” had won in best dance/electronic recording, while “Plastic Off the Sofa,” from the same genre-spanning album, won best traditional R&B performance.After the winner for dance/electronic album was announced by James Corden — “This is an honor, because we are witnessing history tonight!” — Beyoncé, who had not yet arrived at the ceremony when she won her first televised award of the night, took the stage to a standing ovation.“I’m trying not to be too emotional,” she said, “and I’m trying to just receive this night.” (Already, a post had been uploaded to Beyoncé’s official Instagram celebrating her wins so far: “We won 3 y’all,” the caption read, alongside a photo of the singer with a trio of trophies. “‘Plastic Off the Sofa’ is my favorite song on ‘Renaissance’ most days. It’s hard to pick though. Haaa.”)Beyoncé went on to thank her “Uncle Jonny,” whose battle with H.I.V. she has cited as an influence on her turn to dance music, with its historical ties to the L.G.B.T.Q. community.“I’d like to thank the queer community for your love and for inventing the genre,” the singer said.Nominated nine times overall on Sunday, mostly for “Renaissance” and its songs, Beyoncé will have a chance to add to her total with the top categories still to come: song, record and album of the year, a prize she has never won despite three previous chances. Of the singer’s 32 trophies, just her song of the year victory in 2010, for “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It),” came in one of the Grammys’ major, all-genre fields.Beyoncé’s status as both a perennial, now-unmatched Grammy favorite and also a high-profile loser under the ceremony’s brightest lights — including album losses to both Adele and Taylor Swift, each of whom has won the category multiple times — has underlined the show’s complex relationship with contemporary Black music.While the Recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammys, has in recent years emphasized its commitment to showcasing hip-hop and R&B on the telecast, and to broadening its voter base, critics have contended that Black music has too often been overlooked in the top categories.Beyoncé had entered the night already the most awarded woman in Grammy history, and tied with the producer Quincy Jones, who has 28 wins, for second most overall trophies. Alison Krauss, the bluegrass singer and violinist who was nominated twice on Sunday but lost both awards, has 27, as does Chick Corea.Here’s Beyoncé’s entire speech:“I’m trying not to be too emotional, and I’m trying to just receive this night. I want to thank God for protecting me. Thank you, God. I’d like to thank my Uncle Jonny, who’s not here, but he’s here in spirit. I’d like to thank my parents — my father, my mother — for loving me and pushing me. I’d like to thank my beautiful husband, my beautiful three children, who are at home watching. I’d like to thank the queer community for your love and for inventing the genre. God bless you. Thank you so much to the Grammys. Thank you.” More