Welcome to episode forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This one looks at "Goodnight My Love" by Jesse Belvin, and at the many groups he performed with, and his untimely death. . Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus podcast, on "In the Still of the Night" by the Five Satins



Before getting to the resources, I wanted to preserve a comment left on the site's old host, the single most touching thing anyone has said about this podcast:
"​Jesse Belvin is my Beloved Uncle, my mother's brother. I've been waiting all my life for him to be recognized in this manner. I must say the content in this podcast is ?correct!Joann and Jesse practically raised me. Can't express how grateful I am. Just so glad someone got it right. I still miss them dearly to this day. My world was forever changed Feb. 6th 1960. I can remember him writing most of those songs right there in my grandmother's living room. I think I'm his last living closest relative, that knows everything in this podcast is true. THANK YOU. Debra A. Frazier#I was there"

Resources

As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.

My principal source for this episode was this CD, whose liner notes provided the framework to which I added all the other information from a myriad other books and websites, including but not limited to Jackie Wilson Lovers, Marv Goldberg's website, and Etta James' autobiography. But as I discuss in this episode this is one of those where I've pulled together information from so many sources, a full list would probably be longer than the episode itself.

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Transcript

Before we begin, a quick content warning. This episode contains material dealing with the immediate aftermath of a death in a car crash. While I am not explicit, this might be upsetting for some.

Jesse Belvin is a name that not many people recognise these days -- he's a footnote in the biographies of people like Sam Cooke or the Penguins, someone whose contribution to music history is usually summed up in a line or two in a book about someone else.

The problem is that Jesse Belvin was simply too good, and too prolific, to have a normal career. He put out a truly astonishing number of records as a songwriter, performer, and group leader, under so many different names that it's impossible to figure out the true extent of his career. And people like that don't end up having scholarly books written about them.

And when you do find something that actually talks about Belvin himself, you find wild inaccuracies. For example, in researching this episode, I found over and over again that people claimed that Barry White played piano on the song we're looking at today, "Goodnight My Love". Now, White lived in the same neigbourhood as Belvin, and they attended the same school, so on the face of it that seems plausible. It seems plausible, at least, until you realise that Barry White was eleven when "Goodnight My Love" came out.

Even so, on the offchance, I tracked down an interview with White where he confirmed that no, he was not playing piano on doo-wop classics before he hit puberty. But that kind of misinformation is all over everything to do with Jesse Belvin.

The end result of this is that Jesse Belvin is someone who exists in the gaps of other people's histories, and this episode is an attempt to create a picture out of what you find when looking at the stories of other musicians. As a result, it will almost certainly be less accurate than some other episodes. There's so little information about Belvin that if you didn't know anything about him, you'd assume he was some unimportant, minor, figure.

But in 1950s R&B -- among musicians, especially those on the West Coast -- there was no bigger name than