Episode sixty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Maybe" by the Chantels, and covers child stardom, hymns in Latin, and how to get discovered twice in one day. 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 episode available, on "Don't You Just Know It" by Huey "Piano" Smith and the Clowns.



Resources

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

The only book actually about the Chantels is barely a book -- Maybe, Renee Minus White's self-published memoir, is more of a pamphlet, and it only manages even to get to that length with a ton of padding -- things like her fruit cake recipe. Don't expect much insight from this one.

A big chunk of the outline of the story comes from Girl Groups; Fabulous Females Who Rocked the World by John Clemente, which has  a chapter on the Chantels.

This article on Richie Barrett's career filled in much of the detail.

My opinions of George Goldner come mostly from reading two books -- Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz, which talks about Leiber and Stoller's attempts to go into business with Goldner, and Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy by Richard Carlin.

There are innumerable collections of the small number of recordings the Chantels released -- this one is as good as any.

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ERRATUM: I refer to “Summer Love” rather than “Summer's Love”

Transcript

We've already seen one girl group, when we looked at “Mr Lee” by the Bobbettes, but already within a few months of the Bobbettes' breakout hit, other groups were making waves with the public.

The Chantels were one such group, and one of the best. They were pretty much exact contemporaries of the Bobbettes – so much so that when the Bobbettes were forming, they decided against calling themselves the Chanels, because it would be too similar. The Chantels, too, changed their name early on. They were formed by a group of girls at a Catholic school – St Anthony of Padua school in the Bronx – and were originally named “the Crystals”, but they found that another group in the area had already named themselves that, and so they changed it. (This other group was not the same one as the famous Crystals, who didn't form until 1961). They decided to name themselves after St Francis de Chantal after their school won a basketball game against St. Francis de Chantal school – when they discovered that the Chantal in the saint's name was from the same root as the French word for singing, it seemed to be too perfect for them.

Originally there were around a dozen members of the group, but they slowly whittled themselves down to five girls, between the ages of fourteen and seventeen – Arlene Smith, Lois Harris, Sonia Goring, Jackie Landry, and Renee Minus. According to Renee (who now goes by her married name Renee Minus White) the group's name came from a brainstorming session between her, Lois, Jackie, and Sonia, with Arlene agreeing to it later – this may, though, have more to do with ongoing disputes between Arlene and the other group members than with what actually happened.

They were drawn together by their mutual love of R&B vocal groups – a particular favourite record of theirs was “In Paradise” by the Cookies, a New York-based girl group who had started recording a few years earlier, and whose records were produced by Jesse Stone, but who wouldn't have any major chart successes for several years yet:

[Excerpt: The Cookies, "In Paradise"]

So they were R&B singers, but the fact that these were Catholic schoolgirls, specifically, points to something about the way their music developed, and about early rock and roll more generally.

We've talked about the influence of religious music on rock and roll