Episode ninety-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Stand By Me" by Ben E. King, and at the later career of the Drifters. 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 "If I Had a Hammer" by Trini López.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/



Resources

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

This 3-CD set has all Ben E. King's recordings, both solo and with the Drifters, the Crowns, and LaVern Baker, up to 1962.

This episode follows on from episode seventy-five, on "There Goes My Baby".

I'm not going to recommend a Drifters compilation, because I know of none that actually have only the original hit recordings without any remakes or remixes. The disclaimer in episode seventy-five also applies here -- I may have used an incorrect version of a song here, because of the sloppy way the Drifters' music is packaged.

My main resource in putting this episode together was Marv Goldberg's website, and his excellent articles on both the early- and late-period Drifters, Bill Pinkney's later Original Drifters, the Five Crowns, and Ben E. King.

Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus.

Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller's side of the story well.

And Bill Millar's book on the Drifters, while it is more a history of 50s vocal group music generally using them as a focus than a biography of the group, contains some interesting material.

Patreon

This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?

Transcript

Today, we're going to look at a song that ties together several of the threads we've looked at in previous episodes. We're going to look at a song that had its roots in a gospel song that had been performed by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, that involves the Drifters, Leiber and Stoller, and Phil Spector, and which marks the highpoint of the crossover from gospel to pop audiences that had been started by Ray Charles. We're going to look at "Stand By Me", by Ben E King.

[Excerpt: Ben E King, "Stand By Me"]

When we left the Drifters, they'd hit a legal problem. When the contracts for the individual members had been sold to George Treadwell, the owner of the Drifters' name, Ben E King's contract had not been sold with the rest. This had meant that while King continued to sing lead on the records, including the first few big hits of this new lineup of Drifters, he wasn't allowed to tour with them, and so they'd had to bring in a soundalike singer, Johnnie Lee Williams, to sing his parts on stage. So there were now five Drifters in the studio, but only four of them in the touring group.

That might seem like an unworkable arrangement for any length of time, and so it turned out, but at first this was very successful. Leiber and Stoller continued producing records for this new Drifters lineup, but didn't tend to write for them. They were increasingly tiring of writing to a teenage audience that didn't really share their tastes, and were starting to move into writing for adult stars like Peggy Lee.

And so Leiber and Stoller increasingly relied on songs by other writers, and one team they particularly relied on was Pomus and Shuman. You'll remember we've talked about them in association with both the Drifters and Leiber and Stoller previously, and that they'd been the ones who'd discovered the Ben E. King lineup of the Drifters. Doc Pomus was one of the great R&B songwriters of the fifties, but by 1960 he and Mort Shuman, who was thirteen years younger than him, had w