Episode ninety-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "The Loco-Motion" by Little Eva, and how a demo by Carole King's babysitter became one of the biggest hits of the sixties. 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 "Duke of Earl" by Gene Chandler.

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.

There are no biographies of Little Eva, so I've used a variety of sources, including the articles on Little Eva and The Cookies at This Is My Story. The following books were also of some use:

A Natural Woman is Carole King's autobiography.

Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the whole scene.

Girl Groups by John Clemente contains potted biographies of many groups of the era, including articles on both Little Eva and The Cookies.

There are no decent CDs of Eva's material readily available, but I can recommend two overlapping compilations. This compilation contains Little Eva's only sixties album in full, along with some tracks by Carole King, the Cookies, and the Ronettes, while Dimension Dolls is a compilation from 1963 that overlaps substantially with that album but contains several tracks not on it.

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Transcript

A quick note before this begins -- there is some mention of domestic violence in this episode. If that's something that might upset you, please check the transcript of the episode at 500songs.com if reading it might be easier than listening.

A couple of months back, we talked about Goffin and King, and the early days of the Brill Building sound. Today we're going to take another look at them, and at a singer who recorded some of their best material, both solo and in a group, but who would always be overshadowed by the first single they wrote for her, when she was still working as their childminder. Today, we're going to look at Little Eva and "The Loco-Motion", and the short history of Dimension Records:

[Excerpt: Little Eva, "The Loco-Motion"]

The story of Little Eva is intertwined with the story of the Cookies, one of the earliest of the girl groups, and so we should probably start with them. We've mentioned the Cookies earlier, in the episode on "What'd I Say", but we didn't look at them in any great detail. The group started out in the mid-fifties, as a group of schoolgirls singing together in New York -- Dorothy Jones, her cousin Beulah Robertson, and a friend, Darlene McRae, who had all been in the choir at their local Baptist Church. They formed a group and made their first appearance at the famous Harlem Apollo talent contests, where they came third, to Joe Tex and a vocal group called the Flairs (not, I think, any of the Flairs groups we've looked at). They were seen at that contest by Jesse Stone, who gave them the name "The Cookies". He signed them to Aladdin Records, and produced and co-wrote their first single, "All-Night Mambo". That wasn't commercially successful, but Stone liked them enough that he then got them signed to Atlantic, where he again wrote their first single for the label. That first single was relatively unsuccessful, but their second single on Atlantic, "In Paradise", did chart, making number nine on the R&B chart:

[Excerpt: The Cookies, "In Paradise"]

But the B-side to that record would end up being more important to their career in the long run. "Passing Time" was the very first song by Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield to get recorded, even before Sedaka's recordings wit