Maurice Williams: The Simple World of Hits and the Complex World of Covers
The late Maurice Williams provided ammunition to those who scorned early rock ’n’ roll as kind of simplistic.
Williams, who died Monday in Charlotte, N.C., at the age of 84, accomplished that unintended feat by writing two signature hits of the early era.
The first, “Little Darlin’,” peaked at №41 on the Billboard pop chart when Williams recorded it with the Gladiolas in 1957. Then the Diamonds cut it and their version reached №2, kept from the top by Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up.”
Williams had better personal luck with his second national hit, “Stay,” which he and the Zodiacs took to №1 in 1960.
Neither song is Shakespeare, or even Cole Porter.
Sample from “Little Darlin’”: “My love-a, I was wrong-a / To try to love two.” Sample from “Stay”: “Oh won’t you stay / Just a little bit longer / Please please please please please / Tell-a me you’re gonna.”
Yes, those are the kind of lyrics that made it easy for defenders of “good music,” like Steve Allen, to ridicule rock ’n’ roll.
All that Allen and his fellow ridiculers missed, really, was the point: A new generation got it and loved it.
Williams, who wrote “Little Darlin’ “ when he was 13, was simply applying the old songwriter trick of putting well-understood thoughts into catchy musical form. “Little Darlin’ “ and “Stay” both sold millions of copies in their original release and subsequent incarnations by the likes of the Four Seasons, Joan Baez, Jackson Browne, the Hollies and Elvis.
Williams also wrote one other million-seller: “May I.” He recorded it for Vee Jay Records about 10 minutes before Vee Jay declared bankruptcy in 1966, so Bill Deal and the Rondells had the hit version. “May I,” as rock writer Dave Marsh noted some years ago, is a striking song because, in contrast to the macho declarations that have always permeated rock ’n’ roll, the singer in this one is asking permission.
While Maurice Williams never became a household name, he built a long and successful career. He became a beloved figure among Carolina beach music fans in his later years, and a stage career that began when he formed the pre-teen gospel group the Junior Harmonizers stretched out until he was well into his 70s.
The history of his two biggest hits also casts an instructive focus on cover records, one of the more controversial norms in the early rock ’n’ roll world.
“Cover” versions, it should be noted, are widely mis-defined. A true “cover version” is a song recorded by a different artist at the same time the original is being promoted and played. When Pat Boone recorded “Tutti-Frutti” at the same time as Little Richard, that created a cover version. What’s not a cover version is the Beatles recording “Twist and Shout” years after the Isley Brothers. That’s a “remake.”
In any case, there is a widespread historical consensus that most cover records were musically worthless and ethically bankrupt. Who wants to hear the Crew-Cuts sing “Earth Angel” when you could be hearing the Penguins? Accordingly, why should the Crew-Cuts have made more money?
Nor can the racial element be disregarded, since most of the best-known covers in the rock ’n’ roll world had white artists singing sanitized versions of black R&B songs. Even when an actual rocker like Bill Haley recorded “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” his version was a weak swing at Joe Turner’s towering original.
It’s not hard to see why original artists got frustrated. LaVern Baker, several of whose songs were covered by Georgia Gibbs, talked about seeing Gibbs in an airport and asking why she didn’t get some songs of her own. Ruth Brown remembered Patti Page covering Brown’s “Oh What a Dream” and said, “I mean, she already had the doggie in the window. Why’d she need my song, too?”
It was not, however, quite that black and white. Musically, for one thing, some covers were pretty good records on their own. The McGuire Sisters’s cover of the Moonglows’s “Sincerely” was a splendid pop record, just as the original was a wonderful R&B record.
And speaking of Maurice Williams, the Diamonds’s cover of “Little Darlin’” is one of the few cover versions widely considered better than the black-group original. Williams has talked about how Excello Records rearranged the song to give it a calypso beat, hoping to cash in on the popularity of Latin and Island music, and the recording feels slightly unfinished, like the producers needed to go around once more on the arrangement and the execution. The Diamonds, who recorded the song in one take with their drummer missing, rearranged it just enough to keep the beat while making it more infectious.
There were also some grey areas on the financial side. Black songwriters, and artists who wrote songs, frequently saw cover versions as a way to sell a lot more records, thus multiplying their royalties, because the cover versions could go where the originals, sadly, often could not: mainstream pop radio.
Dave Somerville of the Diamonds, talking about his group’s cover of “Little Darlin’,” summarized it to Gary James of ClassicBands.com: “White stations weren’t playing black music. The Diamonds could get play on white-owned stations.”
Small wonder Williams told music historian Todd Baptista that he was on board with the Diamonds’s “Little Darlin’ ” cover, knowing it would help give him a lifetime of more royalties.
Jesse Stone, who wrote “Shake, Rattle and Roll” for Turner (under the name Charles Calhoun), said he happily rewrote it into Haley’s sanitized version for the same reasons: more exposure, more royalties.
Pat Boone said a few years ago that black artists loved having him cover their songs, even when the musical results made R&B fans roll their eyes, because it got those songs to audiences that otherwise might never have heard them. Also, Boone added, hearing his version of the song likely sent a certain percentage of his audience back to seek out the originals.
There’s probably some truth and some rationalizing there. It doesn’t alter the fact that the Crew-Cuts’s lounge version of “Sh-Boom” spent nine weeks at №1 while the Chords’s groundbreaking original barely cracked the top five. It does suggest there are a few nuances in the world of covers.
It’s also worth remembering that for its first six or seven decades, the record industry often marketed songs themselves more than specific versions of songs. If a song became popular in the 1930s, a half dozen artists might quickly have recorded it. Some of that mentality lingered into the 1950s, when Columbia saw Hank Williams scoring hits in the country market and had Tony Bennett record pop versions.
Maurice Williams presumably was thinking about none of that when he began writing songs and forming vocal groups. He had one goal: getting their songs on the radio. It’s a common dream that, for Williams, had an uncommon ending. He did.
