Mention Sonny Curtis and You Don’t Just Hear Crickets
Back in the summer of 1961 the Four Preps scored a top-20 hit with a comic song titled “The More Money for You and Me Medley,” in which they suggested their path to greater fortune would be the elimination of every competing popular vocal group.
The verse about Dion and the Belmonts, accordingly, suggests that group will soon be removed by the constabulary: “While the kids are watching Dion / Singing about the stars / The Belmonts are out in the parking lot / Stealing hubcaps off of cars.”
Now there is no evidence that the Belmonts — Carlo Mastrangelo, Freddy Milano and Angelo D’Aleo — ever stole hubcaps. But the song tangentially underscores a widespread truth about the many vocal groups that backed popular artists in the early days of rock ’n’ roll.
Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. Danny and the Juniors. Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs. Little Anthony and the Imperials. Shep and the Limelites. Rosie and the Originals. Jay and the Americans. Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. Gerry and the Pacemakers.
What only the most devout among us remember is exactly who any of these backup singers were. They are, collectively, blank pages. They could have been pioneering heart transplant surgeons or they could have been hubcap thieves. They almost always sang in anonymity, which has its advantages (freedom of movement) and its disadvantages (less money).
That makes it particularly impressive that Sonny Curtis — and that’s his real full name, Sonny Curtis — rose from a backup band to make a name and a lifelong living from his own music.
Curtis, who died Friday in Nashville at the admirable age of 88, was for a short time a member of Buddy Holly’s Crickets, joining the band only a few months before Holly’s tragic death on February 3, 1959. But Curtis had been a musical associate of Holly years before, when as young Texas teenagers the two of them put together a band called the Three Tunes. He also played on records Holly cut in 1956 for Decca, before he became a star. That’s Curtis playing guitar on “Blue Days, Black Nights,” a catchy rockabilly tune that points exactly where Holly’s clean country-inflected music was going.
At the same time, Curtis was starting to write songs. Holly recorded his “Rockin’ Around With Ollie Vee,” and country star Webb Pierce hit the charts in 1957 with Curtis’s co-written “Someday,” two minutes and 10 seconds of good solid melodic heartbreak lament.
After Holly’s death the Crickets cut an album with Curtis singing lead and featuring two of Curtis’s songs, “More Than I Can Say” (co-written with Crickets’s drummer Jerry Allison) and “I Fought the Law.”
Both songs reflect how closely Curtis’s music roots aligned with Holly’s. “More Than I Can Say,” which would sound a bit fuller when Leo Sayer took it to №2 on the charts in 1980, started life as one of those under-the-radar American rock ’n’ roll songs that a British band called the Beatles performed in their live sets in Hamburg, Germany, in 1961 and 1962.
“I Fought The Law,” which would become Curtis’s most popular composition, was almost haiku in its directness: “I fought the law and the law won.”
Can’t get much more basic than that. After John Mellencamp copped the thought years later for “The Authority Song” (“I fight authority / Authority always wins”), Mellencamp laughed and said, “It’s close to being almost too stripped-down.”
While “I Fought the Law” was performed by dozens of artists, including Bruce Springsteen, it remains best known as the signature hit for Bobby Fuller, a scorching version that showed Fuller’s reverence for Holly and the Crickets. (Aside: He called his group the Bobby Fuller Four. Can anyone name the other three?)
Curtis scored another writing hit in 1961 with “Walk Right Back.” His fellow Cricket Jerry Allison was playing in the Everly Brothers’s road band by then, and Allison got the song to the Everlys, who rode it into the top 10. While the Everlys’s version spotlighted their enchanting harmonies, the song itself was still in the spare Holly mold.
After that Curtis migrated into other parts of the music biz, writing ad jingles, playing backup on the road for artists from Slim Whitman to the Everlys, and becoming a popular session guitarist. That’s Curtis on guitar for Vicki Lawrence’s melodrama “The Night the Lights Went Out In Georgia.”
It was the songwriting, however, that enabled him to survive the rough terrain of the music biz, because song publishing rights are the cow that keeps delivering cash. Toward that end, Curtis’s next big score was “Love Is All Around” which became the theme for television’s beloved Mary Tyler Moore Show.
That’s Curtis singing as Mary tosses her hat into the air to open the show, and Curtis’s name on the credit. While it wasn’t his edgiest song, it illustrated how writing dozens of earlier songs and playing on hundreds of sessions had left him well equipped to write a TV theme.
He would have one more big radio hit, co-writing Keith Whitley’s 1989 hit “I’m No Stranger to the Rain” in 1989. Musically, it has much of the same propulsive rhythm as Curtis’s songs three decades earlier with Holly, and in addition to reaching №1 on the charts, it won the Country Music Association award or single of the year — a trophy Curtis could have displayed next to the Emmy he won for writing the theme to the Burt Reynolds show Evening Shade. Curtis was also inducted into three musical halls of fame, though he never won a Grammy.
“I’m No Stranger” was the last Whitley song issued while Whitley was still alive, which has given it an association with an eerie tragic trilogy in Curtis’s musical life.
Holly died in a plane crash at 22, shortly after Curtis joined the Crickets. Bobby Fuller died at 23, under circumstances that are still debated today, soon after “I Fought the Law” seemed to have made him a star. Whitley died at 34, basically drinking himself to death, weeks after “I’m No Stranger to the Rain” had become his third consecutive №1 hit.
All this had an effect on Curtis, his daughter Sarah Graziano Curtis told the New York Times. ““When he was growing up, I know he definitely wanted to be famous,” she said. “I think as time went on, he saw a lot of tragedies related to fame. He saw people succumb to accidents and addiction.”
Curtis himself became a star inside the business, reverently regarded by the likes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones as well as Nashville. He never had to steal hubcaps to pay for dinner.
“He was able to live a normal life but still make a living in the music business,” Graziano, a writer whose biography of her father will come out next month, told the Times. “And that’s no small feat.”
