Nino Tempo, Lenny Welch and Why We Ended Up Listening to Our Parents’ Music Anyway

The first time I heard “Deep Purple” — the song, not the hard rock band — I had no idea it was a revered classic from the golden age of American popular standards.

I had no idea that it had been written in 1933 by pianist Peter DeRose and recorded the next year as an instrumental by Paul Whiteman. Or that in 1938 Mitchell Parish added lyrics and the following year five different versions made the top 20, including the Larry Clinton recording with vocal by Bea Wain that spent nine weeks at №1.

I had no idea it was Babe Ruth’s favorite song or that DeRose performed it regularly at Ruth’s birthday parties.

Nope, all I knew was that my favorite top-40 radio station, WDRC, started playing a duet version by Nino Tempo and April Stevens in October of 1963. It played alongside featherweights like Jimmy Gilmer’s “Sugar Shack” and Elvis’s “Bossa Nova Baby,” the delightfully catchy instrumental “Washington Square” by the Village Stompers, pleasant pop like Dale and Grace’s “I’m Leaving It Up to You,” legitimate rock like Roy Orbison’s “Mean Woman Blues,” country tunes like Skeeter Davis’s “I Can’t Stay Mad At You,” terrific R&B like the Impressions’s “It’s All Right” and Garnett Mims’s gospel-drenched tour de force, “Cry Baby.”

As “Deep Purple” was leaving the charts in late November, the hottest rising hit was “Dominique” by the Singing Nun.

This, to 14-year-old me, was how popular music worked. Or at least the top-40 part of it. Songs were songs, whether they were “Deep Purple” (“When the deep purple falls / Over sleepy garden walls”) or “Bossa Nova Baby” (“Drink, drink, drink oh, fiddle-de-dink”).

In any case, Nino and April’s “Deep Purple” sounded a lot different than the 1930s versions had sounded, swooping through a series of “whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa” choruses and featuring a call-and-response section where April whispered the lyrics and Nino sang them.

I’ve never seen DeRose’s reaction to this recording, though the fact it went to №1 and sold a million copies doubtless made his bankbook happy. Musically, I can’t imagine he was as upset as Oscar Hammerstein reportedly became when he heard the Marcels’s overhaul of “Blue Moon” two years earlier and wanted everyone involved with the production sent to prison.

Nino Tempo died earlier this month, age 90, after a long career in which he became a close friend and musical confidante of Phil Spector. He played on many of Spector’s records, which made sense, since he was a musical prodigy proficient on multiple instruments. As an artist he was more of a one-hit wonder, and listening to his debut single from several years earlier, “Loonie for Junie,” it’s not hard to figure out why. (April Stevens, who in real life was Tempo’s older sister Caroline, died in 2023, a few days short of her 94th birthday. Her solo career notably included the breathy and suggestive recitation “Teach Me Tiger.”)

In any case, the fact “Deep Purple” reached No. 1 underscored how WDRC’s eclectic mix back then differed from the more homogeneous animal top-40 would later become.

This openness to variety also had an unintended consequence beyond top-40’s core mission of selling records and acne cream. It made top-40 radio a gateway drug to multiple styles of music kids didn’t think they liked. Under the big umbrella of “rock ’n’ roll,” we heard country, classic pop, gospel, Broadway, R&B, folk and even an occasional note of jazz or classical. Not every top-40 listener eventually embraced all of that, but the seed was planted. If you liked “Nut Rocker” by B. Bumble and the Stingers, you had heard Tchaikovsky. If you liked “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” you had heard Bach.

We also heard songs our parents had listened to, and while Nino Tempo and April Stevens sang “Deep Purple” rather differently than Bea Wain sang it in 1938, that wasn’t always the case.

Lenny Welch’s 1963 rendition of “Since I Fell For You,” for instance, could have been released in 1945, the year Buddy Johnson wrote the song.

Welch came to mind because he also died in early April, a few days after Nino Tempo, at the age of 86.

He never had a hit to match “Since I Fell For You,” which reached the top 10, but he parlayed his smooth ballad style, old school mixed with a little ’50s R&B, into a decent music career that later included singing commercials for Coca-Cola, M&Ms and Subaru.

He also put Asbury Park, New Jersey, where he was raised, onto the musical map a decade before some guy named Springsteen.

Welch wasn’t a unicorn in putting a romantic ballad into the top-10 next to, in his case, “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen and “Surfin’ Bird” by the Trashmen. The first decade of rock ’n’ roll also gave us Johnny Mathis, Brook Benton and Tommy Edwards, and if none of them sounded exactly like Billy Eckstine, they sang in the same warm crooner tradition.

“Since I Fell For You” left the charts two weeks before the debut of “I Want To Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles, which among other things launched the revolution that would gradually change almost everything, including top-40. There would eventually be little room for a song like “Since I Fell For You.”

And that’s too bad. Yes, music is one of the first ways many kids separate themselves from their parents, but it’s not like computers replacing typewriters, where the old way disappears. With music, a whole lot of the old hangs around to help shape the new.

By my calculation, my mother and father would have been almost exactly the same age as I when each of us heard “Deep Purple” for the first time. I’d be curious to know what their parents thought of it.