They only had one song we can remember, but what a simple, perfect single from 1961:
Rose Hamlin, who wrote the song she sang so distinctively, has died at the age of 71.
And here's John Lennon's cover of the song, introduced with a dedication "to Rosie, wherever she may be."
April 7, 2017
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22 comments:
Dreadful song dreadfully sung but it was a good slow dance.
Her IMDB page speaks to the song's popularity. It was used in:
2005 Cheap (writer: "Angel Baby")
2003 The Boys of 2nd Street Park (writer: "Angel Baby" - as Rosie Hamlin)
1999 Kiss Toledo Goodbye ("ANGEL BABY")
1997 The Locusts (writer: "Angel Baby")
1994 There Goes My Baby (writer: "Angel Baby")
1989 She's Out of Control (writer: "Angel Baby")
1988 Colors (writer: "ANGEL BABY")
1987 Date with an Angel (writer: "Angel Baby")
1985 After Hours (writer: "Angel Baby")
1969 Mondo Trasho (writer: "Angel Baby")
Now we know the answer to the question posed in the liner notes to Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy in connection with D'yer Maker ("Whatever Happened to Rosie and the Originals?").
So young. So pretty. So dead. RIP.
That song could well have been done by a male do-wop tenor. She uses that sound with skill and talent, even though it's clearly a female voice. I wonder if she ever did it as a duet with a good male tenor. It could have been fabulous.
Her songwriting credit was ripped off by the label (Highland Records) as frequently happened back in those days. Her royalties were tied up in the courts for years.
Goodnight Mrs Calabash, wherever you are.
"Slow" dance or a hard dance? ��
Sad and a little melancholic. This woman was a dolly when I was a year old. Now she's a dead old lady as I make my way through late middle age. Time is relentless.
Seems like she wrote and recorded the song when she was 15 years old. I assume that picture of her was taken when she was a bit older?
In 1969, at the age of 26, after graduating from college and law school, I found myself in Army basic training with a bunch of kids – sorry, I mean young men – mostly 18 to 20 years old. (At that age, a difference of 6 or 8 years is a BIG difference.) One day we were cleaning up the barracks, and somebody had a portable radio on. What was playing was 1950’s rock and roll. The kids – sorry, I mean young men – thought it was great. They’d never heard anything like that before. When I told them that this was music from when I was a teen-ager they didn’t believe me. It was too good to be so old. I don’t remember if Rosie was on the play list, but can’t we all agree that the original was MUCH better than Lennon’s cover of it?
I love the high ooh ooh stuff in thhe end. It's such a surprising contrast to the nasal rote attitude in the beginning, as if she becomes angelic by singing about her baby. You go on a little journey with her.
Ahhh, late 50's/early 60's summer evenings in the Central Valley, windows rolled down, radio playing XERB, crusing in your lowered Chevy or your hot rod. Pretty girls everywhere, I married one 53 years ago. Every other Saturday night a dance with a cooking blues rock band. Two hours to the beach at Santa Cruz, plenty of jobs a high school grad could use to support a family. The San Joaquin Valley was paradise. If you weren't there you'll never know.
"I love the high ooh ooh stuff in thhe end"
It's the sound of her heart skipping a beat.
Willa May sang in a beach bar in Santa Cruz for I don't know how long. Had a killer band.
It's funny how do-wop music has seemed to gain a sinister edge that wasn't there in its first go around (was it?)
If you heard this in a movie soundtrack, it would be the song obliviously playing on the radio as the camera panned past the gory crime scene.
For some reason, in modern pop culture innocence reads as false innocence.
I'm not complaining. I'd watch that movie! I just think it's interesting.
Re the Lennon cover: until the Beatles hooked up with Brian Epstein, they were almost exclusively a cover band, and they had really good taste in finding lesser known American songs to cover. If you go on YouTube, you can find some of the stuff they recorded in Hamburg with Tony Sheridan as the front man.
Obviously their true destiny lay in a different direction, but they were a really good blues band.
Hmm. It was songs like this that made me not pay attention to early rock and roll...schmaltzy, uninteresting, blah.
But obviously, rock and roll had to go through stuff like this in order to get to the Beatles, who caused me to pay attention to rock and love it forever.
Having said that, Hamlin had a beautiful voice and to think that she was fourteen or fifteen when she composed and recorded it is amazing.
She must have been 16 at the time of the recording.
Marty: Let's...uh talk a little bit about the history of the group.
I understand Nigel you and David originally started the band
wuh...back in...when was it...back in 1964?
David: Well before that we were in different groups, I was in a
group called The Creatures and w-which was a skiffle group.
Nigel: I was in Lovely Lads.
David: Yeah.
Nigel: And then we looked at each other and says well we might as well
join up you know and uh....
David: So we became The Originals.
Nigel: Right.
David: And we had to change our name actually....
Nigel: Well there was, there was another group in the east end called The
Originals and we had to rename ourselves.
David: The New Originals.
Nigel: The New Originals and then, uh, they became....
David: The Regulars, they changed their name back to The Regulars and
we thought well, we could go back to The Originals but
what's the point?
Nigel: We became The Thamesmen at that point.
One problem with having lived overseas for four years: I can never win a "name that tune" contest.
So I never heard of this lady or of her song.
As DJT might say, "Sad!"
As a matter of curiosity, how does a vicious little porn merchant, (Indian[?]welas asih), so consistently manage destruction of blogspotdotcom's defenses?
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