Billy Shelton has described himself in interviews as "a prehistoric Spaniel". He wasn't with the celebrated doo wop group during their hitmaking days on Vee-Jay Records in the 1950s but he taught their leader, James "Pookie" Hudson, how to sing during their time together at Roosevelt High School in Gary, Indiana, forming a vocal trio called the Three Bees with Pookie and another schoolfriend, Calvin Fossett.
Billy left school before Pookie, who was eventually prevailed upon by other schoolmates to join the group which became the Spaniels. A few years into their professional career Billy received several invitations to join them but resisted; he didn't become a member until the late 1980s.
This was the second lineup of Spaniels, to be heard on later Vee-Jay sides such as Everyone's Laughing. Around 1990, however, Pookie decided to reform the original group, who had sung on Vee-Jay's debut release Baby It's You and the classic Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite. All the originals, who had long been out of the business, were keen to get back together with the exception of Ernest Warren, who had become a minister, and Billy took his place.
Now Billy Shelton is the last man standing from those Roosevelt High days – and still leading a group of Spaniels. They can be seen in Episode One of the BBC documentary series Rock'n'Roll America, with Billy intoning those immortal bass notes of Gerald Gregory's which usher in Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite.
I was born on March 9th, 1934, in Chicago. My parents came from the South – my mother was born in Alabama and my father was born in North Carolina – but everybody migrated to Chicago because things were happening in Chicago. And 25 miles away, in Gary, Indiana, they had the largest steel mill in the world, so the Southern families and groups would all migrate there because it was work.
I had a gift: from when I was three years old I could hear any song on the radio and sound enough like it so that people would know. In those days it was Bing Crosby, the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots – I was fascinated with group singing even then. Blues was just starting then but the radio stations didn't play black music: the only thing you could hear was Negro spirituals on a Sunday morning. They had groups like the Southernaires and the Soul Stirrers, the Pilgrim Travelers, the Golden Gate Quartet, the Dixie Hummingbirds – that was the only kind of black music you could hear.
When we lived in 46th and Vincennes our apartment was right over a tavern, and when the drunks would hear me sing they would stand me up on a soapbox and gather around and I would sing my little songs that I heard on the radio. They would give me nickels, dimes and quarters, and back in those days of the Depression that was good money: I was actually making more money than my dad was making on his job. My father broke my piggy bank when he needed some money real quick; I had been singing for about two or three months and he counted out about a hundred dollars.
My grandfather was a minister; he would travel round and he would sing when he had his services. My father was a Pullman porter – in those days that was a good job for a black man to have – and I think I got my sense of humour and my flair for showbiz from him. And my mother played the organ and piano, trained voices and sang.
She would work as music instructor with around five churches at the same time and they'd have rehearsals on different days of the week. In each church there'd be four or five choirs, maybe a senior choir, a gospel chorus, a male chorus, a female chorus and a youth choir. Her motto was: "If you can talk, you can sing."
I could sing soprano when I was a child and I was born with a low voice so I had a wide range vocally. My mother would take me to the rehearsals, and any section where they were weak, or if the sopranos didn't show up: "Billy, go over there and sing soprano with the women." Or if she was one short in the altos: "Go sing with the altos," or: "Go over there and sing baritone." I sang with all the choirs apart from the girl choir.
I can see now how that benefited me. I hated it at the time, because I couldn't play like the other kids, but she could see the talent that I was born with. And this helped my career because it taught me so much about music, all the rudiments of harmony and stuff, without ever going to school. Everything was by ear. She did give me music lessons, she tried to teach me how to play the piano, but I wasn't interested in playing instruments or reading music because I didn't have to: I could sing the music that was in my heart and that was it.
My mother and my father split up when I was still just a kid. My father was an alcoholic. As long as he was sober he was the nicest guy you could want to meet but when he would drink some whiskey then his horns would start showing: he would pick a fight with my mother when he got drunk and hit her, and that was a terrible thing for a child to watch, because I loved both of them.
Eventually my mother, being the strong, protective woman that she was, divorced my father because of his abusive ways, and I swore to myself then I would never touch alcohol in case I might be like my father, unable to resist it. I stayed away from those kinds of parties, and this is probably why I'm still alive and in such good health.
We were a very close-knit Christian family and my grandmother was a minister too. She told me never let the sun go down when you have hatred in your heart for anybody, and that's why I don't have any enemies.
My mother later married a minister from Mississippi and I thought of him as my father. The minister was more like a father to me than my real father, although I was maybe seven or eight years old when my mother married him. He was the one who would take time and play games with me and he, more than anybody, formed the type of person that I am today. By him being a minister he taught me to love people, not to hate people, and to try and be peaceful.
Let me tell you how Santa Claus hurt him. I remember my daughter telling me that the myth of Santa Claus doesn't hurt anyone because kids are so excited thinking about it. Well, I grew up as a child loving fat white guys because they reminded me of Santa Claus, but here's the bad thing. My father worked in a junkyard. He wanted to be a successful minister because he loved bringing happiness, joy and peace but he didn't have the education. My mother had much more education than my father and she had to help him when it came to making his sermons. But my father worked in that junkyard to put biscuits on the table for us because he loved us, loved our family as his own; my biological father had never done that. He would work overtime in below zero weather when he was sick so that he could buy me a gift that I wanted on Christmas ... and I'm giving the credit to an overweight, redneck white guy.
Sometime in the early 1940s Billy's mother made some appearances on a show of Jack L Cooper's on Chicago station WSBC. The Radio Hall of Fame website notes that "Jack L. Cooper is considered to be the first African–American radio announcer in America ... By 1937, Cooper was heard on WSBC five days a week, with a variety of disc jockey programs that played an eclectic blend of black music, ranging from blues to jazz to gospel."
They called her "Lil Shelton, the Queen of the Blues", and she played the piano and sang Ethel Waters songs. I don't think she made any live performances; it was all on the radio, she made a few broadcasts and that was it, though she had show business in her blood and she could have stayed with it. She actually sneaked away from the church and did that but she had to stop because she would have been kicked out of the church.
But that's where my musical thing came from. And there was no difference to me: it was all music. I could sing the blues just as well as I could sing church songs. But the people around me didn't see it that way. My friend Rebert Harris, of the Soul Stirrers, told me that back in those days if you sang a song like Trees that was considered blues and they would throw you out of the church for that.
When my mother married the preacher, as his congregation began to grow she had to spend more time with him. Our religion was African Methodist Episcopal church, or AME Zion. And what they require – and I never did like this – was that every time you build a church they would send you to another area to start another church. Well, that might have been okay for them, but for me, us being black, we lived in the poor section, and I would be subjected to the gangs and have to fight and sing my way out of gang wars. It was like a nightmare for me, all those switches, but being involved in the church, having a close family, and my love of music helped keep me centered and out of trouble.
The story never did have a happy ending and it wasn't till after I got to be a grown man that my father finally got the idea and changed his denomination from AME to Baptist. Then he could build a church and watch it grow, and he became prosperous: he was one of the biggest preachers in Toledo, Ohio.
Before he passed away his health was failing and he offered me to take over all he worked for, all the days he had to work outside in the junkyard and go to different cities before he found his home. And he said, "Billy, would you pastor my church?" But preaching never appealed to me even though I've probably been to church more than most preachers have because of my family connections and singing with gospel groups: Sunday morning it was not uncommon that I could go to three or four different churches and all of them would have different theologies.
After a year establishing a new church in Akron, Ohio the family were back in Chicago at the time of Billy's graduation from elementary school in 1948. Shortly after that, however, his stepfather's ministry entailed yet another move, one which would prove decisive in Billy's life: to the city of Gary, Indiana, 25 miles away.
"Gary ... was founded in 1906 by the US Steel Corporation," writes Robert Pruter. "The company made Gary a major steel production center, and the city grew largely as a result of settlement by European immigrants. By the 1920s, southern blacks and Mexicans began settling in the city."
Gary was once a boom town with pretty close to 200,000 people there; people would migrate to Gary like a gold rush to get a better job because of the steel mill, and that made it a Mecca for entertainment because most of these people coming were singers. I grew up in Chicago and I thought I could sing – until I came to Gary. It was a big quartet town and the competition was overwhelming because you had to go up against guys from Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida – all over. Every Sunday morning you'd hear at least 35 different gospel groups on the radio.
Billy soon began to frequent a barbershop whose proprietor, Sylvester Smith Jr., known as "Smitty", managed a gospel quartet; Richard Carter notes that "the legendary groups were all booked in Gary by Smitty."
Their quartet was the best quartet in the whole city, and they would get professional groups from outside the city to come in. They were called the Royal Quartet because the shop was the Royal Barbershop. People would go there to get their hair cut because they could hear music. The quartet would rehearse in the shop and Smitty had an old Seeburg jukebox with gospel quartet records, and on any record where the group had an outstanding bass I would mimic the singer.
I didn't know what I was doing but I was close enough, and when customers came in and got their haircut I was an attraction: "Hey, listen to this kid – okay, Billy!" And they would put a nickel in the jukebox, the record would start and I would mimic the bass.
During those days the best singer was a guy called "Dickie": Isaac Freeman of the Fairfield Four. Smitty told me that they were one of the oldest gospel groups, established in 1921. Dickie had a phenomenal bass voice and he had his own style and I could mimic all the songs that he sang. I never met this guy at the time because the Fairfield Four were so busy travelling around the country. I couldn't afford to buy a ticket for anything but if a group came to do a show in Gary if there were some spare seats they would slip me one and I could see and watch all the groups sing; I was able to get techniques and watch the strategy of the gospel groups meeting each other in battle that way.
Billy was enrolled in Theodore Roosevelt High, the only school in the area exclusively for black students, who were treated like second-class citizens everywhere else, according to the Gary Crusader. “With the institution of segregation in the public schools (established),” writes historian James B Lane, “Gary’s Black people were forced to make the best of a bad situation. They took pride in Roosevelt High School. Roosevelt became a key center for the African-American citizens in Gary.”
Billy discovered that two schoolmates in the same year, James "Pookie" Hudson and Calvin Fossett, shared his passion for singing, and he formed a trio called the Three Bees.
Everything was informal; nobody went to music class or anything. The closest we had to instruction was being in the boys' glee club at Roosevelt. We would actually go out on the street corners and sing but our favourite place was the toilet, because of the echoes – it sounded like a miniature recording studio and music would sound good in there.
But I was a rascal, I was a scoundrel then. I was the youngest of my family and it was my job to empty the garbage and wash dishes and stuff like that. I hated to wash dishes. So Pookie and Calvin would come by my house and want me to sing with them and I would tell them, "I'll sing with you, but I've got to wash these dishes." So they began to do it for me: Pookie would wash and Calvin would dry. And after about three or four months they would just walk into my house and put on the aprons.
So I have to fault myself for that; I just didn't want to wash dishes. But they knew that I would train them to sing.
I didn't appreciate that special quality in Pookie's voice immediately. I tried real hard to get him to change his style. Pookie was always to me like an anaemic singer: he didn't come off sounding like Mario Lanza. I wanted Pookie to project but that just wasn't his way of singing. And I'd say, "You sound like a sick old man!" when he would sing church songs.
But the thing that I did notice was that whenever Pookie would sing a song, no matter how anaemic it sounded to me, the women went crazy: he could be in church, singing a church song, and all the girls in church would start swooning. I wanted him to be more forceful but he could recognise that gift in himself.
The style was there from the very beginning: as a little kid he had that style, and later people like Aaron Neville, Cory Wells, the lead singer of Three Dog Night, Gene Chandler, Felix Cavaliere of the Young Rascals – all of these people loved Pookie's style. He really was a great singer because he went for the soul, he went for the inner feeling.
All three of us – that's Pookie, Calvin and myself – it was our passion to sing. But when the Three Bees first started our peers in the church laughed at us because we sang more of a delicate harmony: he was our lead singer so we couldn't sing louder or more forceful than Pookie. With the arrangements and everything, the person in our group that was most in demand was Calvin Fossett because he sang tenor and it was so clear it sounded like a bell ringing. The groups weren't interested in me or Pookie, they wanted Calvin; that's the funny thing about it.
This was around the time of Clyde McPhatter, whose father was a minister too. I would say Clyde McPhatter was responsible for getting the soulful sound of singing into popular music. You had Sonny Til around that time but he was not a spectacular lead singer; Clyde McPhatter was. He could hit those high notes without going into high falsetto, just naturally. He introduced runs, where you hit a note then you blend a lot of notes with that. Jackie Wilson was taught by Clyde because they both sang with the Dominos; Clyde was the senior singer and Jackie was the young upstart. Jackie Wilson had this big voice and then Clyde taught him the finesse of the singing, so that's why Jackie Wilson was probably one of the greatest singers. He could have sung opera and almost did, like with the song Night, which I believe is based on an operatic aria.
But my idol, and Pookie's idol, was a guy named Billy Williams. His group were the Charioteers and they were way ahead of their time: they were making chords, harmonies, unheard of before them. Billy Williams popularised the high tenor which went all the way down to Smokey Robinson and Eddie Kendricks and people like that. He had such finesse: he would hit notes you couldn't hear, then he would gradually increase the volume so you could hear the note. He would hit a note and hold it for a full 60 seconds while the group sang the song. He was such an artist.
That's the guy that Pookie was inspired by. And when he left the group he was the first black to be on regular television: the Billy Williams Quartet were the house group on Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows. Billy Williams had to cross over to keep from starving – in those days you couldn't make any money singing gospel. If you sang in church they'd look hard at you if you asked for money; you should be doing it for God. That was why so many black entertainers had to leave the church to make a living: it just made no provision for your ability to pay bills.
Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots would follow the Charioteers around when they were the top group, and whenever they had concerts he would always be in a seat in the front row. But Billy Williams said Bill Kenny had his own style.
But Pookie had something in his voice that made him great – and I think it was even greater than Billy Williams or Bill Kenny. These other guys were singers: they could demonstrate what they could do musically, by the notes. Pookie never hit any high notes, he was just a plain singer, so for him to be able to turn as many heads as he did his gift had to be the greater, and people could feel it.
Danny Boy was probably Jackie Wilson's greatest song. But Pookie sang Danny Boy in his quiet way and I think he hit it right on the head, cause he's singing it with sincerity, like it was meant to be sung by an Irish tenor. He didn't try anything, he didn't do anything; when the Spaniels performed in England in 1992 we had so many people from Dublin in the audience and they just went crazy over that. If I were Irish I would love Pookie's version more than Jackie Wilson's version: spectacular, yes, but Pookie kept that sincerity. There's something so elemental and basic about that song that you should do it with sincerity.
There's one guy who kind of reminds me of Pookie and that's Sonny Til. To me Sonny Til and the Orioles started the rhythm and blues, doo wop style of singing, the music of the streets where the standard was not as high as the Ink Spots or the Charioteers but it related to people. In fact, when the Spaniels first went to Vee-Jay Vivian Carter told Pookie, "You sound like you're trying to copy Sonny Til!" – but that was just Pookie's voice.
The Orioles' It's Too Soon to Know, written by Deborah Chessler, was released in 1948 and is now generally regarded as the first doo wop record, as distinct from the Ink Spots' style.
There was also that high tenor in the Ravens, Maithe Marshal, who later replaced Bill Kenny in the Ink Spots. He had that classical voice, early 1930s, everything had to be right: articulation, breathing, everything. The Ravens were like a bridge between the Ink Spots and the later doo wop groups. They weren't very gospel-influenced but they were definitely the beginning of the change. Their bass singer, Jimmy Ricks, was Gerald Gregory's idol: when he was 14 years old he could sing any song Jimmy Ricks ever did; that was his standard. But then again Jimmy Ricks did not have the unique quality of Gerald's voice, that mellow sound like a bass saxophone. And those notes at the start of Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite are probably the most popular five notes around the world.
Lee Gaines of the Delta Rhythm Boys was the one who actually started singing with the bass voice and letting the others background him; Jimmy Ricks heard that and took it to a higher level. Whenever you heard the Ravens you knew you were going to hear a very low lead bass and a high classical tenor. And then for all the groups that followed it was always that ping pong between the low bass voice and the high tenor. Any group like that had a prizewinning combination – and that goes for the Ink Spots, Jimmy Ricks and the Ravens, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters as well as Sonny Til and the Orioles.
One difference with the doo wop groups is the era when they were singing: the music reflects the times. When we had the war years we had groups like the Andrews Sisters and the Ink Spots and the Golden Gate Quartet; we were just coming out of the Great Depression and the music reflected that time. Now when you get to the early 50s, the country was probably at its greatest time: happier times, then you got all that doo wop. I think we had more groups then than any time in history – and at that time you could go and buy a brick home in Gary, Indiana for $5,000.
And that's why we had an avalanche of singers. We were happier because everybody had a job. I was born in the middle of that Depression. It was hard to make a dollar then, which was why artists back then were so good: you had to be good or you would starve to death!
That whole street corner thing was all about the optimism in the 50s, happier days, and that's why I don't think that doo wop music will ever die. Because when people hear that music they think of happiness and the time of making babies – that's why we have the baby boomers. Somebody told me that if it hadn't been for the Spaniels and Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite he might never have been born.
But there's no question that the Mills brothers and Ink Spots were superior technically. The Mills Brothers were so great that after they had gone over the hill they recorded a version of Get a Job by the Silhouettes just for fun – and they blew the Silhouettes out of the water. The Mills Brothers had so much quality in their sound when they sang Gloria, I'll Be Around, Little Girl, Paper Doll. They sang with sincerity in basic harmony. They didn't showcase anything: it was always harmony.
And for my money those were the greatest two groups: the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots. They started everything. The doo wop groups were more gospelly, churchy, soulful, but I could listen to the Mills Brothers all day long: the texture, the finesse of the singing, the techniques of how to hit the high notes, but when you get to doo wop you can do anything you want.
I'm not knocking doo wop because that music goes to the heart, but if you get down to the dynamics of the music the Mills Brothers, Ink Spots, Hi-Los and the Four Freshmen were far superior, and you could even add the Platters in there because they were an extended version of the Ink Spots.
Doo wop is more about raw feeling and it's easier digestible. It's like listening to symphonic music as opposed to popular music: it calls for more education and refinement for the listener to listen to the symphonic music than the music of the streets. When you get to the street singing, if you felt something you could sing it incorrectly as long as it was not inharmonic. And you sang mostly from feel.
Getting back to Roosevelt High and the Three Bees, Michael Jackson's father, Joe Jackson, used to come to the Three Bees' rehearsals – he wanted to sing with us but we wouldn't let him sing with our group. I think he could sing good but whatever reason it was he couldn't be a member of our group.
And the guys who later became the Spaniels couldn't be in our group because we were in our own capsule. We had reached the point where white people loved to hear us sing because we sang the music of the Mills brothers and the Ink Spots and stuff like that, and Pookie never had a gospel, raspy voice – Pookie could never sing Wilson Pickett or Otis Redding or anything like that, it was always smooth singing. And the places that we sang to, they understood Pookie's voice.
We could go into white churches and our music would be acceptable to the congregation because they were white hymns and Negro spirituals, and I was always good at putting music together for white people because actually I didn't like the blues; I grew up listening to white music and appreciated it.
So we were in our own little capsule and we kind of looked down our noses at Michael Jackson's father. I think in the end we might have told him: “You got the spirit – you just don't sing good.” So maybe he thought I'll show you guys, I'll go home and train my family – and he showed everybody. Who knows, maybe if I had let him join there might never have been a Michael Jackson because he wouldn't have needed to prove himself through his kids ...
We didn't have anyone else in the group for a while because three is all you need. Harmony is only three-part. It's the lead singer who is a second tenor, that's a part; the high voice, which is the first tenor, and the baritone singer: that's harmony. It's only three parts when you hit a regular chord. Now, where the bass comes in, he is hitting the same notes as the lead singer but he's doing it an octave lower, and that's the thing that attracts women, that low bass voice.
So to sing music you don't really need a bass – look at groups like the O'Jays, Ray, Goodman & Brown, the Andrews Sisters. A trio is all you need but if you want to get people really interested you get a real good low bass to come in and that's it.
So that's why we later became the Four Bees. There was a popular guy, a track star, his name was William Dooley and he wanted to get into the group. I don't know why we didn't get Gerald Gregory in the group because he would have been perfect, he was a natural bass singer. But he wasn't popular enough. We were using politics: all the girls knew of William Dooley because he was a cross country runner. We were just kids and we thought that was the best choice was to get, though he really couldn't sing that good. His bass voice was nowhere near Gerald's quality. But we could operate with him better because he could take instructions better. It's hard to nail it down but that was one mistake we made when we didn't get Gerald to sing bass.
Two of the group that became the Spaniels, Willie C Jackson and Gerald, were in the Boys' Glee Club when I was the president and lead bass. But I trained all of them at some point, apart from Gerald. I didn't train Gerald because he was my competitor. And in the Glee Club he had to be subservient to me, to take my orders. He didn't let me forget that when I joined the Spaniels forty years later.
The Three Bees didn't go on after high school. Calvin Fossett was the one to break the group up. We were scheduled to record for Vivian Carter, long before the Spaniels ever were. But Calvin was a boxer and the night before the recording he got his nose broken, so that cancelled the recording and we never tried it anymore. That's just the way fate worked. And after we left school there were no more Three Bees.
Although Pookie was in the same year as Calvin and me he didn't leave at the same time. Calvin and I graduated from Roosevelt in 1952; Pookie wasn't up to snuff on his points so he had to stay in a year. When I was inducted as one of the Four Vagabonds in the United in Group Harmony Association Hall of Fame Pookie was a surprise guest. He talked about the Three Bees and he told the audience: “It wasn't that I wasn't supposed to graduate in '52; I just didn't graduate in '52." That brought the house down and everyone was laughing.
The Spaniels were initially a trio, like the Three Bees. Willie C Jackson was the businessman of the group and he was the creator of the Spaniels. Pookie and I had arguments over this when we were both being interviewed and I told the interviewer that Willie C, who sang second tenor, was the worst singer in the group but they took him because he was business-minded, he was way ahead of his years, and he was the only one in the group to have an automobile. It was actually Willie C's group. And they were after Pookie. They had Gerald, they had Ernest Warren; I think Opal Courtney Jr came a little later. He was the youngest one. His father was Opal "Shag" Courtney, who played with the original Harlem Globetrotters.
Some people will know that the Spaniels used to be called the Hudsonaires. They probably had a name before that but I wasn't around, I was out of high school by then. These are the guys who would come by our rehearsals and we wouldn't let them to sing; we thought they weren't good enough. But Willie C, being a businessman, he knows that he's got the best bass singer, Warren is the best tenor singer, and if he can get Pookie to come to his group ...
Pookie refused him so many times because he missed us and actually looked down his nose at these guys. That's why “the Hudsonaires” came up: Willie C figures that if he names the group after Pookie that would appeal to his vanity, and that's how they got Pookie to join. And of course they would win the contest – you only had to look at the talent you got in the group. They had years of listening to us sing, so they were good: they'd modelled themselves on us.
Pookie knew they were not the calibre of the Three Bees but things were happening. And he went to Vivian Carter and said, "If you're still thinking of starting a company I've got the guys now," and that's how the Spaniels got formulated: they were just in the right place at the right time and I wasn't.
If you asked me to give you an outline of the main events in my life between leaving Roosevelt High in 1952 and joining the Spaniels in 1989 I could tell you in one word: pain. I caught hell.
During those days in the South they had strict rules, and when your child was 18, no matter how much you loved him, he had to go out and make his own way. I was sort of essential in my father's church so he didn't want me to go, my mother didn't want me to go ... but because of my father's upbringing I had to go. He loved me but he said that when those young eaglets become a certain age they are thrown out of the nest: either fly or die, and that was his background.
My mother cried when I left home but now I'm out, cast into the world, and I've got to find a job. The first job I ever had, I went there with Calvin Fossett – not with Pookie, because he was still in school then. Calvin and I went to the most likely place, the steel mill. Gary had the largest steel mill in the world, United States Steel, so both of us went to get a job there. Calvin came from a well-to-do family and they had money and were able to give him courses. He went into some other department, the office or something like that; I didn't have any skills so I was in the mason department. My number was 307; I never will forget that. And at the time they hired me, I was excited because they paid $65 every two weeks. Prices were low back then and I was happy about that.
What I didn't know was that the time I got hired was right after a strike. The workers had walked out and left the bricks to cool off. And that's the worst thing that can happen, because when bricks cool off in a steel mill then they crack. So they needed the mason department to go and rebuild the foundation under the furnaces. They had tunnelled a hole which you had to crawl through like a mole or a gopher so you could get underneath the furnace, and I'm claustrophobic as it is: I don't even like to be in a crowded room. And you're going through this tunnel and you can feel the heat from the furnace as you get down under there. There's no out except the way you came in.
They had put in some timber temporarily to hold the furnace up, and while we're there, replacing the bricks, we can actually see that the furnace is swaying, and that if anything happened, if those furnaces fell, we would all be trapped under them like a bunch of rats. Only one person could get out the hole and I imagine everybody would be fighting to get out. And it was so hot under there they had to spray a hose on you to keep you from falling out under the heat.
I weighed about 150lb then, and it was all muscle. When I graduated from high school I was the first black guy that I knew to order a set of weights; I was reading books like Strength And Health and Iron Man and you could see the beautiful bodies of these guys and I wanted to get like that. In about a month's time I had lost 15lb at the steel mill; I went into bad health because I lost too much weight. It was like a false hiring because of the strike. They fired me; I didn't want to give up because I didn't want to look bad in the eyes of my father, like I couldn't hang onto a job, so I was prepared to go in in ill health. But now the strike was over and the regular workers came back and they didn't need me.
After about a month or five weeks they called me in the office and they said, “Shelton, I'm sorry but we've got to lay you off.” And I remember telling him, “Thank you very much,” and that was my reply.
That was my first encounter with the world. I had basically lived a sheltered life before then. And in all of this music was the only thing that kept me going. If I could sing a song then I could endure all the trials and the miseries. When I was working under that spray I'd be singing a song, and it just struck me that's how American music got started – the Africans bringing their music, their chants, especially the work chants, because if they slowed down, they were going to get the whips on their backs. Little chants became songs.
And when I was singing at the steel mill other people would take it up. I'd be singing My Life Is In His Hands by the Soul Stirrers and somebody else would join in, and we'd have group singing to endure the work. That was just a beautiful thing and that's why I'm living where I'm living. I had a girlfriend once who gave me the choice: she said, "Spend more time with me, quit the singing, you can stay with me and I can give you a good way of living and luxury – or you can continue singing and you have to get out of here, you have to go back where you came from." Back to the ghetto, the poor neighbourhoods. Right now I'm staying in a senior citizen place because I cannot give up the music. I cannot do it. It's like telling a bird you can't fly anymore. Just like it was for the Africans who were brought over here and put under the whip, music is about survival for me, not just entertainment: I'm singing to live, not just to pass the time.
When they let me go at the steel mill I still couldn't go back home but my sister shared an apartment in a very nice neighbourhood in Chicago with two ladies who both worked at the post office and she let me stay with her – but I had to sleep out on the verandah and there was no heat, so you can imagine the nights: 20 below zero and only a couple of blankets between me and freezing to death.
I think it was around this time in Chicago that I first met the Flamingos, though they weren't called that then. They were very intense and dedicated, they were probably the most dedicated group that ever sang: it was their art, they were doing it out of pride, they weren't there to make a quick buck.
They were in a Hebrew church and the whole service was music, and in that church every member could not only sing but they could sing all the parts; that's why the Flamingos were a superior group, even when they started. The church was open for everybody and I used to go just to hear the terrific music; it was old Hebrew chants and stuff like that.
But on many occasions they would actually physically beat up members of the group that took it lightly and didn't learn their parts: they were very serious about it. They'd ask me, how about joining our group? I'd say no, it's alright.
I got work as a stock boy at a mail order company called Alden's; I had to supply the girls who wrapped the products up and mailed them. I don't think they're in business anymore. I worked my head off there. Then through the Urban League, that's a bunch of people interested in getting black people jobs, I went into Saks on 5th Avenue as a shipping clerk. And that was too much for me: I couldn't keep up with the paperwork and I ended up transferring over to a stock boy; it was the same pay but there was less tension and less responsibility.
It was there that Billy formed an intense but platonic bond with an older woman.
I was 23 before I had any sex because my grandmother told me to stay away from girls. She was a lady minister and she had a more profound effect on my life than any other person. She could see what would have happened because I could have been a father from the age of 12 in the neighbourhood that I lived in – you had to be strong and turn your back on all that or you had to be a part of it. The girls in my neighbourhood thought I was gay because of that.
It was through music that this woman and I became close because she loved music. She was 28, from a wealthy family, she went to acting class and she spoke several languages. I never had any sex with her or anything like that, but like a knight has a lady she was my lady. She was like a goddess to me. Her family was from Assyria and her hair was so very black it was like a raven, almost blueish. The manager of the store was at her feet she was so beautiful, and she didn't like him. For some reason she was attracted to me.
I'm a very shy guy; I wouldn't have the nerve to go up to a girl and ask for a date, and that's why I'm glad I'm a singer. And I guess that's what the music does for you because she and I would call each other on the phone and I would listen to her music and she'd listen to my music. She gave me an album called Ports of Call. It's symphonic music by a symphony orchestra, very beautiful; I would listen and it was another world to me. And I would give her albums of jazz and American music which she had never heard before. I would talk to her for hours and hours on the phone when I got home and I wanted to marry her.
Now, can you see what kind of chance that has? At the time that I knew her it was not in the best interests for a black man and a white woman to be seen anyplace: back in those days we both would have been fired from our jobs. I was romantic and she was the only thing in my life then. In one of our conversations she told me: "Billy, I can visualise us being in bed together but what do we do when we get out of the bed?" Our worlds were completely different.
I respected her enough that I kept that job just to be around her and to be able to see her occasionally, and I knew that she was happy to see me. But I ended up quitting because I couldn't take it anymore – it was like torture because I was too involved with her and I didn't want to make things rough on her, so I quit the job because I was falling in love with her too much and this thing between us could only destroy her. I hated the fact that because I was black I could not have a relationship with a white woman.
The only difference between the South and the North – and the West and the East – is that in the South they would call you a nigger: they would come out with it, they didn't sugarcoat it, they were honest. In Chicago it was de facto segregation; it was impossible for us, we didn't have a chance to become a couple.
Before I quit I took all of the money that I had saved and bought her a piece of jewellery which was probably cheap to her but I know that she'd have kept it until the day she died.
The funny thing is that when I got to be 70 years old I thought I would go down there and see if she's still around ... and it hit me: if I'm 70 she's 80. So automatically she has to be retired and she's maybe in a nursing home. So I stopped – I had gotten all the way down there and I was about to go in the door.
But all of this, these episodes, were because of music. It kept the two of us together. We communicated by music.
There was a lot that happened in about a one-year period. I'm not too clear about the order but I got another dose of reality around this time. I was very good at electronics and electricity, that was my favourite subject at Roosevelt; I even was my instructor's assistant all the way through high school. So I went to Coyne Electrical School in Chicago to further my knowledge. My white friends who were studying with me would come to me for solutions to problems, and I had a 93.7 average when I graduated, but I couldn't get a job as an apprentice because I was black.
I'm glad about my father's decision to throw me out at eighteen because otherwise I wouldn't be the man I am today. But I made one terrible mistake though. My sister Gwendoline was a teacher and she was the angel in my life. She wanted me to go to college and I would not go to college because the racist thing embedded in me so much that I was taught repeatedly that I was nothing, I was inferior – and even if I was good at something I couldn't get a job: they wouldn't be able to hire me because I was black.
So I would tell my sister, "Don't spend that money, cos what difference does it make? I'm still going to have to ride on the back of the bus. I'm still gonna be a nigger. I'm going to have to get a job shining shoes or being a waiter or something like that." And that's a bad thing when the chains come off your limbs and you put them on your brains.
When I quit Saks I was lucky enough to get a job in the post office through my sister's friends. I was there for two years and when I went there I sang. I was a clerk, I threw the mail in the boxes; there was a girl and a couple of guys and all of them could sing and I started a quartet there. When we were working we would be singing, and we especially loved the Christmas period when we'd be singing Christmas carols. The supervisors were spit and polish, because the post office was owned by the government. They came and said, "We noticed that you're singing while you're working. There is to be No More Singing."
I've always been a rebel: I hate to see injustice done, I hate to see bullies and big corporations taking advantage of people. So I told all of them: "Look in the book – how many letters are we required to throw in the spots a minute?" They looked it up and they told me we were throwing three times the rate of mail into the boxes while we were singing. And we could do it automatically, we didn't have to think; the music helped us just like it helped the slaves, so we could sing a song and speed up production. So I said, "Let's do the bare minimum, just stay above that limit that the book says."
So we quit singing and started throwing mail like the book said. And the same people who said we couldn't sing, after two or three days they came back and said "What's wrong?" So I said, "Well? Are we violating the work ethics?" "No, you're not." So I said, "What's the problem? You told us we couldn't sing. When we sing it makes us more energetic." So right then and there they said to start singing again. Music has always been the answer to my problems throughout my life. So much power in music.
By this time I'm addicted to music, just like a crack addict or a heroin addict. I'm like a musical nymphomaniac – one group could never satisfy me! I'd be in three groups at the same time and singing in my mother's choirs at the weekends.
I had saved some money after working with the post office and I could keep my head above the water so I decided to take that opportunity to go to college. At Chicago Teachers College if you would agree to become a teacher you didn't have to pay tuition fees, you just had to buy your books. My sister, the schoolteacher, finally talked me into doing that. It made a lot of sense: you could take the two years, go to college, get your degree and teach school.
Just after he started the course Billy was invited to join the Spaniels. He told Richard Carter that “Pookie wanted to replace Gerald because he was on drugs, drinking too much and scared the hell out of Pookie when it was his turn to drive.”
Pookie asked me to come with them two or three times but I didn't do it then – I didn't know if I would be able to go through all the temptations of the entertainment world: women, wine and drugs. But it wasn't just that. By this time the Spaniels were stage entertainers with three years of experience behind them; I'd only been singing locally and I wasn't sure I could step into those shoes without those years on the road.
But temptation was the main thing. Pookie told me that when he was on the road when he was becoming popular the most beautiful girl he had ever seen in his life came to him with the keys to her new Eldorado car and she said, "Drive the car, and tonight when you come to the hotel that's where you'll find me and you can bring the keys back." You're only human, what can you do? And the drug dealers follow you around, saying, "You're tired, here's something that will give you more energy, and if you don't like it then don't use it anymore" – no mention that it's addictive. You had all these pitfalls and I wanted to be a good person before anything because I felt I would disgrace my family if I did anything like that. And that's the main reason I didn't go out when I was younger.
Meanwhile, there was something else to worry about. While I was at college the army was bothering me, and on April 2nd, 1957 I was drafted. Remember, I grew up in church, and it was my religion never to pick up arms against human beings, and now this same society is telling me they want me to be an attack dog – that's what a soldier is, with all due respect: you're trained to kill people and your government will tell you who to kill. I grew up in a country that taught me to love and now I'm in the army, being trained to be a killer.
War is a terrible thing but I was blessed by God the time I was in the army: I was in between the Korean War and the Vietnam war so I didn't have to go out and do combat. I spent my time singing in special services to captains and officers and lieutenants – I didn't even have to do KP or guard duty.
I was talked into entering the All-Army entertainment contest, which was an international thing. And the way that happened, the guys who had won before had come to our camp, we heard them and they heard our group and we had like a head cutting contest. The major who managed the previous winners, the Melodiaires, told me they were all leaving the army and said, "You guys have another year. If you just re-up for a year I can assure you that you will be on the rolling entertainment programme, your job will be to entertain troops all over the world," because he could see the quality that we had. We thought it was a ploy to get us to re-up – all of us wanted to get back home.
This group who had won the year before were the best in the world: they could do the Four Freshmen, the Hi-Los, the Ravens, the Orioles – any group out there. They had the best singers, the best bass; he was a graduate from Juilliard who could read music but our ranges were similar. I've never heard a group like that in all my life.
My group were scallywags, we were pirates, we had got together in the male chorus of Fort Lee, Virginia – that's where I was stationed – and I had a bunch of baritone and bass singers. We had a baritone that actually sang with Joe Van Loan of the Ravens and loved the kind of music that I loved, so he became our lead.
I honed these guys; none of us could read music but I trained them just off of sheer grit. We didn't take the major's advice and re-up but we threw our hats in the ring and did two songs: Summertime Blues and Cool Water by the Sons of the Pioneers, but a doo wop version with the bass singing lead. My group was called the Travelaires.
Ernest Warren had been drafted the year before and he also organised a group for the contest, but they didn't even place, so to do something like that was a big feather in my cap.
About two years after I got out of the army I got a letter saying that they had been looking for me and that my group had won first place in that contest and that they owed me a trophy; I still have to go to Fort Lee to collect it. We could have been on the Ed Sullivan show and travelled all over the world but we didn't even know we'd won; we didn't re-up and that stopped our career. It would have been the answer to anybody's dream come true ... But if that happened I probably wouldn't have ended up with the Spaniels.
And I didn't trust the army. Muhammad Ali is my great hero, he would not step across that line and he said: "No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger." I consider myself a red-blooded American but I'm not going to go and murder somebody because my sergeant tells me to do it.
But what happened as a result of working with those guys in the army was I found out I had this great power not only of organising people and training them to sing but inspiring them. That was something I was able to use when I finally got together with the Spaniels.
They're so busy I don't fault them, but people that I'm training go on and become icons and nobody knows about me; it never was important to me but the only reason I'm doing this is I want the truth to be out there – and if I don't tell it, in a few years there'll be nobody to tell it.
I came out of the army in 1959. I went back home to Gary with my mom and dad and I couldn't find a job, and that's when I met my first wife, the mother of my children. She was a farm girl from Huntsville, Alabama, she had picked cotton, and I have always had a weakness for powerful women. When she was 18 she got on the bus and came to Gary, and in just a few months she had her own business, a restaurant called Anne's Barbecue.
My mother played Cupid. Anne loved to sing and she was the prettiest girl in the whole church; she just had an aura about her, she was sexy and she was a very powerful, very determined woman. I thought she had a lot of money because she owned a restaurant – and she thought I had a lot of money, because I was a recording artist at that time, singing with a group called the Golden Tones, who recorded the same time the Spaniels did, on the same label, Chance.
The fledgling Vee-Jay had leased the Spaniels' debut, Baby, It's You, to Chance Records in Chicago for better distribution.
They were playing my records on her jukebox so she thought I had money and I thought she had money. We married each other for our money then found out both of us were poor. Then we fell in love with each other.
There are some people who make things happen and she was the type of person who made things happen. All of the women in my life are powerful: my girlfriend now, she's the heiress of an oil company and we've been going together since 1985. But I would like everyone to be powerful. I have made the statement that I would have more respect for a powerful enemy than I do for a weak friend. I have a lot of respect for people who are willing to pay the price to get what they want.
In the same way in entertainment, nobody in my group has taken music lessons or has gone to music school or taken voice lessons. These guys are from the streets, the ghettos; I'd say that the guys that I sing with most of my life, about 98 per cent of them came from the bottom up and they had this terrific love to sing.
When we got married and the children began to come I was unemployed and I couldn't get work, and the restaurant wasn't really doing financially too well. I found out later that the guy who built the restaurant, it was in the hopes that she would marry him.
So she made a clean break, quit the restaurant and she was able to find a job down the road about a half mile from where we lived and she worked in a housewares store. And I couldn't cook, because I'd always been with my family who were great cooks. And she would come home from work and do the cooking and all the chores of a housewife and I would go out looking for work which I couldn't find.
We were so poor that when my firstborn, Teddy, who was the bandleader for the Spaniels and often substituted for Gerald, was a baby we couldn't afford to buy a crib. We would put blankets in the dresser drawer and pull the drawer out and that was his bed.
Some of my friends were going job hunting in Gary and they asked me if I wanted to go. It was a place called the Budd Plant, at 700 Chase Street, where they made the bodies for automobiles and railroad cars. As luck would have it I was the only one who was hired – and I was at that job for eighteen years.
It was a good job: it had benefits and paid well, and I was able to buy my family a home in a very nice neighbourhood and send my kids to school and buy cars. It was a very happy life. I was lucky as a father – my daughter Mouse and my three sons were so close to me and we would do things as a family all the time: we'd play table tennis together, go to Sunday School together, play chess together. The happiest years of my life were raising my children and having a home in Gary.
But music didn't take a back seat during this time. I never quit singing, it was running alongside all that: every time I could get a chance, every group that I could sing with. I was singing with six or seven groups, and when they introduced the group members to the audience they would say, "This guy sang with the Harptones," or "This guy sang with the Staple Singers," but when they got to me they'd say: "This guy sang with all of them!" I couldn't get enough of singing: that was my whole life.
I sang with groups including the MTS Singers, the Kings of Harmony, the Five Trumpets, the Golden Tones and the Gospel Clarinets. I sang with the MTS Singers for years before I discovered that their name meant "Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium.” All these guys had had tuberculosis but they just loved to sing, and they were good, so I joined them – and actually it was safer to sing with them than anybody else because they were constantly being monitored. I didn't care, anyway; I loved that group.
I got involved with the Golden Tones around 1959, through Bob Bonner. One night when I was performing with the MTS Singers I heard Bob's group, the Gospel Keynotes, and loved their intricate harmonies. I was never too sold on straight harmonies, because they were so common, but when groups like the Golden Gate Quartet or the Southern Sons would make sevenths and thirteenths that got my attention musically. Out of all the groups that night only the Gospel Keynotes were doing that jubilee music and making those chords, so after it was over I went to shake Bob's hand and compliment him.
He said, "You remind me of Dickie!" Well, of course I reminded him, because that's where I got my style from, mimicking Isaac Freeman's bass on those Fairfield Four records on the jukebox in the Royal Barbershop. I said, "How do you know about him?" and he told me, "I was his instructor. Why don't you let me take you under my wing and you can sing with my other group?" And that's how I got into the Golden Tones.
Bob Bonner was the greatest guy I ever had the pleasure of meeting and working with. He taught me how to sing bass and how to feature bass, and the man could hear music. He listened to everybody and he not only could sing all the parts, he played the guitar and he had his own style; he was just as good as BB King or anyone else you could think of. He would train us to sing with the chords that he'd make with the strings on his guitar – the top string would be the high singer and the bottom string was the bass – and when you learn to sing like that you can't beat it.
He was so wrapped up in music and he had so much faith in me because I wasn't all that great but I had commitment: it was something I loved to do, music was just in me, and he could see that. And whenever we had to buy a uniform and I didn't have any money he would take care of it, or if we had to go someplace and I didn't have a car he would come and pick me up; he was just like a big brother to me.
Bob loved the Golden Gate Quartet, who were the number one jubilee group, and the Dixie Hummingbirds, who were probably one of the most underrated groups – they could do any kind of music. I learnt their songs while I was in the Golden Tones and I got to the point where I could mimic every single song of the Dixie Hummingbirds' bass singer, William Bobo. We even used one of his numbers, The Final Edition, to help us win the Aunt Jemima Gospel Talent Hunt on WBEE Radio in Chicago, sponsored by the Quaker Oats Company.
The first time I ever made a commercial recording was with the Golden Tones in 1965 on the St Lawrence label: Move, Satan and A Place in Heaven For Me. I wrote the lyrics for Move, Satan. My family has always been a humorous family – humour can bring you through a whole lot of stuff – so I thought, why not have a little fun and do something different? Bob Bonner had the tune down and I said, “Let's make it a song about the devil trying to entice people to follow him. He's got a whole lot more to work with, he's faster than God and can give you instant gratification – with God you have to wait a while!”
I played the part of the devil – it had to be a bass voice – and I even had a diabolical laugh, but for some reason the record company went out of business before they could actually push it.
About a year later we recorded Why Can't We Love Our Fellowman? for Halo Records. This was written by Dinision Gill, a minister who had Sam Cooke's voice just natural: whatever he did it sounded just like Sam Cooke. We had heard him preach and sing when we were looking for a new lead singer. He was fantastic and had a way of speaking to people and calming them down, whatever the situation.
After the Golden Tones came the Gospel Clarinets, which were kind of a throwoff of the Golden Tones. John Hamilton, the leader of the group, was a baritone and people told him: "You can't sing lead, man, you gotta get up high and hit notes – your voice is low." But he was like the bumblebee: according to the laws of aerodynamics the bumblebee is not meant to fly but nobody convinced the bumblebee of that. John Hamilton was one of the greatest lead singers that I ever worked with: he was no Ira Tucker or Claude Jeter vocally but he could make you feel what he was singing.
Incidentally, that's where the Spaniels got the song One Day at a Time from – that was the name of the album we made with the Gospel Clarinets and later I took the song to the Spaniels; you can hear Pookie singing it on the 40th Anniversary album.
But while I'm getting all this happiness and fulfilment out of singing and raising a family I've still got to go to work – and that wasn't always so good. Not the work itself but the situations I would find myself in.
My job at the Budd Plant ended prematurely because I hate bullies, I hate injustice, I hate to see people taken advantage of. I had to go through the racial prejudice thing when I first got the job because I was the first black guy in the company to be a die setter. That was something black people didn't do; they were more on the assembly line. It was a good job and what was so good about it was that if you finished the job you were allowed to do what you wanted. In my case it was playing chess, because I love to play chess, and I usually had two or three jobs at the same time, so most of the free time I had I tried to get me some sleep.
They had some good ol' boys from the South there who couldn't stand to see black guys being in that department. I would get bothered every night by the supervisors and foremen. They would use the n–word and tell me, "I'm not going to rest until I get you fired." But it's kinda hard for someone to break me because I grew up in the ghettos and I had the army physical training thing. I played competitively and I took care of myself back then; I didn't drink; I lifted weights. So when this guy told me he would get me fired I didn't get mad at him; I bet him that he couldn't do it, that he would be fired before I was. I've seen a lot of foremen who threatened me but they were transferred or fired before I was.
And the reason that plant closed down – it was a multi-million dollar plant – when they would do injustice to the workers there I was the common guy and I would go to every department and organise a strike.
There was a union but the union was sleeping with the company. Whenever somebody would lose an election for the union the company would hire him right away because he knew all the secrets. The union didn't care about us, we had to work in unsafe conditions and it was nothing to see someone walking about with one arm or a young man with no hands because a machine caught him because we were forced to work in unsafe conditions, so I tried to work all that out.
Because I was an entertainer and I would go to the wholesale companies and buy radios and stuff like that to sell to people at work everybody knew me – and they knew me as a happy person: a buffoon, a clown. They didn't know that I was the person masterminding the wildcat strikes. Everybody would listen to me: I could go to the Croatian people, the Serbian people, the Hillbillies and the Southerners and they would listen to me – and I never will forget, one time, they found out that I was the guy organising the strikes and they went and told the management and the management, they died laughing! "You're crazy! Not that guy – he's a fool, a clown!"
That's the only thing that saved my life because I think they could have had me killed very easily because we are talking millions of dollars and I was the one stopping all that from happening. They could control other plants but not Gary, Indiana. And the Gary plant being the most productive plant, when they walked out the company was losing millions of dollars.
And the greatest thing I ever did, I told everyone to walk out of there and have a wildcat strike. The first guy who walked out, he was an electrician, the first to punch out, he punched the clock first under my instructions and the company did something they didn't usually do. They fired him right there on the spot and made the announcement: "To all the rest of you, let that be a lesson. Anyone who punches out will automatically be fired."
I was put to the test. I had got my friend fired because of him following my orders so I had to go around to everyone to convince them they can't fire all of us if we all punch out. The only way we can save his job is by all of us walking out. And everyone did. They had to call him back to work! I was proud of myself for doing that.
I'm naturally a funny guy and I like to laugh but the clown image was something I was using to protect myself in those situations and that was the thing that saved me. They gave all the workers a choice: you can move out to Philadelphia or take retirement early, so I took early retirement because my house was paid for, I had low bills, and of course I was singing on the side.
In 1984 I got my army group, the Travelaires, back together one last time for a contest run by the Chicago Parks Department. I found out that that the judges had a range of musical backgrounds so I condensed songs of different styles – we went into gospel, we went into comedy songs, we went into blues – and we won first place, beating over 1500 other acts. That same year another group of mine got our first contract, working in Geneva, Illinois every weekend, and I was making enough money to keep my head above the water singing, so things were going okay.
Then in 1989 I got the telephone call that changed my life – though I wasn't actually too excited about it.
I never will forget, I was rehearsing with a local group who were practising religious songs, and I get a call from Carl Rainge – he was the top tenor – and he says, “How would you like to sing with the Spaniels?” So I told him he would have to call me back later because I was in rehearsals. You can imagine how that went over.
But this time it wasn't about whether I could cut the mustard, like when they asked me back in '56; I'd had too much experience since then. I wasn't too excited because I knew the kind of life those guys were living on the road. This was the second group of Spaniels that got together, who recorded Everyone's Laughing and You're Gonna Cry. They were also from Roosevelt High School.
That's the group that travelled the most, and they were taught choreography and the basics of music and harmony by James Cochran; I always said that he was probably the most valuable man that the Spaniels ever had. James Cochran was like me, he was giving concerts when he was seven or eight years old; he knew the rudiments of harmony, and more than that, he was a terrific dancer, so he taught the group choreography and he's the one that made the Spaniels stand out from the other groups, with other innovations like the lead singer being under the spotlight and the background singers in the shadows.
That's how the Spaniels got famous – not because of their recording of Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite but because they had a hot show live on stage: you saw the Spaniels, it was action all the way. It was in contrast to Pookie leaning back and being lazy. His name wasn't Pookie, his name was Sleepy – he would make Perry Como look lively. He was literally so cool he could lean up against the wall and start singing and fall asleep in the middle of a song, so we called him Sleepy all the time.
But by that time the second group were victims of the world. They fell into the pitfalls. I have a recording that they made live that would make you throw up if you heard it. Everybody staggered on; Pookie was the only one that stayed on his thing. Even Gerald, who was also in that second group – everybody. It was repetitious, and they were arrogant too, because they'd been in high places. They did Danny Boy and in the middle of the song they spoke to the audience, saying: "We know you like that, don't you?" And they butchered Danny Boy. They probably were ashamed of that themselves. The worst thing the Spaniels ever did was that live recording.
James Cochran had had an operation and didn't want to be out in public anymore, so he recommended that they get me in to replace him, and everybody agreed because they knew me, but it took a couple of phone calls to get me into the group. That's the group I started with. When I got with these guys I got with a bunch of drunks that didn't care about the audience or anything like that, they were just into themselves and going to the bottle after the show. But I said what the heck, you know, it might help Pookie some or it might give me some kind of recognition to be there, and why should I start new groups all the time when I have the legacy of the Spaniels?
Gerald Gregory had stayed on in that second lineup – and forty years on he still hadn't forgotten he'd been below me when I'd been president and lead bass of the boys' glee club in Roosevelt High. When I came into the group Gerald told me, "Remember, you're comin' in singin' baritone, don't sing no bass" – letting me know "I'm the Big Dog now.”
I stopped singing with that second group about 1990, and in 1991 I was the instigator of getting the original guys back together. The second group were very hard on Pookie because they went by the rule that everybody get an equal amount of money. He was taking care of the business arrangements and they were very much disgruntled with him, and he came to me: "These guys are taking advantage of me because they want to run the group."
Being an old friend of Pookie's I went to his defence and I said, "Well, Pookie, if these guys don't want to operate right I can take any group and train them. But why find new voices if the original guys can still sing? And that will help us even more because they were the guys actually on the record."
He said that as a matter of fact the original group, the ones who made the record, had just received the Rhythm & Blues Foundation Pioneer Award at the Smithsonian in Washington. And with the exception of Ernest Warren, who was now a minister, the others – Willie C Jackson and Opal Courtney – wanted to start the original group back up. I asked, "How did they sound? Do they still have the voices?" He said, "I'll let you hear them and you can be the judge."
I had them come to my house, sing a few songs, and they still had the voices. And the other group was giving him so much hell about the money I told Pookie, "You don't have to put up with that. I can take these original guys and retrain them and we can go back out."
We all made this deal with Pookie: "Since you are the figurehead of the group and you've been out there the longest, just pay us $300 whenever you get a gig and you can have the rest, however much it is." He could live with that. And that's how I ended up with the original group.
So now I've got the job of training the older guys, getting them back into condition, and some of them hadn't sang for a long time. They had given up on the business; they'd been singing in their churches or something like that. They broke up in like the latter part of 1955 because they were being shafted by the recording company, making just enough money to go to the next city and perform.
Pookie and Gerald were familiar with their parts, so they didn't always need to be there, but I had a lot of rehearsals at my house or Willie C Jackson's house with Willie C and Opal Courtney Jr, listening to tapes of those old Vee-Jay recordings in order to recreate the backgrounds as closely as possible. At that time there were people listening to the records and they knew the songs better than we did; it's my thing that when you're carrying on the group you want to try to keep as much of the flavour of it as you can. And Willie C and Opal also had to learn the backgrounds on songs which had been recorded by the second group of Spaniels after they had left, like Everyone's Laughing and A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening.
My son Teddy was brought along to be bandleader at the same time. Teddy went to VanderCook College of Music in Chicago and was employed by the city to give guitar lessons, and he could sing all the parts, so he was the perfect guy. I got him in the group and I let him choose who he wanted to be the rest of the band – we had a regular touring band called the S Band who could play all the Spaniels' songs whenever we would have a local show.
The shows weren't just the old numbers. Being the musical director my plans were to bring the old songs up to snuff but at the same time I was working on not original songs but standards, I'll Be Seeing You and songs like that – I thought that was a nice thing just before Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite to give the message that we'll be seeing them again sometime – and the beautiful standard songs that have outlived time itself which the Spaniels hadn't done before that were not too common.
I would say that 95 per cent of the Spaniels' songs for Vee-Jay were originals because at the time you had to have original songs, you couldn't do standards, though they did do Red Sails in the Sunset, A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening and Stormy Weather.
The original members were very happy and excited to be back on the road and working the circuit, meeting their old friends – and they got a chance to get back at me. I became the whipping boy because all of them had one thing in common: I did not let them in my group the Three Bees. So now I'm in their group, and they pulled tricks on me.
They would stay up all night if we had a radio or a TV broadcast to make the next morning. I would go to bed maybe 2.00 in the morning, and we all understood that we had to be up at 5.00 to make it to the TV station. What they'd do, they would give me about an hour and a half to go to sleep and they would call me up at 3.30 and I would say what are you calling me for? And they would say we just want to remind you to wake up at 5.00 – that kind of stuff. They were getting back at me, now I'm the low guy on the totem pole, punishing me for all the times I didn't let them be in my group. And they would laugh about it!
Because these guys had been out of the business they hadn't fallen prey to the same issues as the second group. That was their redeeming feature: by them not staying in show business it saved their voices and it saved their lives.
I remember I was backstage at another group's gig, and one of the guys was complaining to me: "They are treating us bad, they don't bring our set-ups." A set-up was whiskey, brandy, whatever you like, and "Do you like to smoke pot?” or “Do you like to sniff coke?" The old school entertainers who were used to being supplied all this stuff, now they don't see it and are insulted, and a lot of them can't even perform because they're so used to having that as a crutch. That's what happened to David Ruffin of The Temptations: he was forced to get his drugs from the outside and that's why he died in a crack house.
The 1991 Rhythm & Blues Foundation Pioneer Awards Show which had prompted the original group's reunion was an important event for the Spaniels, who were honoured at the Smithsonian in the company of others such as Ray Charles, Curtis Mayfield, Doc Pomus and the Five Keys. It came with a $20,000 cheque for the original members and elevated the group's status in terms of performing venues and contacts.
The Spaniels was a small operation – we didn't have an expensive management to get us bookings at the best places, cover the public relations side of things or anything like that. We had to take what we had, do the best we could; we had nobody to sit us down and tell us how to behave like they'd have in Motown, what to say and what not to say. Whoever gets there gets there, and whatever is said is said. But after the Pioneer Award it was a different ball game.
The Manhattan Transfer's Tim Hauser, his wife flew us all the way from Chicago to LA to sing for his birthday because she asked him randomly, "If you could have anything you wanted right now what would it be?" And he told her, "I wish that the Spaniels would come and sing Happy Birthday to me." And she got on the phone and started making calls. We met a lot of the great singing stars of all time there. We were surrounded by other people, not just a promotional agency; we had people in high places who could set you up.
This did mean I had to be extra protective of Gerald. I was the stabiliser and I was very close to Gerald and he was the drunk of the group, and I pulled him to the side and said: "Gerald, we're getting a second chance and we don't want to blow it, so just be strong and wait for another hour when you'll be back in your room and you can do what you want." I could talk to them because I had respect from all of them and that's why I was able to keep them together till they died. I feel good about myself that they respected my judgement.
We weathered life on the road pretty well. Willie C might have a drink at the bar with fans but we had no problems internally. Gerald was the only guy we had to watch because everybody else knew how to speak when in front of the TV cameras or giving a radio interview. But everyone was so glad to see the Spaniels they would overlook any bad behaviour – and they did that all the time with Gerald. They tolerated Gerald's drunken antics and he even became like Dean Martin: they knew that he was a drunk and they laughed at that and they forgave him.
We didn't know that he had developed brain cancer – it wasn't just the drugs and the alcohol. That cancer did a lot to Gerald, so much so that we could be having an interview on television, and he would use profanity and start cursing. But Gerald Gregory will go down in history as the number one doo wop bass, so there's a lot he can be forgiven for. I don't know of anybody else whose five notes were more famous than Gerald's.
And these were happy years. The first thing that I require in any group I sing with – and I required in the Three Bees – is first, let's be happy. Whatever we do, let's do it out of happiness and love for one another – and it makes the heart work less hard if you enjoy doing what you're doing. That's my whole attitude. Whatever you have to do you have to tell yourself that it isn't so bad. I hated washing dishes but I made a game out of it: I would time myself and see if I could break my record.
Gerald was like a brother to me, like a younger brother. Remember, I'm the oldest of any of the Spaniels, so just because of my age they never disrespected me. If I protested against something and it made sense, they would conform.
Like at rehearsals, Gerald and Opal Courtney couldn't stand each other and they invited each other to go out in the alley and fight. It was like: "We can settle this like men." I don't think fighting represents any men: it's more childish than anything else, just like starting wars. We were in Willie C's house, so when they got ready to go out to fight in the alley I put my hat and coat on.
Somebody asked: "Where are you going?" I said, "I'm going on home. I came over here to rehearse so we could get better; I didn't come here to see two old men fight each other. If that's what I want I could turn on the cable TV and see Mike Tyson beating the hell out of somebody, but it doesn't give me any pleasure to see you two guys fighting."
And they told me, "Take your coat off," and they came back like two little children and sat down and we had a good rehearsal.
That was kind of a significant moment because at that point I was the outsider, I was the whipping boy that they could basically take all the jokes out on, they were able to get revenge on me, pull little pranks and everything. But they knew that deep down inside I respected them and I loved them.
And it came out later when a guy I had gotten in to replace Gerald accused me of doing something unsavoury. The group called me before them and I told them the truth that no, I didn't do it. He had said that I had another group of guys and I was advertising them as being the original Spaniels, and I never did that. I said I advertised the group as being who they were. Of course I told them that I sang with the Spaniels, but in some kind of way the guy got it mixed up.
They looked at the guy that brought the information and they said, "Don't ever come to us with any negative talk about Bill – we would work with him if he had to crawl up on the stage, we would feel better singing with him than with you at your best." That let me know what they thought about me.
I was lucky enough to see this lineup of Spaniels for myself in 1992 when the group made their first visit to the UK as part of an Alan Freed-style package show promoted by Tom Ingram. As mentioned earlier, they sang an unforgettable version of Danny Boy, which Pookie told the audience was one of the songs they used to practise in their high school locker room forty years ago.
Up to that point the evening hadn't been the transcendent experience I'd been hoping for, despite the presence of several doo wop and rock'n'roll legends – and Wembley Conference Centre, which had a capacity of 2,500, seemed less than half full, which didn't help in the atmosphere stakes. One of the comperes, former Capital Gold DJ Randall Lee Rose, told me that station politics had prevented his promoting the show properly on the air.
But the Spaniels were in a different league: the harmonies were tight and Pookie's singing felt in the moment, unlike some other acts, even though I was a little disturbed by that stolid expression, not realising it was his default mode: had he fallen out with the other guys just before walking on? But his voice was a thing of beauty, just like the records – and there at the other end of the line, balancing the lead singer, loomed the massive-seeming figure of Gerald Gregory, eyepatch occasionally riding up as he sang Zing Went the Strings of My Heart; I think I felt a sense of his unpredictablility even then, despite knowing nothing of the circumstances.
The other acts were polished, but the Spaniels had something else which it's difficult to describe – maybe just the sheer joy and gratitude radiated by men granted an unexpected chance to shine again after so long.
The 1991 Rhythm & Blues Foundation Pioneer Award was followed by further honours. The following year the Spaniels were inducted into the United in Group Harmony Association (UGHA) Hall of Fame at Symphony Space in New York along with the Flamingos, the Ink Spots, the Five Keys and others. Founded in 1976 by Ronnie Italiano, known as Ronnie I, UGHA is “dedicated to the preservation, exposure and education of authentic vocal group harmony music.” Billy and Ronnie I became friends – though it didn't get off to a good start.
Ronnie I didn't like me at first. He had a record shop in New Jersey and he knew the guys that were on the record and he didn't see my name on that, so he thought that I was a Johnny-come-lately. But we got to the point where I was his favourite Spaniel – he was even carrying my bags to the airport before it was over. I adopted him like a son and I was instrumental in getting Ronnie I to bring the Golden Gate Quartet back to America; they'd been in Europe since the 1950s.
He didn't know about gospel groups, he thought that music started with the doo wop groups, but I taught him: I said, “No, it goes way back, music came out the church – blues, jazz, rap, anything – all music came from the church and it's a shame that you're missing all these great groups.” Ronnie I put the Fairfield Four into the Hall of Fame and I was responsible for that – I brought them up just so I could finally get to meet Isaac Freeman, whose voice I used to mimic in the Royal Barbershop.
This was a great thrill for me because for a long time I hadn't even realised he was still around. I had been following his career – he had left the Fairfield Four in 1950 and organised the Skylarks with James Hill – but I thought he had passed away because I hadn't heard anything about him for years.
Then one day, when I was in my late sixties or early seventies, my son Teddy calls me up and says: "Pops, turn on the TV set – this guy that's singing bass on The Johnny Cash Show reminds me of you." And it was Dickie – Isaac Freeman – so he was still alive. In fact he was only a few years older than me.
When he flew in for the Hall of Fame I went to his room and I said, "Isaac Freeman?" And when this guy talked you had to hold onto your chair.
"Bob? He's the guy that taught me how to sing bass."
From then on I was so close to Isaac Freeman. Me and Calvin Fossett were guests at his home in Nashville Tennessee; he gave us a wonderful hospitality. I would call him up and he was like a big spoilt brat, he was used to having his own way, and I knew how to irritate him and I would tease him. I would introduce him by saying: "I'd like to introduce the world's greatest bass singer ... next to me!"
In 2005, after the death of Gerald Gregory, the Spaniels were inducted into the Doo–Wop Hall of Fame of America, founded by Harvey Robbins, at the Boston Symphony Hall, where the group were given Pavarotti's dressing room. A photograph in Jet magazine shows that both past and present members were represented at the ceremony: Charles Colquitt, formerly of Gary group the Goldenrods, who had replaced Gerald on bass; Willie C; Donald Porter; Billy; Wilton Crump, their MD ,who would later take over on lead after Pookie's death; Opal Courtney and Carl Rainge – all gathered in a semicircle around the enthroned Pookie.
The final honour for the Spaniels came with their induction into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in Youngstown, Ohio in 2008. This was the scene of an unexpected reunion when Billy met Ruby Nash Garnett, of Ruby and the Romantics, who had lived on the same street in Akron, Ohio where Billy's stepfather pastored a church before the family's move to Gary. Also at the ceremony, as he'd been at UGHA, was Jon "Bowzer" Bauman, formerly of Sha Na Na, who used Goodnight Sweetheart Goodnight as the closing theme for their longrunning TV shows.
Sadly, however, the composer of that immortal ode to teenage love had passed away the previous year.
When people ask how long did that reunited group stay together I tell them: forever. Stayed together till they died. I kept them. I was the only one – and this includes Pookie and Gerald – I was the cohesive force in the Spaniels. And from the time I walked into the group that group stayed together until they died of natural causes. And now I'm the only one of that group alive.
Gerald was the first to go. Gerald and I had become very good friends because I really admired the guy. He really wanted the Spaniels to succeed a lot, and he would become frustrated when we weren't moving forward. And his death – you know, everybody was expecting him to die because of his lifestyle, but it was hard when it came, of course.
By him being a bass singer he was more likely to get on alcohol or drugs, because of the nature of what he was doing. Bass singers are more quick to become alcoholics than anybody else because of the nature of their singing. To hit low notes you have to be completely relaxed; tension stops you from hitting a low note. It's like a string on a guitar: if you tighten a string you get a higher note; if you loosen it everything goes down low. It would be to a bass's advantage if he has no tension when he goes on stage – though it's only natural that you're going to have tensions if you're singing in front of 6000 people and you've got a touch of laryngitis and you've got these notes to hit. And if you get some drink in you you relax. And that's perfect for a bass singer because his voice can go lower: you've loosened the string.
He died around 1999; I don't keep up with the years too much. But I do know that Todd Baptista and his wife Kristen came all the way from Boston to attend Gerald's funeral; he was crazy about Gerald. Jerry Butler and Gene Chandler came to Gerald's funeral, a lot of people came. The Spaniels were honorary pallbearers, and Ernest Warren, who was the Reverend Ernest Warren then, spoke. We sang Danny Boy and You Gave Me Peace of Mind, which has always been my favourite Spaniels song: it's kind of a spiritual and makes me think of all those gospel groups I heard growing up. At the end we sang Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite, only this time it was: “Goodnight, my friend, it’s time to go.”
In 2004 Lester "Doc" Williams died. He had deputised for Gerald in 1957, singing bass on the Vee-Jay session which yielded such well-known sides as Everyone's Laughing and A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening; Gerald was jailed for non–support at the time after Vee-Jay refused to loan him the money. Lester Williams can also be heard on some 1994 Spaniels recordings on the Canterbury label.
Opal Courtney Jr, youngest of the group, passed away in 2008. Two years below Billy and Pookie at Roosevelt High, he had quit school early in order to be with the Spaniels but returned to complete his education after becoming disillusioned with the group's treatment by Vee-Jay. He later joined the US Air Force.
Ernest Warren, the man whom Billy replaced in the Spaniels, passed away in 2012. After his time in the army he had returned to the group, staying with them until 1962. He had been ordained in 1976. "It was one of my lifelong desires," he told Richard Carter:“My father was a minister and I idolized him and I idolized the type of life that he lived before us, and for his children.”
Willie C Jackson, the "businessman of the group" whom Billy credits with the creation of the Spaniels, died in 2015. An obituary in the Chicago Tribune states that he was a charter member of Unity Baptist Church in Gary and worked with the children's choir. "He would never call attention to himself,” his pastor is quoted as saying, “but every time, crowds would end up around him, singing. Even in the hospital, there was singing. He couldn't escape it, but he enjoyed it just the same. And he loved singing in Gary."
One name has been taken taken out of its order in that melancholy roll: that of the group's inimitable lead, the man Billy had known for almost sixty years. Thornton James "Pookie" Hudson died on 16 January, 2007.
He had an unusual cancer that he actually died from. The thing about Pookie's death is that they had his funeral in the Washington DC area then they had a funeral service for him later in Gary, Indiana – because that's where he spent most of his life, either in Washington or Gary – and the other Spaniels could not understand why I didn't go to his funeral in Washington. But at that time I was hurting financially, I didn't know how I would pay my bills, and I think the plane ticket was close to $300 round trip.
The whole group went there and were even singing Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite over his body – and the other group that Pookie had got up and they were singing that too. It was almost like a circus act: each group was trying to claim to be the Spaniels by singing over Pookie's body, and I didn't want any part of that: everybody's fighting over Pookie's affection or memory or something.
We'll be returning to that "other group" later.
Despite the way Pookie was treated by Vee-Jay, and all those struggles to get royalties for his songs, I'd say he was a happy man when he died, because he was still singing. His cancer came on him at the very end. Pookie was the type of guy who was quiet and shy and you didn't know if he was drunk or if he was sober, or if he was sick or well; he had a lot of Indian blood in him, he looked like an Indian and he had that same stoneface.
Vivian Carter, who started Vee-Jay, died before anyone else. She had been sick for a long time and she was in a nursing home. She was much older than us because she was a grown woman even before she came out to Gary, Indiana and started her radio show.
Everybody saw her. Jerry Butler was there all the time. She had a lot of people to care about her. And she had owned all of this, started all of this, but now she was just an old lady who was very sickly and in a lot of misery. Pookie went to see her and made his peace with her – but when they asked him to do a benefit for her he said: “Let the Lord take care of her.”
But Pookie loved Vivian Carter – and whenever people asked about her his reply was that Vivian Carter was just as much of a victim as he was because all of the experts and the people that she hired just ran off with her business. He was always close to Vivian Carter and never accused her of stealing from him or treating him bad.
The only thing she did was when she put Ewart Abner in charge. He got a big Great Dane dog and put the dog behind the desk so the artists could no longer walk around in the studio freely, so there was a resentment towards that. And Pookie often said, "That damn dog hasn't put out a million dollar record or made any money for you, and he is treated better than we are!"
And Vivian didn't know what was going on – she was going too fast, like pulling up a deep sea diver from out of the water. She was going so fast that she had to delegate all of these jobs in the hands of other people and they were corrupt people.
Take Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite. Pookie's name is not the only name on there. The other name on that record as writer is Calvin Carter. Calvin Carter never even heard the song – but he was Vivian Carter's brother! And that's what was going on: whoever was recording you, all of a sudden you would have a cowriter. Alan Freed told Pookie, "I can make the Spaniels a household word if you just let me put my name on all your music." Pookie refused and Alan Freed banned all their records from his radio shows. That hurt the Spaniels.
The Moonglows were smarter than Pookie: they consented to have Alan Freed's name on Sincerely and he made the Moonglows. I think Pookie made a mistake – he should have let Alan Freed put his name on the records because Alan Freed was the power at that time, and if you want to dance to the music you have to pay the piper. Instead of that Pookie let Calvin Carter, who was a nobody, just the brother of Vivian, put his name on there and that didn't help the song at all.
He only started to get regular royalties for Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite in the 1990s. The guy who was responsible for that was Todd Baptista. Todd's done so many wonderful things for the Spaniels and he wanted to make things right – I even get royalties off the Spaniels' records through SoundExchange. He has to be given credit for that.
You know, Pookie was never ambitious. Ernest Warren used to tell us that Pookie could have been a terrific athlete, he was tall and he could play basketball very well. Ernest said that Pookie could throw a ball from one end of a football field to the other and he had a lot of the attributes you need physically to be an athlete, and if he had pushed hard he probably would have been. But he just loved singing, he loved music, he was laid-back and that was it.
There's one memory of Pookie I'll always treasure. In 1997 I went into the UGHA Hall of Fame with the Four Vagabonds, a group that goes way back to the 30s. I'd been in an 80s lineup with the original lead singer, John Jordan, and I was doing my best to keep the group's sound alive.
Pookie was so pleased when I went into the Hall of Fame with the Four Vagabonds that he flew out to the show, to New York, came on as an unknown guest – and it shocked me, I didn't know he was there. And he said, right there, "He's the guy that taught me how to sing, and the only reason I became a lead singer is because I couldn't master the background parts, so that's how I ended up singing lead." So that's something. It was one of the few times I saw him really happy, because he was so proud of me going into the Hall of Fame.
The third member of the Three Bees, Calvin Fossett, passed away in 2012. After his time at the steel mill he had joined the Navy then gone to university, studying architecture and eventually becoming Building Commissioner for Gary. The Post-Tribune describes him as a "charismatic, intelligent, funny and humble man" who, after retirement, "continued to explore his interests in homeopathy and spiritual healing, music and 'junking'."
The best thing that happened to me was I've got a picture of the Three Bees after we became old; we happened to take a picture together, Calvin Fossett, Pookie and I, and that picture should be worth a lot because to me that's the thing that started this whole ball rolling: the Spaniels and Vee-Jay and Motown and all that.
We went back to Calvin's house, that's where it all started, and for one night we were at peace with each other, we became the three kids that started it all off.
Calvin and I graduated in '52 so that makes almost seventy years since the Three Bees broke up. But I still wonder what would have happened if things had been different – if Calvin hadn't got his nose busted before the recording session or Pookie hadn't stayed on in school so Willie C got that chance to wear his resistance down.
If the Three Bees had made it the situation would have been different because the Bees were my group, and I would have demanded that we would have been totalitarianistic in our efforts: there would be no drugs, even the women and drink would be on the back burner. We were like Jedi Knights when we started, you know.
I could have protected Pookie, only me – because I was older than Pookie, for one thing. And it was more than just singing: we were spiritually together. He and Calvin were members of my mother's church choir. And I think that Pookie might have done a few foolish things but I think I could have saved him from the worst if the Three Bees had made it.
So that's it. I feel honoured to be part of that. And if nobody else knows about it I don't care. I know about it.
The Spaniels continue to perform, with Billy now singing bass and leading the group under the modified name of Spaniels Forever.
That other set of Spaniels who sang at Pookie's funeral were a Washington-based group who had appeared with him at several high-profile events in his later years. Since his death they have been performing as "Pookie Hudson's Spaniels".
Billy dismisses these rival claimants as "a bogus group" – and it's particularly galling to him that after Gerald's death Pookie chose them, and not the original Spaniels, to back him on TJ Lubinsky's celebrated Doo Wop 50 TV show, which aired in 1999 and featured many of the most famous names in doo wop.
He called me up after the programme – we all saw it cause it's on the PBS channel – and apologised to me and said, "Billy, man, I needed the money and I didn't want to have to pay you guys $300 so I just took these guys." I told Pookie, "Don't apologise to me – the guys you should apologise to are all the guys who made that record: Opal Courtney, Ernest Warren and Willie C Jackson. They're the ones who all their lives had been telling their neighbours and friends and their churches that they'd been on the original record – what are they going to tell the people now?"
Then when Pookie passed away his wife at that time went to the court with a lawyer, and she was the first one to get to the court and she claimed the name "the Spaniels" legally. Now, personally, I don't think she had any more right to claim the name of the Spaniels than any of the original Spaniels. All of them were Spaniels; Pookie just happened to be the lead singer. Willie C was still with us then, and he started the group.
But anyway, she got to the court before anyone else and she got the rights to be called the Spaniels. I could have taken her to any court but I didn't want to go through that kind of stuff. I don't care: she can keep the name Spaniels.
So we changed our name to avoid confusion. At first we were called the Legendary Spaniels but I'm happy to go as Spaniels Forever because that's what the original group ended up being. We hold that distinction of being the original group and whoever goes with me has the right to be called Spaniels because I'm The Last of the Mohicans.
There were many aggregations of Spaniels in Pookie's lifetime – Billy estimates that there were at least twelve groups around the country whose services Pookie would call on from time to time – but none with Billy's history and deep connection.
When we were in New York on Broadway in 1992 and they inducted the Spaniels into the UGHA Hall of Fame Pookie was introducing this new member Billy Shelton ... and then he stopped and said, "To tell you the truth he's not really a new member, because Billy and I go way back to 1948 and the Three Bees – this was long before the Spaniels was ever thought of."
And I remember we were part of a tribute to LaVern Baker at the Nasau Coliseum, on this big programme with the Miracles, the Supremes, the Orioles, the Clovers, Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes. I tape myself anytime I sing because that's how you get better. But I forgot to turn the tape off and later, when I played it, Willie C was standing by some rich guy who got his autograph and said, "I see Billy Shelton's name on here but I've got the original record and his name is not on that record. Why should I get his autograph?" Willie C said, "No, he did not record with us on the record but he's the guy that taught us how to sing." And later the guy came to me all smiles for an autograph.
Not everything written about the Spaniels is necessarily accurate. There was one case where they mentioned the Three Bees and Pookie said that was his group because Pookie at that time was out of sorts with me because I opposed him about a money matter, so that was his way of punishing me. I have absolutely nothing to gain by lying and I'm just grateful to God that I'm out here singing. Before I drop dead I'd love to go to England and tell the story and perform with the group that I have. I think that would be a blessing for everybody.
Richard Carter's book about the Spaniels is the most accurate as of now because he got all the Spaniels together when he wrote it: if one person chose to tell a lie he had five other guys there to correct him, and Richard Carter came to my home in Gary and Willie C's home, that's where he wrote the book. And he even called the second group of Spaniels – that's Donald Porter and Carl Rainge and James Cochran. He spoke to them on the telephone like a conference call; the rest of the Spaniels could hear what was being said. That was the most arrogant group of Spaniels and that's when they made the statement that they were better than the first group, and I never would have said that. I thought that was very disrespectful and out of place. They said, “We could out-sing that group,” which was telling the truth, and nobody in the original group disputed that fact, but I can say that the group that I've got now is better than any group of Spaniels technically.
But the first group had something. Feeling. They were purer. They were kids in high school that finally got a chance to record – and remember they were like 17 years old, so you're talking about pure kids that are doing this just for the love of singing. Where the second group, I'm sure they had thoughts of: "Well, the first group put out a couple of hits ..." They're thinking more of the financial, fiscal thing.
The second group, they each had a part and they stuck to it. But Ernest Warren and Opal Courtney in the first group, these guys had ranges, they could sing high and low. So just for fun, for a difference in seasoning, they would switch. Opal could sing the high part or Courtney could sing the high part and then Ernest would sing the high part. On the record it happened to be Ernest doing the high voice, Opal's doing the baritone, but maybe on another song they'd switch it up, just for variety. I liked that because it was a thrill, it gave us all a chance to get different sound textures.
The Flamingos did a lot of that too because Johnny Carter, who was the top guy on Golden Teardrops, had a wide range. And when he joined the Dells he would sing bass with them as part of their act. Chuck Barksdale was the bass singer but when they would do the show Johnny Carter would hit lower bass notes than him – and then Chuck Barksdale's like: "I'm-a kick your behind for embarrassing me out here!" And my tenor in my group can sing soprano and he can hit notes just like I do.
I'm getting my current group to go into all kinds of different songs, and that includes the Ink Spots and the Beatles, who were first released in the US on Vee-Jay. I think Vivian Carter had the foresight: she could see what was going to happen. We've fused Yesterday, the Beatles song, with the standard Yesterdays, by Jerome Kern, which the Ink Spots recorded in the 50s with Jimmy Holmes on lead.
The Spaniels never sang another group's song. They did standards but they never copied any other group. None of the Spaniels' songs ever got too popular – Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite is probably the most popular song outside of Happy Birthday, but you take that away and the Spaniels didn't have hits like the Four Tops and the Temptations.
But what I'm doing with the voices that I've got, we can sing all the other groups' songs – the Platters, the Drifters, the Four Tops, the Temptations – and since our songs weren't big hits we can do that for the audience and keep it fresh. But then we will do maybe five or six of our most treasured songs, like the first song, Baby It's You, then we can do Stormy Weather – that was an arrangement that Pookie said he stole from the Cadillacs because he was at their rehearsal and heard the arrangement then went right back to Vee-Jay and recorded it before the Cadillacs could.
Nobody knows the Spaniels' name. They know Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite but they probably think that it's by the McGuire Sisters. We have to compete against the young vocal groups with a full band. Last time we played we just had a guitar player and we had everybody eating out of our hands. We were up against four young guys doing Motown and using backing tracks. Now to me that's like eating soup out of a can, but it was the original Funk Brothers tracks, so anyone with a decent voice will sound sensational. So we were disarmed.
But when we got on the floor we dared to do an Elvis song, Can't Help Falling in Love, and when we started singing that a shocking thing happened: everyone got up on the dance floor. And that's the magic of music, of a good song, and a good delivery, a good group to sing: no gimmicks, just from the heart, and it was reaching people's hearts. We don't need the Funk Brothers.
If we were a young group it would be amazing but you're talking about a group that was recording in 1953. And the group was in good voice because of the rehearsing commitment. The old school teaches you that if you're great you don't have to rehearse anymore, but that's not the way it is: you have to be on top of your game if you want to get a following, you have to be committed, you got to put the time into it, your voice has got to be in shape.
So I was proud of the group at that gig: we did a good job and my crowning moment was at the end of the show we didn't lose anybody on breaktime even though there was a big event going on in another room. Willie Rogers, who took Sam Cooke's place in the Soul Stirrers after Johnnie Taylor, was our special guest and we had him sing two songs. The first was A Change Is Gonna Come; Willie Rogers was the first person to sing it publicly after Sam Cooke was murdered. And he closed with If I Had a Hammer, which Sam Cooke sang at the Copa, and the audience sang along.
This guy makes so much money when he sings but it just so happens that we're friends. After the show I saw his wife with her eyes wide open: she was amazed because we started singing that song by The O'Jays, Love Train, and getting everyone up to make a train, and she was so overwhelmed by that she didn't know what to do. Willie has never had a rehearsal in maybe 40 years but he came to me at the end and said: "I want to start coming to rehearsals."
I think we are headed in the right direction. We could get by off of our name and maybe a performance would not be so good – they would still respect us because we were the pioneers of doo wop music in the Midwest – but we've got a hot show. I'm just like a little kid: if I have a good performance and can make people happy, that's the reason for my existence.
I'm very demanding on the guys. I've been called Yoda, Mussolini – there's no mercy. If I were a football player or a boxer I would have to be in top condition if I went out there, and whenever I perform I can see Pookie and all the great singers of the Spaniels – Gerald and Willie C and Ernest Warren and Opal Courtney and "Dimp", James Cochran, and Donald Porter – and I owe them something, I'm not going to have the standard fall beneath what they would expect. It's a personal thing with me.
We had one of the Temptations sitting in on a rehearsal and he said, "I can't hang with you – you guys are too precise for me. I've been with the Temptations for 14 years and they never rehearse that way." If a guy didn't hit his note, if he was a quarter of a step too low or too high, I would know. And he said to me: "Mister, you got some big ears." So that was a compliment.
And I've incorporated Donald Porter's son to be a Spaniel. This guy is a self-achiever with a big insurance company but he still has this need to sing, and he sang as a Spaniel when he was 14 years old, with Pookie and Willie C, on the Jerry Lewis telethon. So by me adding him to the group it's just like coming back home. He is now with the group and I think the future is now brighter for the Spaniels than it's ever been.
Going through every genre of songs gives us more variety as singers but it's also a way of reaching as many people as possible. The old fans who first heard the Spaniels in 1952 or 1953, they are all dead now or in nursing homes, so we have to rely on the young people who appreciate quality music, and we want to present the music of our era the way it should be. And usually the young people love it – often we pick up new audiences from young people. Music is like fine wine: you go in the cellar and pull out something that was bottled in the 1800s, and it tastes better. Or it's like paintings: if it's the original that makes it more valuable. But the quality has to be there.
It's a new experience for many of our audience to hear a group with only a guitar so the voices are exposed, there's no camouflage. And they can't believe that it wasn't the Stylistics and the originals who recorded with a 40 piece orchestra – they're looking at four guys with a guitar duplicating that with no appreciable difference. It's amazing. And that's an artistic choice, to use a guitar: we wanted to have that doo wop flavour, that acapella flavour, but in music there are lead-ins and things like that where it's good to have an instrument to fill in the gaps, so it's like a marriage of one instrument and four voices. But it doesn't overwhelm the voices.
I'm blessed because my vocal range is almost like it was when I was 18; there are only four or five notes that I can't get. And I've got a lot more experience now when I get up on stage. People are not just looking at a guy singing: they're looking at the love I've had all these years for the music, the love I have for them, and I'm trying to bridge the gap where they can feel the music like I'm feeling it, and that's the greatest thing that happens whenever we sing: it's like magic, it happens regularly when we sing, what I'm trying to convey to them. You talk about getting high – that's a high that you can never get enough of.
To me singing is a spiritual experience, whatever you're singing. It's got to be. Because what you're doing, you're trying to make an intimate connection with the audience. Whether you're doing it for free or whether you're being paid, when you're singing all that's on the back burner. The first thing to any entertainer is to reach the people that he's singing to: if he can get into their hearts, if he can make them feel what he is feeling, that's what it's all about. That's why doo wop is so powerful, because it's connected to gospel and that's where the soul comes in.
We've been playing a lot of white churches lately, just like the Three Bees. White congregations seem to be more broad-minded nowadays when it comes to a group like us singing secular songs in church like Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite. I'd say about 95 per cent of our audience is middle-aged-and-up white people. It's nothing new to black people – they've been hearing us sing for years, they're tired of hearing us, where it's a new experience for white people, just like the blues. In the 50s white people didn't understand the blues – how could they understand us when they were on the other side of the wood? But now it's altogether different: if you can sing blues you can work in any white establishment, because that's the thing now: white people, they understand blues.
Same thing happens in gospel, where white people can relate to that now through commercialism. They understand and they're experiencing something new – and back in those days, remember, the segregation was so great that the white kids growing up, who are now middle–aged and senior citizens, they were not allowed to turn to a black radio station or go out and buy a black record – it was referred to as “jungle music.” But now their parents are dead, they've got the freedom to do it, and this is why audiences are almost totally white.
I will never do a show where we will be below standard. I want to be the best and I want whoever I get to do the best they can so we can keep that level up. The Spaniels have never been the best, musically, out there but one thing: nobody ever wanted to come behind the Spaniels, and that includes Little Anthony and the Imperials. The second time we went to England it was to Liverpool, with LaVern Baker. She was the headline but she said, "I ain't coming up behind the Spaniels – if I don't sing before them I ain't singing." The Spaniels were giantkillers.
It's not always been easy to keep a flavour of Pookie in our sound. We were at a rehearsal with one singer, and this is a guy who doesn't like to imitate anyone else, he has his own style. Well, his style didn't come close to Pookie's on this song. It was You Gave Me Peace of Mind, that number that sounds like a spiritual. Pookie wrote it at a time of trial in his life: he was broken up with his wife and he was out of the group, working for a boxcar company and hitting the bottle. So it's personal. Me being the vocal director, I said, "Hey, try and sing it as close to Pookie as you can can. Try it – do it like Pookie."
And this guy told me, right there at rehearsal: "If you love the way he does it so much, why don't you dig him out of the grave and let him sing it for you?"
Now I just quit talking to him then because it was like somebody had just put a butcher knife right in my chest. He was my brother, we grew up together, and this guy's making a joke like that ... I never said anything else to the guy, and it even hurt Willie C, who was also at the rehearsal. I just said, "Excuse me," and let it go like that.
Nobody can capture Pookie's voice exactly. But we can get close to it. Our current lead singer, Patrick Pitre, is in his early 50s and he reminds me of myself as a kid. He can sing soprano and in the next second drop down all the way to bass. He can mimic anybody, sound like Pookie, sound like Gerald; it's an unusual gift. He's probably the most amazing performer I've ever been with, though everybody else in the group is pretty close to him on the level of attainment.
That's Patrick you can hear singing Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite on the BBC documentary Rock'n'Roll America and me doing Gerald's intro. I was interviewed in Detroit for that. I had been telling them the history of how Pookie and I got together but then they asked about eight or nine times, "Do you think singing and the human voice has anything to do with a woman?" Eventually I said, "I think it does; I think that women are sexually motivated by vocal chords. It happens in animals, like mating calls." I said that women love unusual voices, bass voices and high tenor voices. That represents Billy Shelton in the programme – talking about the mating call of the bull walrus, and they left all the history completely out of it. But Rebecca Mounsey, who was the Producer, told my daughter, “Your father is an absolute gentleman," and that her face hurt because she couldn't stop smiling.
I've worked out an arrangement of I'll Be Seeing You with the new group. All of these things can come in because I think that physically they're the best group: these guys are better singers pound for pound. And they've got the best instructor because I've been training voices over seventy years. I think if you put all these ingredients together you get something that's hot, that's going to take off.
I would love to come to England again. Whether I'm any good or not I'm the oldest entertainer who's still out there performing. I have a phenomenal memory and we have a group that's not an antique group. We're out there fighting every night and we have got a group that's worthy of performing anyplace, we don't have to take a back seat.
I remember when we went to England before we had some 17-, 18-year-old kids out there and they knew about the Three Bees – then we come back to my home town and the school that the Spaniels originated in, and nobody knows about the Spaniels: the schoolteachers don't know, the schoolchildren don't know. If we could get to England the money would be a secondary thing – of course we want to get paid for it but that's not the reason we're doing it.
I'm fulfilling a commitment. To Gerald and Willie C Jackson and Opal Courtney and Carl Rainge, all the ones that have gone on. I think they would want me to continue and keep the Spaniels alive and I'm the only one who can do it – because I was there. No one else can perpetuate them – they don't know all the troubles and the turmoils and the sorrows that the Spaniels went through. And I can warn my singers of the pitfalls before they happen.
They can't pay you money faster than you can blow it. But your fans are responsible for you turning into a monster too. They are captivated by your performance and the first thing they want to tell you is: "Let me buy you a drink." I've had people in Boston offer me their homes, saying, "If you wanna retire you can just stay here for the rest of your life, we can take care of you" – and they've got money, you know. A lot of times with those people out there you have to be superhuman to keep your head on straight. It spoils you, success, hurts you more than anything if you don't know how to handle it.
I came from a spectacular family. I would do nothing consciously to disgrace my family. I have to be straight. Gerald used to say when you can wake up in the morning you got another chance. And that's so true. Every time you wake up: "What can I do today? What good can I do?" Not: "How can I indulge myself?" Even when I was young I didn't think that way and I think that's the reason I've been able to get old in relatively good health. I'm just truly happy when someone says, “I've enjoyed your show.”
Willie C told me this story about Chuck Berry and the race that they had. Chuck Berry was a track star before he started, like Johnny Mathis; he had done some nice things on the track and Willie C had also been a track star. They were working together, and while they were sitting around they made a $10 bet: I can beat you in the 100 yards.
They got to the starting line and took off; Chuck Berry pulled out ahead and he kept that lead. Willie C figured he didn't have a chance and he was thinking: "Why did I make this bet? This guy with these long legs" – and Willie C is very short, the shortest guy in the Spaniels – "I have to make two steps to equal his one." So out of frustration, when they got close to the finish line he hollered at Chuck Berry: "You long-legged S.O.B.!"
Chuck Berry won the race. And when Willie C was paying him, saying, "I don't know why I ever took a challenge like this!" Chuck Berry told Willie C something which everybody can use in life. He said: "I tried to run away from you, you wouldn't let me; you kept that same distance behind, and I couldn't raise one leg before the other. I was ready to drop out until you said those words and I knew you had given up. So I took every bit of my energy, because I hadn't planned to run anymore, but I felt that all I had to do was to get across that finish line because you threw up your hands."
And isn't life like that? As long as you don't give up there's a great chance you can win the race, no matter what the odds are.
Now I'm last man standing in the Spaniels. And I miss every one of them. I wish that they were here. Being on the road with your brothers and we're going through all kinds of stuff, but we're together ... and I miss that. They don't make people like they used to make them.
But I've been given this shot at life. I didn't die for a reason. It's like a rosary of tears to see everybody gone but I would like for the truth to be told and the name of the Spaniels, the guys that started it in the Midwest, to go on.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Bob Marovich for permission to use his interview with Billy as source material for the section about Billy's gospel groups in Chapter 4 and for a few details in Chapter 1. The original can be found on the Journal of Gospel Music website here.
Details about Bob's book A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music can be found on the University of Illinois Press website here.
Thanks also to Pete Fraser, Alwyn Turner and Eric Midwinter for their help and advice.
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