Unvarnished Soul: Sonny Til

 

 

As today marks the centenary of Sonny Til, here's the story of how the Orioles came to record It's Too Soon to Know, now widely regarded as the first doo wop record.

Deborah Chessler, who wrote it, revealed some years ago on the BBC radio series Street Corner Soul that it was an attempt to make sense of her feelings after a disastrous early marriage. It's Too Soon to Know wasn't her first song, though earlier pieces had similarly questioning titles and directness in the words, coaxing a more emotionally direct form of singing from the Orioles, and Til in particular, than the style associated with earlier vocal groups.

The number which kickstarted the whole doo wop shebang - or shboom? - came about when a supportive male friend who offered to help pay for Chessler's divorce suddenly declared his love. Normally it's parents who counsel caution in these matters but  her mother was all for it; it was Deborah who told her mother: "How can he love me? It's too soon to know."

Inspiration struck but, with no paper in the house, she was obliged to scribble down the lyrics on toilet paper. She sang it twice to a group she had been drafted in to help, the Vibranaires (as the Orioles were originally called) at their next practice session. The group got the harmonies "almost immediately" then she gave the lead sheet (on sturdier paper, I trust) to Sonny Til who, she says,

    sang it like he had been singing it all his life.

But what made that one recording so different from what had gone before? I suppose the simplest answer is that it had an extra added ingredient: a sense of suppressed gospel fervour, of real passion and pain just below its smooth surface. And the song was a perfect fit for Til, bringing out all his ability. The Locust St blog sums it up:

 Other vocal groups of the '40s, like the Ink Spots or the Mills Brothers, sound composed, so arranged compared with the Orioles. On "Too Soon," Sonny Til's lead tenor seems filled with fear and doom, forcing out each word - the others, Alexander Sharp, Johnny Reed and George Nelson, hum and moan behind him. Nelson briefly takes the lead, and then the song is Til's to haunt again. 

Here's Robbie Whelan's account of the recording's impact from the Baltimore-based Urbanite website, including contributions from Marv Goldberg:

"It's Too Soon to Know" had an impact like a slap in the face. Never before had a pop group sung a love song so directly and honestly. Sonny Til's main influences, Nat King Cole, The Ink Spots, and The Mills Brothers, performed polished, dreamily orchestrated jazz ballads in which sentiments of pain, love, or loss were rather sanitized. Til, on the other hand, sang the part of the doubting, suspicious lover—"Is she foolin'? / Is it all a game? / Am I the fire or just another flame?"—with a passion that matched his words. But at the same time, his delivery was conversational, informal, with nothing of the neat polish of his predecessors, and no one had ever heard that before. The earthy street-corner sound of the city—what was still classified in Truman's postwar America as "race" music, with its challenge to uptown politeness—was coming to the mainstream and The Orioles were cutting-edge.

One has to put one's self in the shoes of a pop fan at the dawn of the 1950s to understand aurally why Sonny Til and The Orioles were so important.

"The biggest vocal group was The Ink Spots, and The Mills Brothers were popular too, but they had more of a white audience," says Marv Goldberg, a writer and historian of early rock and roll who interviewed The Orioles for his "R&B Notebook" article series published in 1999. "Sonny Til and The Orioles were different. Til was very handsome. By all accounts, when he got on stage he made love to the microphone, and the girls would just go wild."

"It's Too Soon to Know" hit No. 13 on the pop charts and was a "race record" that earned a significant white audience. [...] "I think it was time for the less-polished sound," Goldberg continues. "Everyone was singing in the same mold. The Orioles weren't singing black pop music; they were doing something new."

According to Goldberg, a lot of the singers in early black pop groups had studied music in college, and it came through in their sound. Sonny Til and The Orioles sang more laid-back R&B. Listening to their old records now, it's hard to imagine their sound ever seeming "new" - it's all doo-wop syllables and familiar pop harmonies undulating under Til's strident, tenor solo voice, like dozens of familiar oldies groups from The Skyliners to The Temptations - but when you listen to it alongside a group like The Ink Spots, the difference is stark. Sonny Til had unvarnished soul.

Sonny Til died on the 9th of December, 1981; Deborah Chessler, who had a close association with the Oriole for several years, becoming their manager as well as songwriter, died on the 10th of October 2012. Greil Marcus wrote of her in 1993:

All she and the Orioles left behind was the expressive power of a new, as-yet-unnamed, music - a power they were perhaps the first to define, and that in their own way they defined to the Full.

 

 

Links:

Marv Goldberg's R&B Notebooks: The Orioles - Part 1 

Deborah Chessler