Dean Barlow (1934-2013)

One of the last outstanding '50s R&B vocal group lead singers has died. Grover “Dean” Barlow was the voice of the smooth Bronx group, the Crickets—not to be confused with Buddy Holly's backup band. He also was the lead of the Bachelors, also known as the Montereys, and was a solo performer. He died in an Edenton, NC nursing home on September 29. He had been suffering from dementia.

Grover Barlow was born in Detroit on Christmas Day of 1934. He moved to the Morrisania section of the Bronx in 1951 when he was 16. At the Forest House Community Center, he met an untitled vocal group in search of a lead. The group consisted of Grover Barlow, lead; Harold Johnson, tenor and guitar; Eugene Stapleton, tenor; Leon Carter, baritone; and Rodney Jackson, bass. They sang pop standards and some original tunes by Johnson and Stapleton.

They acquired an agent, Cliff Martinez, who introduced them to Joe Davis, a veteran producer of race records whose career began in the 1920s. He had previously released records by many jazz and R&B artists, including Coleman Hawkins and Savannah Churchill. It was Davis who named them the Crickets. He wisely copyrighted the name and in 1958 received a large cash settlement from Buddy Holly's manager, Norman Petty. Davis also suggested that Barlow use the first name “Dean”—apparently “Grover” sounded too old-fashioned for a pop star—but Barlow remained “Grover” to his friends and family.

On December 2, 1952, the Crickets recorded four sides that Davis leased to M-G-M records. Two of them, “You're Mine” and “For You I Have Eyes,” are widely acknowledged classics of the group harmony genre. “You're Mine”/”Milk and Gin” was released in February and reached #10 on the R&B charts. “For You I Have Eyes”/”I'll Cry No More” was issued in June but did not chart. 

Davis released 13 other Crickets sides on his own labels, Beacon, Davis and Jay-Dee. They are all worth listening to, but none had the magic of the first two. Barlow sang lead on all of their songs except “Man in the Moon,” which features Harold Johnson. They can all be found on the out-of-print Relic CD, Dreams and Wishes, which is well worth seeking out.

In late 1953, Davis encouraged Barlow to embark on a solo career and the group broke up. Johnson went on to be a member of the Mellows, featuring lead singer Lillian Leach, who died in April. Barlow released about 15 records as a single artist between 1955 and 1964. None of them were very successful. They are hard to find, but not all necessarily worth finding.

In 1956, Barlow formed the Bachelors, who had two releases on the Earl label which, to the best of my knowledge, are not available on CD. In 1957, they changed their name to the Montereys and recorded four songs for Sammy Lowe's Onyx label. One of them, the up-tempo “Dearest One,” on which Barlow harmonizes with William Lindsay, was a New York favorite but never charted. The last two Onyx songs were not released until a couple of decades later. All four can be heard on another out-of-print Relic CD, The Best of Onyx Records.

After retiring from the music business, Grover Barlow worked for Western Union as a Director of Community Relations. He put together a Crickets group on the '90s to perform at oldies shows in the Northeast. Here he is singing "You're Mine" at a PORCC show in Pittsburgh in 1992, accompanied by three Bronx vocal group veterans, Freddy Barksdale, Bobby Mansfield and Milton Love.

He joined with Lillian Leach and several neighborhood friends to form the Morrisania Revue. They released a CD in 1994. The Crickets were inducted into the United in Group Harmony Association Hall of Fame in 1999. 

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Lou Reed (1942-2013)

We caught Lou Reed at the Radio City Music Hall around the time his New York album came out (1989). His guest was Little Jimmy Scott. Here's everyone's favorite side from that album:

In case you didn't catch the last verse:

          Well Americans don't care much for anything,

          land and water the least

          And animal life is so low on the totem pole

          with human life not worth more than infected yeast

          Americans don't care too much for beauty

          They'll shit in a river, dump battery acid in a stream

          They'll watch dead rats wash up on a beach

          and complain if they can't swim

          They say things are done for the majority

          Don't believe half of what you see and none of what you hear

          It's like my painter friend Donald said to me

          “Stick a fork in their ass and turn them over, they're done”

Here's Lou on David Letterman's show at about that same time.  If you look sharply, you'll see two familiar faces in the band:  Buddy Guy and James Cotton.

Video of the Week #36

These two clips by guitarist Wes Montgomery come from an early '60s British TV show. He recorded "'Round Midnight" in 1959 and "Full House" in 1962. The other members of his quartet were Harold Mabern, piano; Arthur Harper, bass; and Jimmy Lovelace, drums.

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Video of the Week #35

Mississippi John Hurt does two songs, "Lonesome Valley" and "Spike Driver Blues," in his distinctive finger picking style, from a 1965 folk music TV series, Rainbow Quest, hosted by Pete Seeger. John Hurt died in 1966.

Hedy West and Paul Cadwell were the other two guests on that episode, so I assume they are the two people sitting on each side of Seeger.

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Video of the Week #24 (Skip James)

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Video of the Week #34

Here's a movie scene with Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto performing "The Girl From Ipanema." I think it's a lip-sync of their hit single version. (The album version is quite a bit longer.) Accompanying are a nerdish-looking 21-year-old Gary Burton on vibes, Gene Cherico on bass, and Joe Hunt on drums. The scene is from the 1964 film Get Yourself a College Girl, which starred Chad Everett, Mary Ann Mobley and Nancy Sinatra.

Video of the Week #33

Here's a great way to spend half an hour. This set by Coleman Hawkins was shot by Yannick Bruynoghe for Belgian TV in 1962. After a solo warmup, Hawk is joined by Georges Arvanitas on piano, Mickey Baker on guitar, Jimmy Woode on bass and Kansas Fields on drums. The three songs are “Disorder at the Border,” “South of France Blues,” and “Hawk Hunt.”

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Doin' the Reminiscence Bump

The reminiscence bump is not a dance step, but a characteristic of autobiographical memory—our recall of our own life history. While you might expect memories to fade gradually with time, previous studies of older adults show better recall for events during their youth, between the ages of 10 and 30. One way to test this is with popular music. In studies in which participants listen to hit songs from before they were born to the present, they are more likely to recognize and prefer songs from their teens and twenties, with the bump peaking at age 23.5. Reminiscence bumps have also been found for films, books, sports figures, current events and personal memories.

It won't be a surprise to music fans that we show a lifelong preference for the songs of our youth. The audience for oldies shows consists mostly of people who were in high school or college at the time the music was originally popular.

Several explanations have been suggested for the bump. One possibility is that we had many vivid first-time experiences during late adolescence and young adulthood, which were encoded in memory more strongly due to their emotional content. The first experience of a given type may also become a prototype, which is more easily recalled than other members of the category. It has also been suggested that hormonal and neurobiological changes play a role.

In a new study by Krumhansl and Zupnick, 62 Cornell University students with an average age of 20 were played clips from the two top hits of every year from 1955 to 2009 in random order. They were asked whether they recognized each song, whether they liked it, and to rate its quality. They indicated whether they had personal memories of each song, and if so when and with whom they heard it. Here are the results for recognition, quality, liking and personal memories.

These students are too young to test for the reminiscence bump. Their better recall for songs released after 2000 has a trivial alternative explanation—that more recent songs are better remembered. However, there were “cascading reminiscence bumps”—two earlier, smaller bumps, which are seen most clearly in the recognition and personal memories data. One occurs at from 1980-1984, about the time their parents were 20, and the other in the '60s, the decade when most of their parents were born.

The obvious explanation for the 1980-84 bump is that as children and adolescents, we are exposed to out parents' favorite music and wind up liking some of it. (My parents were fans of big band music. I didn't care much for big bands when I lived at home, but I've gradually come to like them much better—a sleeper effect?) The authors suggest that the '60s bump could reflect the musical taste of the students' grandparents. They also entertain the hypothesis that '60s music is generally better known and of higher quality than the music of other decades—a claim I regard as suspect.

Krumhansl and Zupnick also asked their participants what genres of music they listened to while growing up and now. Of course, their sample was neither large nor representative of college students generally, but here are the results.

Neither jazz nor blues did well—a problem for the future of both genres. I was prepared to see them overshadowed by pop, rock and hip-hop, but they also did worse than classical, country and soundtracks! (Of course, in recent years, the more popular soundtracks have been collections of recent hits, rather than original music composed for the film.)

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