Them too! In the past hour or so I came up with We Five, but I'm not sure of their origin, so I'll take a look in my DB now. (Pause) having done that, I've got my groups straight; it was the Seekers I was thinking about, but I may be mistaken about a connection to Australia on one or both of these groups. The Seekers had a few more to chart, but both groups had great early sixties tunes, IMO. "If they gave me a fortune, my pleasure would be small..."
Couple of PS's about Telstar - there was a vocal version by Bobby Rydell I always associate it with watching the Echo space balloon, though a little Googling indicates that Echo was a few years earlier than Telstar.
When you think about it, there was a mini Australian Invasion too, and the Seekers may have begun that. I guess the most successful would have been the Brothers Grimm. Olivia Newton-John might figure in that, too, I suppose.
Since Olivia Newton-John and the Bee Gees were all born in the UK and the Seekers never quite made it to #1 ("Georgy Girl" was #2 for four weeks behind "I'm A Believer"), I think the first truly Australian act to get to #1 in the US was Air Supply. My Australian friends are very rarely pleased when I share that factoid with them.
I thought about moving to Australia in the early Sixties. The naysayers told me that it would be like returning to the west of the 19th century. I thought how great that might be. Didn't Australia also give us a group of guys that wore strange looking helmets?
Love it. Have the original stereo LP. I could be wrong, but I think this could be the first big hit on the sixties pop charts to prominently feature a 12-string guitar (albeit an acoustic), which would become a huge deal with The Beatles in 1964 and then The Byrds in 1965. A bunch of guitarists released 12-string guitar instro albums during '64, including Glen Campbell, Tommy Tedesco...and I'm sure some others. Jim (Roger) McGuinn was featured on some folk instro LPs in '63 playing a 12-string acoustic. Walk Right In seemed to be on the cutting edge of the trend.
That was sufficiently unusual at the time that Erik Darling reportedly had to special order two 12-string guitars direct from the Gibson company, and wait for them to be delivered before they could record the song.
Right, I forgot about her. Odd how rarely you hear her stuff on the radio anymore given how big she was for a few years.
I hear ya. She was the kind of singer where the song was key to my enjoyment since it sure wasn't her middling vocal talent. I hated Delta Dawn (a #1 record, of course) but liked Leave Me Alone, I Can't Hear You No More, You're My World, You & Me Against The World and yes, even I Am Woman. Her rendition of Stella By Starlight was also quite nice and I'm surprised she didn't do a standards lp when her career started to fade.
Gotta pipe in on The Four Seasons before it's way too late. I've always loved Sherry and Big Girls Don't Cry. Sure, they were 'novelty' records, Valli's falsetto was hugely grating for a lot of people, but a lot of people absolutely loved it, too. When Sherry started breaking out it was selling 180,000 copies a day I read somewhere. Besides all the knock-offs those records inspired, it was probably Sherry that finally convinced an unsure Brian Wilson that he could use his beautiful falsetto in his records. The Four Seasons represented a significant update over 50s doo-wop in terms of production. Some poster wrote he or she had always thought Sherry was a 50s record. I never would have. Still, the band was still too stuck in a '50s mindset with too many of their recordings and covers, despite the wonderful production on many of their hits. You Send Me and Apple Of My Eye, etc., were already sounding pretty dated by 1963 and definitely by 1964. When it is all said and done, though, they were one of the biggest selling bands of the '60s, influential in their way, and you cannot deny their professionalism. Just listen to their spot-on reproduction of the harmonies on this live version of Big Girls Don't Cry: I just think that performance is so cool, so great, they way they can get the essential sound of the record together on one mike, just leaning in, no overdubbing like on the record, and hit it all just right. Takes me back, too. These were on AM radio for a very long time. I remember as a child being hypnotised ever time I heard Sherry. So many of those records were just such an upbeat tonic -- pure joy put to record. I miss them.
@EdogawaRampo I watched the tv show Candid Camera in the 60's with my Dad, and I recall Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons being on it. I think the setup was that older teen girls were told to answer the phone like a secretary, then the boss came in the room, which was them! The girls freaked out, they knew who they were lol.
Love that song, and I have just read on Wikipedia that their names weren't Paul and Paula at all. Technically, it should have been "Hey Paula" by Ray [Hildebrand] and Jill [Jackson].
Yet, there was a similar sounding singer with a bit of a country twang that didn't irritate me. Maybe that was because her songs didn't chart that high (pause: looking in my DB for whom that might have been). Her name was Sandy Posey. While I considered her songs to be plaintive, Reddy's came across as weak to me. My DB says I have a copy of Delta Dawn on a CD named, "When AM Was King," but my guess is that I probably skipped over her track the last time I played it. YMMV
Hey Paula is another example of the teen girl, malt shop love song that was so popular in the late 5os thru early 60s. It has a character that is of it's time and brings back so many memories of a simpler era when the most pressing problems were " will he ask me to the prom?" I guess this is still somewhat true with teenagers today but it really stood out then and was the subject of many a pop love song, movies (Gidget) and television series (more Gidget, The Patty Duke Show). I was still on the youngish side but I knew I wanted to someday be in love, too. Sigh.
