Sending love notes
February 14, 2011
Sealed With A Kiss · Brian Hyland · 1962
Play the song.
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The solution? Just promise to send her all your love, every day, in a letter (sealed with a kiss.)
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In July 1960, Brian Hyland was a high school sophomore when his record “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini” topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Two years later, in the summer of ‘62, his big hit was “Sealed With A kiss“. That song peaked at position #3, and was in the top 40 for eleven weeks. |
For your valentine: Old-fashioned love songs (January 8, 2009)
Roses are red, violets are blue…
The very first record on the Epic label to top the Hot 100 was this song by Bobby Vinton.
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Bobby had previously recorded two albums as a big band leader, but those records had been failures. The label was about to drop him when he talked them into giving him one more chance, this time as a vocalist. The song he wanted to record was “Roses Are Red (My Love)” by Paul Evans and Al Byron. First he tried to do it as an R&B song, but they didn’t like the result. So they went with more of a country style with different arrangements, strings, and a vocal choir. |
“Roses Are Red (My Love)” was the first of a long line of hits (including more chart toppers) for (singer!) Bobby Vinton.
Roses Are Red (My Love) · Bobby Vinton · 1962 
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Conway Twitty started his entertainment career as a young rock-and-roll singer and ended it as a country music super-star.
| To begin with—believe-it-or-not—Conway Twitty wasn’t even his real name. He was actually Harold Lloyd Jenkins. In his very early days he was a part-time preacher, and he considered becoming a minister. When he graduated from high school, he had a .450 batting average and was offered a contract with the Philadelphia Phillies. But ultimately a War intervened, and he was drafted. He served in the Pacific, where he formed a band called the Cimmarrons and played clubs in Japan. That changed the direction of his life. |  |
Back home, with showbiz stars in his eyes, Jenkins renamed himself after two southern towns that he picked out on a map (Conway, Arkansas and Twitty, Texas.)
His first #1 hit charted in November, 1958, and that was on the Hot 100. It was a song that he and fellow Cimmarron band member, Jack Nance, had written. The song was “It’s Only Make Believe”. It is a song that clearly shows his rockabilly roots.
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Listen to It’s Only Make Believe • Conway Twitty Download MP3 |
Joni wrote me a note one day…
A few years later, Conway Twitty wrote the song “Don’t Cry Joni”, and recorded it as the “B” side of his (#1 Country) single “Touch The Hand”. “Don’t Cry Joni” peaked at number 4 in the late summer of 1975. It is a duet he recorded with his sixteen-year-old daughter Joni Lee.
The song asks the questions, “What do you do when the little girl next door writes you a love note? And what if, years later, you come to realize that she may have been your soul mate?”
It records the emotions of the young girl, Joni, in her simple little note to Jimmy, a boy seven years her senior. She pleads to him to wait for her to grow up. But he thinks he has his own life to live; so he moves away and they lose touch. Then, over the years, he begins to realize that he made a mistake by not waiting for her. At last he returns to their home town to explain to her and to claim her. (Until the story’s abrupt ending in the song’s ironic final line.)
Don’t Cry Joni · Conway Twitty · 1975
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