Obscure Originators (37): "Youth Opportunity Program” (Back To School)

From my website's front page series about lesser known artists who performed the original versions of Australian or NZ records.

See also: the full collection of over 30 Obscure Originators features. 

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Of Hopes And Dreams And Tombstones was covered by The Purple Hearts, a respected Australian band with R&B-blues influences. It charted in Melbourne and Brisbane in 1966.

Australian listeners might have been surprised to learn that the original version was recorded as part of a 1965 US government campaign. The aim was to encourage teenagers to stay in school, unlike the singer who is working three jobs a day and regrets quitting school too early.

The Youth Opportunity Back-to-School Campaign distributed the single free to American radio stations with a formal message on the sleeve from Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey.

In spite of its origin, the record is a convincing piece of mid-60s popular music that was later adopted by Britain's Northern Soul movement. The vocals and the harmonica-led backing make it sound like a perfectly credible (even groovy!) rock record of the time.

The title of the project is printed on the label instead of an artist's name, so the singer goes uncredited. He was Jimmy Fraser, still a mystery although I have seen it suggested that this was a pseudonym. Columbia Records did reissue the track commercially as a Jimmy Fraser single, but that was the last we heard of him, at least under that name.

Credit for the song's credibility goes also to the composer, Joy Byers. She wrote, for example, Eddie Cochran’s C’mon Everybody, several songs for Elvis Presley and (with co-writer Clyde Otis) Timi Yuro's What's A Matter Baby (Is It Hurting You).

In 2002 The Purple Hearts' Australian version provided the opening track and the title of one of Alex Palao's excellent Ace Records (UK) compilations, Of Hopes & Dreams & Tombstones (Beat 'n' R&B From Down Under). For me, that just about confirms its groovy status.

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For more about the song and "Youth Opportunity Program” (Back To School), see The Purple Hearts - Of Hopes And Dreams And Tombstones. 

▶︎ Teresa Brewer's quirky Aussie trifecta

Back in her hometown, April 1952

Singing star of the 50s
Teresa Brewer's voice was familiar on radio and records throughout the 1950s. From 1950 to 1957 she made the Top 40 twenty-five times, beginning with Music, Music, Music (1950, #1 USA), also known for its familiar opening words Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon. 

Some of her songs, like Ricochet (1953, #2 USA), were in that perky post-WW2, pre-rock'n'roll vein of Music, Music, Music, but that did not confine her. 

A Tear Fell (1956 #5 USA) was on the pop charts while Ivory Joe Hunter's version was charting #15 R&B, and her cover of Sam Cooke's current hit You Send Me charted #8 USA for her in 1957. 

In the following years she proved her versatility by recording albums with jazz greats including Count Basie (The Songs Of Bessie Smith), Stephane Grappelli and Duke Ellington. On the 1973 album In London she recorded contemporary songs with Oily Rags, a younger band featuring Chas Hodges and Dave Peacock, soon to be stars as Chas And Dave.

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Teresa's versions of Australian hits
She clearly cast widely for material. Her cover versions even included three songs previously released by Australasian artists, songs that were familiar in Australia. 

There were Teresa Brewer versions of:

• Col Joye's Bye Bye Baby (1959, #1 Sydney #3 Melbourne #2 Brisbane #2 Adelaide #2 Perth; #3 Australia).
Covered on 1959 single using the alternative title Bye Bye Baby Goodbye.

• Patsy Ann Noble's Good Looking Boy (1961, #16 Sydney #6 Melbourne #13 Brisbane #8 Adelaide; #17 Australia).
Covered on 1961 single, song retitled Pretty Lookin’ Boy.

• Maria Dallas's Ambush (1967, #19 Sydney #12 Melbourne #4 Brisbane; #16 Australia).
Covered on album Unliberated Woman (1975)

All three of those songs had chart success only in Australia.

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How come? 
Teresa seems to have had no special connection with Australia or New Zealand, even though she covered these songs with clear Australasian credentials:  

• Good Looking Boy was an original version, recorded in Sydney by an Australian, Patsy Ann Noble. It was written by Johnny Devlin, a New Zealander residing in Australia, 

• Bye Bye Baby was recorded in Sydney by an Australian, Col Joye.

• Ambush was an original version, recorded by a New Zealander, Maria Dallas. The single did not chart in NZ, but NZers would have also known the song from the albums Maria Dallas In Nashville (1967) and Tumblin’ Down (1968).

However, two of the records have some American connections that might help to explain why they came to the attention of Teresa and her people.

• Ambush is an American composition, recorded in Nashville by Maria Dallas. RCA released it in the US as a single and as a track on Tumblin' Down (1968)

• Bye Bye Baby by Col Joye (c. May 1959) was itself a cover, the only charting version of a lesser-known American composition originally released by Sonny Williams (Sept 1958).* 

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*Col's single was also released in the US as Bye Bye Baby Goodbye in July 1959, but after Teresa Brewer's release in June.

Back at the website
• Song histories of Bye Bye Baby, (aka Bye Bye Baby Goodbye), Good Looking Boy and Ambush
• The Obscure Originators feature has articles about Sonny Williams who originally released Bye Bye Baby and about Bobbie & Dude, the sisters from Texas who wrote Ambush. 

Chart sources
Warwick Freeman (NZ), Dean Scapolo (NZ), Gavin Ryan (Australian cities) and Grant Dawe's site (Australia). US charts by Joel Whitburn: 1940-1955, 1955-2012 (via Internet Archive).

 
↑ Music, Music, Music (1950, #1), the first of many charting Teresa Brewer singles

↑ Known in Australia as a Col Joye song, this went back even further than that

↑ Good Looking Boy retitled Pretty Lookin’ Boy for Teresa's version

 ↑ Teresa covers an Australian hit for a NZ singer who recorded it in Nashville


↑ Teresa Brewer does Van Morrison with Oily Rag (1973)

▶︎ Cover version or remake?

Some online music forums used to insist on making a distinction between a cover version and a remake of a record. 

This was back in, say, the late 1990s to early 2000s, when Usenet newsgroups such as rec.music.rock-pop-r+b.1950s were thriving.

Cover?
In this strict terminology, a cover version is released around the time of the original in order to take advantage of the song's current or potential popularity. Several versions of a song could be selling well at the same time. This often happened in the pre-1960s era, but there are plenty of later examples. (In the 60s it wasn't unusual to hear covers of tracks from the latest Beatles album.) 

Judy Stone's version of Born A Woman (June 1966) came out soon after the original by Sandy Posey (May 1966), qualifying it as a true cover version. In Australia Sandy and Judy co-charted in some surveys. 

The same goes for Johnny Farnham's cover of Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head (December 1969), originally by B.J. Thomas (October 1969). Again, these two records appeared side-by-side on some Australian radio charts.

Remake?
On the other hand, in some discussions, if you called Billy Thorpe's version of Poison Ivy (1964) a cover of The Coasters' original (1959) someone would quickly point out your gaffe. No, no, no, after 5 years, Billy's version was a remake. It was easier to stick to the convention.

Cover!
Nowadays, though, cover is so widely accepted to mean any later version that the remake distinction would be lost on most readers. The big song history sites The Originals, SecondHandSongs and (obviously) Cover.info all use cover to mean any later version, and these are run by experts in the field.

A clincher for me was when I realised that cover was already used by songwriters to mean any recording of their published song. I first noticed it in an email from an American songwriter who said one of his songs got a lot of covers. From a songwriter, this indicates that a song was successful, that it did some good business, regardless of when it was recorded.

James Taylor covers some old songs in 2008