Obscure Originators (35): Johnny Yukon

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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Johnny Yukon's real name was Ben Gabus. He was from Texas, born in Galveston in 1931, but later lived in Lafayette, Louisiana where he could be heard regularly at the Jury Room Lounge. His composition Ride Away (With A Song In Your Heart) was released by Slim Whitman in 1954.

As Johnny Yukon, Ben recorded his own composition Made To Be Loved (1959). It didn't make him famous, but it charted #25 in Italy, and it had a good run Down Under through local cover versions.

In 1960 it was recorded twice in Australia: by top Sydney deejay John Laws, and by a new young talent called Adam, an alias of Ian B. McLeod, the enduring country music artist, producer and record label owner from Warragamba NSW.

Neither of those records was a commercial success in Australia, but in New Zealand it was recorded by The Keil Isles, also in 1960. They were a popular Auckland rock'n'roll band formed by Samoan-born Olaf Keil and his cousin Freddie Keil with a line-up that included other members of the Keil family.

Chart placings are hard to pin down for New Zealand in the 1960s, but Warwick Freeman's retrospective chart places The Keil Isles' version of Made To Be Loved at #3 New Zealand.

Ben Gabus released Made To Be Loved again in 1964, this time as Ben Gabus. This is sometimes mistaken for the original version, partly because of confusion between two record labels with the same name and catalogue numbers.

In his later years Gabus lived in Lexington, South Carolina and ran the Ben Gabus Tree Service. 

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For more about the song and Johnny Yukon, see The Keil Isles - Made To Be Loved.