Gene Vincent records Be-Bop-A-Lula
When a music critic wants to indicate that a song lacks lyrical sophistication he or she will often refer to its lyrics as being of the moon in June sort.Its a label left over from the Tin Pan Alley era when even great composers like Irving Berlin churned out a hundred uninspired MoonJune tunes for every highly original classic like Blues Skies or Puttin On The Ritz.If rock and roll has an equivalent in the area of clichd lyrics it is probably Baby and Maybea rhyming pair made most famous in the smoldering early-rock classic Be-Bop-A-Lula which was recorded in Nashville Tennessee by the rockabilly legend Gene Vincent on this day in 1956.The story of how the decidedly un-complex lyrics of Be-Bop-A-Lula got written is shrouded in a certain amount of controversy.
Officially Gene Vincents business manager Bill Sheriff Tex Davis is credited as the co-writer but Sheriff Tex a savvy 40-year-old from Connecticut seems an unlikely source of such nave gem.The story that has the greater ring of truth credits a young man named Donald Gravesa buddy Gene Vincent made in a Portsmouth Virginia Veterans Hospital.Vincentborn Vincent Eugene Craddock in 1935had just reenlisted in the U.S.
Navy in the spring of 1955 when he suffered a devastating leg injury in a motorcycle accident.That injury would land him in hospital for more than a year where a fellow patient remembers Vincent and Graves tooling around the facility working out the song that would eventually become a classic.By the time Gene Vincents demo tape reached Capitol Records the following spring however Graves had been bought out of his share in Be-Bop-A-Lula by Sheriff Tex reportedly for just 25.It wasnt the obvious brilliance of Be-Bop-A-Lula but rather the uncanny resemblance between Gene Vincents voice and Elvis Presleys that explains the speed with which Capitol snapped Vincent up and got him into the studio.
In fact when Vincent and his Blue Caps recorded Be-Bop-A-Lula on May 4 1956 it was as a B side to a now largely forgotten tune called Woman Love.As soon as disk jockeys began flipping Vincents debut single however Be-Bop-A-Lula became a smash rising to 7 on the pop charts and selling more than 2 million copies in its first year of release.
