Music: Singers in Bunches

Once, when a person with a sweet tooth asked for Charms. Chuckles. Cheers or Nuggets, he got candy. Today he gets a disk, by one of the score of vocal groups whose recordings are crowding the bestseller lists. Not all the groups go by such fancy names. There are simple families: the Ames Brothers, the McGuire, De Marco. DeCastro and Fontane Sisters, and groups that wish to establish the fact, before any doubts arise, that they are quartets: the Four Aces, Four Lads, Four Knights, Four Tunes, Four Freshmen.

Many of the top current groups were harmonizing in church or school gatherings when the original Mills Brothers, the Andrews Sisters and the Modernaires were first warbling their close harmonies on the radio. The outfits usually got their break with a performance on a disk-jockey show or an amateur hour. Their commercial success (some now earn five-figure incomes) probably depends on listener identification, i.e., the more amateurish the singers sound, the stronger their appeal for the jukebox set. As a result, most vocal groups get best results with music that has a country or hillbilly flavor, with primitive harmonies and tunes that would go over big in a nursery school. A few, such as the Crew-Cuts, are making their way with such nonsense songs as their recent hit called Sh-Boom.

Topping last week’s bestseller list was Mr. Sandman (Cadence), featuring the piping voices of the Chordettes, beginning with chime effects (“bum, bum, bum, bum”) and paced by the clip-clop sounds of Archie Bleyer slapping his knees. Sample Mr. Sandman lyric: “Give him a lonely heart like Pagliacci, and lots of wavy hair like Liberace.” No. 4 bestseller: Teach Me Tonight (Abbott), with the DeCastro Sisters in a twangy, eagerly enunciated request for seduction. The melody is in the contralto, while the other girls warble country-alto above. No. 11 but climbing fast: The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane (Victor), in which the Ames Brothers croon their kind of bumdadabum, bumbum, bum in a shuffle rhythm, sing the praises of their heroine (“Me-o, myo what a girl”) tongue-in-jowl, right up to the trick ending.