The Rooftop Singers
Encyclopedia
The Rooftop Singers were an American
progressive folk
-singing
trio
in the early 1960s, best known for the hit
"Walk Right In
". The group was composed of Erik Darling and Bill Svanoe (vocals
, guitar
) with former jazz
singer
Lynne Taylor (vocals
).
Darling put the group together in June 1962 specifically to record
an updated and uptempo version
of a 1929 Gus Cannon
folk blues
song
, "Walk Right In". The trio recorded the song for Vanguard Records
, with updated lyrics
and an arrangement
featuring paired 12-string acoustic guitar
s. The record
became the most successful in Vanguard's history.
In the U.S., the song was #1 for two weeks on the Billboard Hot 100
chart
in early 1963. It spent five weeks atop the Easy Listening chart
, which would later become known as the Adult Contemporary chart. In addition, "Walk Right In" reached both the R&B chart
(peaking at #4) as well as the country music chart
(peaking at #23). The song reached #1 in Australia
on the Kent Music Report
in 1963, and it made the Top 10 on the UK Singles Chart
in the United Kingdom
, peaking at #10. The recording sold over one million copies, gaining gold disc
status.
The album that contained this song was also called Walk Right In, and was nominated for a Grammy Award
in the Best Folk Recording
category. The group was more influenced by ragtime, blues, and songster material than contemporaneous folk groups such as The Weavers
, which Darling belonged to until just before he formed the Rooftop Singers. They were also less overtly political.
The group played at the Newport Folk Festival
in 1963. Vanguard released several further singles
including the minor hit "Tom Cat". Yielding to pressure from her husband, Taylor left the trio shortly after Vanguard released the group's second album, Good Time!. Darling and Svanoe then recruited Mindy Stuart to replace her. This line-up recorded one final album, Rainy River. Patricia Street replaced Stuart shortly before the Rooftop Singers formally disbanded in 1967. Darling and Street continued working as a duo into the early seventies, recording the album The Possible Dream for Vanguard.
Lynne Taylor (born in 1928) died in 1982 at age 54, and Erik Darling died on August 3, 2008, aged 74, in Chapel Hill,
North Carolina, from Burkitt's lymphoma.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
progressive folk
Folk music
Folk music is an English term encompassing both traditional folk music and contemporary folk music. The term originated in the 19th century. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers....
-singing
Singing
Singing is the act of producing musical sounds with the voice, and augments regular speech by the use of both tonality and rhythm. One who sings is called a singer or vocalist. Singers perform music known as songs that can be sung either with or without accompaniment by musical instruments...
trio
Trio (music)
Trio is generally used in any of the following ways:* A group of three musicians playing the same or different musical instrument.* The performance of a piece of music by three people.* The contrasting section of a piece in ternary form...
in the early 1960s, best known for the hit
Hit record
A hit record is a sound recording, usually in the form of a single or album, that sells a large number of copies or otherwise becomes broadly popular or well-known, through airplay, club play, inclusion in a film or stage play soundtrack, causing it to have "hit" one of the popular chart listings...
"Walk Right In
Walk Right In
Walk Right In is the title of a country blues song written by musician Gus Cannon and originally recorded by Cannon's Jug Stompers in 1929, released on Victor Records, catalogue 38611. It was reissued on album in 1959 as a track on The Country Blues....
". The group was composed of Erik Darling and Bill Svanoe (vocals
Singing
Singing is the act of producing musical sounds with the voice, and augments regular speech by the use of both tonality and rhythm. One who sings is called a singer or vocalist. Singers perform music known as songs that can be sung either with or without accompaniment by musical instruments...
, guitar
Guitar
The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...
) with former jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
singer
Singing
Singing is the act of producing musical sounds with the voice, and augments regular speech by the use of both tonality and rhythm. One who sings is called a singer or vocalist. Singers perform music known as songs that can be sung either with or without accompaniment by musical instruments...
Lynne Taylor (vocals
Human voice
The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal folds for talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, etc. Its frequency ranges from about 60 to 7000 Hz. The human voice is specifically that part of human sound production in which the vocal folds are the primary...
).
Darling put the group together in June 1962 specifically to record
Sound recording and reproduction
Sound recording and reproduction is an electrical or mechanical inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of sound recording technology are analog recording and digital recording...
an updated and uptempo version
Cover version
In popular music, a cover version or cover song, or simply cover, is a new performance or recording of a contemporary or previously recorded, commercially released song or popular song...
of a 1929 Gus Cannon
Gus Cannon
Gus Cannon was an American blues musician, who helped to popularize jug bands in the 1920s and 1930s. There is doubt about his birth year; his tombstone gives the date as 1874....
folk blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
song
Song
In music, a song is a composition for voice or voices, performed by singing.A song may be accompanied by musical instruments, or it may be unaccompanied, as in the case of a cappella songs...
, "Walk Right In". The trio recorded the song for Vanguard Records
Vanguard Records
Vanguard Records is a record label set up in 1950 by brothers Maynard and Seymour Solomon in New York. It started as a classical label, but is perhaps best known for its catalogue of recordings by a number of pivotal folk and blues artists from the 1960s; the Bach Guild was a subsidiary...
, with updated lyrics
Lyrics
Lyrics are a set of words that make up a song. The writer of lyrics is a lyricist or lyrist. The meaning of lyrics can either be explicit or implicit. Some lyrics are abstract, almost unintelligible, and, in such cases, their explication emphasizes form, articulation, meter, and symmetry of...
and an arrangement
Arrangement
The American Federation of Musicians defines arranging as "the art of preparing and adapting an already written composition for presentation in other than its original form. An arrangement may include reharmonization, paraphrasing, and/or development of a composition, so that it fully represents...
featuring paired 12-string acoustic guitar
Acoustic guitar
An acoustic guitar is a guitar that uses only an acoustic sound board. The air in this cavity resonates with the vibrational modes of the string and at low frequencies, which depend on the size of the box, the chamber acts like a Helmholtz resonator, increasing or decreasing the volume of the sound...
s. The record
Gramophone record
A gramophone record, commonly known as a phonograph record , vinyl record , or colloquially, a record, is an analog sound storage medium consisting of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove...
became the most successful in Vanguard's history.
In the U.S., the song was #1 for two weeks on the Billboard Hot 100
Billboard Hot 100
The Billboard Hot 100 is the United States music industry standard singles popularity chart issued weekly by Billboard magazine. Chart rankings are based on radio play and sales; the tracking-week for sales begins on Monday and ends on Sunday, while the radio play tracking-week runs from Wednesday...
chart
Record chart
A record chart is a ranking of recorded music according to popularity during a given period of time. Examples of music charts are the Hit parade, Hot 100 or Top 40....
in early 1963. It spent five weeks atop the Easy Listening chart
Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks
The Adult Contemporary chart is a weekly chart published in Billboard magazine that lists the most popular songs on adult contemporary and "lite-pop" radio stations in the United States...
, which would later become known as the Adult Contemporary chart. In addition, "Walk Right In" reached both the R&B chart
Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs
Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, is a chart released weekly by Billboard in the United States.The chart, initiated in 1942, is used to track the success of popular music songs in urban, or primarily African American, venues. Dominated over the years at various times by jazz, rhythm and blues, doo-wop, soul,...
(peaking at #4) as well as the country music chart
Hot Country Songs
Hot Country Songs is a chart published weekly by Billboard magazine in the United States.This 60-position chart lists the most popular country music songs, calculated weekly mostly by airplay and occasionally commercial sales...
(peaking at #23). The song reached #1 in Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
on the Kent Music Report
Kent Music Report
The Kent Music Report was a weekly record chart of Australian music singles and albums which was compiled by music enthusiast David Kent from May 1974 through to 1998...
in 1963, and it made the Top 10 on the UK Singles Chart
UK Singles Chart
The UK Singles Chart is compiled by The Official Charts Company on behalf of the British record-industry. The full chart contains the top selling 200 singles in the United Kingdom based upon combined record sales and download numbers, though some media outlets only list the Top 40 or the Top 75 ...
in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
, peaking at #10. The recording sold over one million copies, gaining gold disc
Music recording sales certification
Music recording sales certification is a system of certifying that a music recording has shipped or sold a certain number of copies, where the threshold quantity varies by type and by nation or territory .Almost all countries follow variations of the RIAA certification categories,...
status.
The album that contained this song was also called Walk Right In, and was nominated for a Grammy Award
Grammy Award
A Grammy Award — or Grammy — is an accolade by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States to recognize outstanding achievement in the music industry...
in the Best Folk Recording
Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording
The Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording was awarded from 1960 to 1986. During this time the award had several minor name changes:*From 1960 to 1961 the award was known as Best Performance - Folk...
category. The group was more influenced by ragtime, blues, and songster material than contemporaneous folk groups such as The Weavers
The Weavers
The Weavers were an American folk music quartet based in the Greenwich Village area of New York City. They sang traditional folk songs from around the world, as well as blues, gospel music, children's songs, labor songs, and American ballads, and selling millions of records at the height of their...
, which Darling belonged to until just before he formed the Rooftop Singers. They were also less overtly political.
The group played at the Newport Folk Festival
Newport Folk Festival
The Newport Folk Festival is an American annual folk-oriented music festival in Newport, Rhode Island, which began in 1959 as a counterpart to the previously established Newport Jazz Festival...
in 1963. Vanguard released several further singles
Single (music)
In music, a single or record single is a type of release, typically a recording of fewer tracks than an LP or a CD. This can be released for sale to the public in a variety of different formats. In most cases, the single is a song that is released separately from an album, but it can still appear...
including the minor hit "Tom Cat". Yielding to pressure from her husband, Taylor left the trio shortly after Vanguard released the group's second album, Good Time!. Darling and Svanoe then recruited Mindy Stuart to replace her. This line-up recorded one final album, Rainy River. Patricia Street replaced Stuart shortly before the Rooftop Singers formally disbanded in 1967. Darling and Street continued working as a duo into the early seventies, recording the album The Possible Dream for Vanguard.
Lynne Taylor (born in 1928) died in 1982 at age 54, and Erik Darling died on August 3, 2008, aged 74, in Chapel Hill,
North Carolina, from Burkitt's lymphoma.
See also
- List of folk musicians
- List of artists who reached number one in the United States
- List of artists who reached number one on the U.S. Adult Contemporary chart