A Word with Jimmy Beaumont of The Skyliners
A young group manager and a teenager from Pittsburgh got together and created one of the all-time greatest rock ’n’ roll songs their first time out. Jimmy Beaumont of The Skyliners tells us the story.
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“I was maybe six or seven when I heard the great Nat ‘King’ Cole. I used to imitate him and I thought that maybe someday I could do that.” So says Jimmy Beaumont, recalling his earliest dream of becoming a singer.
“Time went on and I heard the rhythm and blues groups of that era: The Cadillacs’ ‘Gloria’ and The Flamingoes, their early stuff, and The Moonglows singing ‘Most Of All,’ and I just fell in love with that music.”
Knoxville Junior High School in Pittsburgh was, says Jimmy, a “bi-racial school and I made a lot of good black friends there. We formed little groups, singing in the hallways and the bathrooms, looking for an echo.”
Jimmy joined The Montereys as — ironically for one of the great tenor leads of the rock ’n’ roll era — their bass man, because they already had two lead singers.
It was at a Friday night “Battle of the Groups” hosted by radio DJ Al Nobel that Jimmy met the man who would be key to his later success. “We were battling The Crescents and that’s when I met Joe Rock who would become our manager and my co-writer. For some reason I sang a lead, I think it was ‘Sympathy’ by The Cadillacs, and Joe asked me if I’d like to become the lead singer of The Crescents.”
“I was with The Crescents from 15 years old until maybe 17. Joe was a promotion man for ABC-Paramount and [we got] a contract with them. A year and a half went by and we still hadn’t recorded. Three of the guys quit, which left myself and Wally Lester — who was our first tenor — and our guitar player Jack Taylor, who was a good lead and bass singer.” With the addition of high-tenor Janet Vogel and baritone Joe Versharen from The El Rios, The Crescents were poised to record one of the greatest records of the rock ’n’ roll era.
“We auditioned for Calico Records,” says Jimmy, “a new label from Pittsburgh. We had already written ‘Since I Don’t Have You,’ and it was a pretty strong piece of music for kids to show up with. I remember Lenny Martin, who was the A&R man for Calico, standing up and saying, ‘This is the group!’”
“Joe Rock wrote the words to ‘Since I Don’t Have You’ and I put the music to it, and then I built the vocal background around it.”
On the way to a Crescents rehearsal, Joe — forlorn because his stewardess girlfriend was relocating Los Angeles — had put pieces of his heart-pain to paper at each red light. “When he got there,” Jimmy says, “he had most of the song completed. At rehearsal he finished it and I took it home that night and it was very easy to come up with that melody.” (This, from a 17-year-old kid who had never written a song before!)
As for the thrilling ending: “At that time a lot of the records faded and we had actually planned to end the song with a fade. Maybe not 13 ‘you’s,’ maybe six or seven. After the twelfth ‘you,’ I said, ‘Let’s just end this. I’ll sing the last ‘you’ and then we’ll hit a chord.’ And Janet surprised us all with her last beautiful combination of notes.”
Recorded on December 3, 1958 at Capitol’s New York studio on West 46th Street, “Since I Don’t Have You” (Take #3) — with the group now billed as The Skyliners — peaked at #7 nationally in Cash Box in mid-April 1959. It did even better on the R&B charts, going to #3.
The songwriting team of Rock and Beaumont was born; one that would deliver a series of classic group harmony songs in the years to come. In 1959, however, the duo’s main concern was for a powerful follow-up to “Since I Don’t Have You.”
It was common practice then for other artists to record cover versions of up-and-coming singles and, even though Trini Lopez’ recording of “Since” on the more established King label didn’t hurt The Skyliners original, Jimmy feared that their future releases might get buried by competing records. “I said, ‘Next time we write a song I’m going to make it so difficult that no one’s going be able to cover it.’ So that’s why I wrote the jazz-influenced bridge of ‘This I Swear.’ It was very hard for anyone who didn’t really know about music to cover, and so no one did.”
“This I Swear” was another exemplary effort that reached the national Top 30 and charted Top 15 in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, as well as Top 5 in their hometown of Pittsburgh.
After “It Happened Today” and then “How Much” (the latter being his “favorite Skyliners’ record: vocally, arrangement-wise, lyric-wise, and musically”) fell short of expectations, the group went with a non-Rock/Beaumont composition. Jimmy first “heard The Clovers In Clover album, and ‘Pennies From Heaven’ was one of the songs on it and we kind of did their arrangement. The record company sped it up and added the big band [arrangement].”
“[At first] I thought, ‘That’s not a good idea,’ because it wasn’t rock ’n’ roll. (The song dated back to 1936 when Bing Crosby popularized it.) But Dick Clark loved it. It was an easy song for teenagers to sing and you could jitterbug to it.”
And, in the summer of 1960, it put The Skyliners back in the Top 10. Says Jimmy today, “I’m glad they did release it!”
After one more Skyliners release, Calico folded and they moved on to Colpix Records which released group and solo Jimmy singles, a pattern that continued through the rest of the decade on various labels and with various combinations of group members.
With the dawn of the 1970s came the rock ’n’ roll revival and The Skyliners were in the thick of it. Once again, Jimmy and The Skyliners were wowing fans with their great songs and vocals.
In recognition of the group’s talent and success, they were inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2002, “something I’m really proud of,” says Jimmy.
He’s also really proud of the current Skyliners. “Donna Groom is musically blessed. She was a child prodigy, has perfect pitch, and is a concert pianist. Nick Pociask is our bass baritone and likes to sing the high falsetto stuff. Frank Czuri was with Pure Gold for [25] years. He’s our second tenor. [Plus] all of them are wonderful lead singers.”
This year’s Malt Shop Memories Cruise will be The Skyliners’ second time performing for the StarVista LIVE fans and we can’t wait. Jimmy’s emphatic about what we can expect: “It’ll be fun!”
- Ed Osborne © 2016