For such a singular, inexplicable pop record, there is an
awful lot of backstory. Chess producer/A&R man Abner Spector – who was
unrelated to any other similarly-named record producers – asked Harlem-based label
owner Zelda “Zell” Sanders (she owned the independent J&S label) to come up
with a girl group hit for the bigger label. Sanders got together with Spector’s
wife, Lona Stevens (née Leonora
Florence Cataldo); they thought about the ominous and ancient nursery rhyme “Ring
A Ring O’ Roses” (ominous because it was thought to have been inspired by the
Black Death) and came up with “Sally Go ‘round The Roses.” The Jaynetts were
nominally a Bronx vocal group, but essentially
assembled by Sanders; a five-piece line-up recorded an initial demo.
The next stop was to hire Artie Butler as the record’s
arranger. He was uncertain of the song’s potential from the demo but thought of
things that he could do with it. On the final record he plays most of the
instruments, except for the guitars (which were played by Al Gorgoni and Carl
Lynch) and possibly the drums (which may have been played by a young Buddy
Miles). According to Butler,
the entire recording was made on a relatively primitive Ampex mono tape
machine; importantly, however, with the addition of each instrumental and vocal
overdub, he applied a different type of reverb to each separate dub. This gives
the record its eerie, floating quality; the approach is not that different to
what Alvin Lucier would later investigate in I Am Sitting In A Room.
On the final record numerous other singers – basically everybody
who happened to be in the Chess studios at the time – were added to the basic
Jaynetts line-up; some say as many as twenty voices could be heard at one
point. However, when Spector heard the record he flipped and ranted at Butler about wasting his
money. Butler
then played the record to Leiber and Stoller, who offered to buy it from Chess;
Spector accordingly had second thoughts about the song and released it himself.
As a record “Sally” is not only one of the greatest of pop
singles, but also one of the least fathomable. It is a girl group record in the
sense that “Two Tribes” was done by a boy band. There is an appealing
stop/start Latinate motion to the rhythm, which surely must have influenced Lee
Morgan, who recorded “The Sidewinder” in December of the same year, but the
voices come and go, drift in and out of focus…and what, or whom, are they
singing about? Roses which can’t hurt you and won’t tell your secret – “You can
sit and cry, not a soul will know.”
The clear implication is that something a lot more sinister
has happened than Sally catching her “baby” with another girl, but nothing is
ever spelled out. Surprisingly, with so many singers to hand, there is little
attempt at harmonising, and the song is essentially sung as a mass unison
(thereby influencing such disparate operatives as Medeski, Martin & Wood, Girls Aloud and Bananarama). The occasional forthright lead suggests that in Britain (where
the record did nothing), only Dusty Springfield might have understood the song
sufficiently to cover it - as it turned out, there were some unconvincing
domestic covers by people like Lyn Cornell, later half of seventies two-hit
wonders Pearls; but Joan Baez is seen singing a snippet of the song in the Dylan
documentary film Don’t Look Back, Grace Slick performed and recorded the song while still a member of The Great Society, the
Pentangle recorded a fine version on their great 1969 album Basket Of Light, it was the first single
for one Donna Gaines – who later became better known as Donna Summer – in 1971,
and Tim Buckley references the song quite heavily, and indicates a possible
solution to the lyrical puzzle, in his similarly-titled composition on 1973’s Sefronia. It is known that the song was one of Amy Winehouse's favourite girl-group records, and a listen to something like "Wake Up Alone" may demonstrate how deeply its fatal emotional ambiguity resonated in that singer. Even Nana Mouskouri recorded the song, in Greek.
In other words, “Sally Go ‘round The Roses” passed into
popular folklore and became an ambiguous folk song. Who knows what it was
really about? No good asking Zell Sanders, who passed on in 1976, or Lona
Stevens, who died in January 2016, or Abner Spector, who lived on until 2010
(aged ninety-two). As for Artie Butler, he went on to arrange many of the hits
by the Shangri-Las, which in this context has its own irreducible logic (and
thereafter early Neil Diamond hits like “Cherry Cherry” and even unto Janis Ian’s
“Society’s Child”). A Jaynetts album was hastily assembled, and the version of the song there is slightly longer and sonically more reticent. But the 45 mix
is what has been remembered; a record which stands aside from, and a little
above, much of what else passed for pop music in its time. Possibly even more so
than the next entry.
Date Record Made
Number Two: 28 September 1963
Number of Weeks At
Number Two: 2
Record At Number One: “Blue
Velvet” by Bobby Vinton (and given the subsequent history of that song, how fitting that there was another proto-Lynchian construct in second place)
UK Chart Position: None
great post
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