7/9 - Shirley Ellis

You know that Name Game you used to play as a kid - "Phil Phil bo Bill Banana Fanna Fo Fill...etc."? Well, maybe you don't know that you can pretty much thank or blame Shirley Ellis for that song (though the youthful glee of putting the names Mitch and Chuck through the treatment is all your own).

Ellis had a relatively brief career spanning from about 1963 - 1968, wherein she had three pop singles blaze into the top 10, and one other modestly successful soul side presented as a coda to her years as a singer. She was born in the Bronx in 1941, and began singing in the '50s with a now-forgotten group called the Metronomes. Toward the end of that decade, she hooked up with manager/songwriter Lincoln Chase (who had already penned the hit "Jim Dandy" for LaVern Baker), and together they released the semi-novelty floor-burner "The Nitty Gritty" in 1963. Ellis' version of the song, sadly and strangely, was released only as a live cut. Though the stereo quality is uncommonly good for this treatment, nonetheless, no known version seems to exist without the distracting swell of the audience in the background. This, in my opinion, is the one thing that makes Gladys Knight & the Pips' later cover of the song the superior of the two.

The offhanded, playful nursery-rhyme like lyrics of "The Name Game," which became her next release, proved so popular for the singer, that she duplicated the formula in the far-superior single "The Clapping Song" a year later. For my money, "The Clapping Song," with its chanting, rhythmic sing- and clap-along melody, may be over 40 years old at this point, but has scarcely been trumped as one of the best danceparty songs of all time. For her last hit, Ellis released the excellent, more traditional soul, "Soultime," which has been sampled to excellent effect recently by the group The Go! Team (in their song "Bottle Rocket".

It's astounding how well Ellis' so-called novelty pop songs have held up over the years. It's no secret that the "disposable" pop music of the '60s turned out to be quite recyclable in sound, style and tone, but it says a lot that the original versions still play so well next to the music of today.