Dee Clark was born Delectus Clark in 1938 in Blytheville, Arkansas. His family moved to Chicago in 1941 and he was encouraged to develop his interest in music. He completed his first recording around the age of fourteen as a member of a group called the Hambone Kids and joined an R&B group called the Goldentones soon after. After a change of name to the Kool Gents, the group came to the attention of radio DJ Herb Kent, when they won a talent show. Thanks to Kent, the group were able to sign to Vee-Jay’s subsidiary label Falcon Records. Following another change of name, the Delegates, as they were briefly known, recorded their first track in 1956, entitled “The Convention”. They shared the single with Big Jay McNeely, whose song “Jay’s Rock” was on the B-side.
The following year saw Dee Clark embark on a solo career. Three singles were released on Falcon, before the label became Abner Records. Six more singles were issued on Abner. Clark then switched to Vee-Jay’s main label in 1959, recording sixteen singles up to 1963, when he left Vee-Jay to sign for Ewart Abner’s Constellation Records.
Between 1959 and 1963, Vee-Jay also issued four studio albums and a compilation of Clark’s best songs.
Trading card photo of Dee Clark 1960
(Wikimedia Commons)
Vee-Jay clearly invested a lot of time and money into developing Clark as a mainstream artist. His songs cover a wide range of genres but concentrate on a style that would be appreciated by all members of the music community, Black and White. Beyond the ballads, there are also Blues songs, Dance songs and pure Pop songs.
“Just Keep It Up” and “Hey Little Girl” were both released in 1959 and reached the top twenty of the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Chart, the first a bouncy Pop song, the second more R&B. In 1961 he achieved his greatest success, when “Raindrops” went to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Chart and number three on the Billboard R&B Singles Chart. The ballad was written by Clark himself and arranged by Riley C. Hampton, with attention-catching thunderstorm sound-effects to launch the song. It soon becomes smoother, however, with the drama injected by Clark’s falsetto. The single went on to sell over two million copies.
After one more chart entry with “I’m Going Back to School” in 1962, Clark moved to Constellation Records.
