(25) THE SINGER SONGWRITER SCENE IN NEW YORK IN THE LATE 1950's

It doesn't seem too long ago to me that I was walking down Broadway singing to myself, when the Brill Building and the Turf Restaurant and Hanson's Drugstore were my hangouts between record promotional tours, and I was meeting just about anyone who wanted to become someone in the acting business or the music business wherever I went.

Today the term Singer-Songwriter means a person who composes and writes and sings their own songs. Then it was more common that someone who sang, sang some of their own songs, as well as those of their friends - who happened to sing and write songs too. We were all presenting our original tunes to each other, making demo's, trying to get a hit. We were in the Cover Tune Era. Recording a cover of a song that was going to be a hit for someone else was more common than it is today.

One of the main reasons was that records were made on small labels or for distribution in a certain region that a small record company had captured rather than national or international distribution. So, if a song for one artist was a hit in, say, New York City, an artist that was well received in another region, say the South, would record the same song, with perhaps a more of a Southern feel. The songwriter had everything to gain in terms of their residuals if the song hit in two or more territories. The singer brought their unique voice and popular appeal to the song, in a region, and producers produced the song in different ways. But sometimes there were "Chart Wars," between singers.

Sometimes having a number of artists record the same song backfired on smaller labels financially and the overall sales weren't good. But when a song became an artist's own, like Bobby Darin's "Splish Splash," did, then no one else tried to compete with it. Besides live promotional tours, radio, television, record hop and club appearances, getting your song played on the radio could make all the difference!