This is probably a draft of a part of something else. The Americans They were the Americans some years before the British Invasion. In fact, the Jay most of us came to know wasn’t the original Jay. His name wasn’t even Jay, actually, it was David. But the group was called Jay and the Americans, so when David Black replaced Jay Traynor as lead singer, he became Jay Black. “Only in America,” in 1963, was a logical song for a group called The Americans, even if it was originally written for The Drifters. But in 1964, when they scored big with “Come a Little Bit Closer” and then in the following year with “Let’s Lock the Door (And Throw Away the Key),” they were among the few American male vocal groups who still made the charts. As I remember it, what we heard on the radio in 1964 and ’65 were pretty much lots of British groups and three American ones, or at least three white American ones: The Beach Boys, The Four Seasons and Jay and the Americans. While the British groups lived, breathed and sang a synthesis of American blues, R&B and rockabilly, these American groups, to my ears, were pretty much an extension of the doo-wop legacy mixed with Brill Building melodies and lyrical hooks, the latter day Tin Pan Alley. Oh, there was Motown too, plenty of it, on Top 40 radio, a black music partially lobotomized for white America. There was just enough grit to keep it interesting for the listeners and the performers, but Berry Gordy’s productions threatened no incursion of the black church or the juke joint into white households. Not that we never got any of that—there were The Impressions with “Amen,” and Fontella Bass’s “Rescue Me” was a revelation, something we understood had something to do with that Mahalia lady we saw on TV. But I think it was the Aretha juggernaut that ultimately made soul music that really had soul a steady part of our aural diets. What distinguishes the sound of Jay and the Americans for me is the Latin tinge in their best known songs. There were, of course, plenty of Latin-inflected hits in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, drawing on the popularity of the mambo, the cha cha cha and the bossa nova (even if “Blame it on the Bossa Nova” had nothing to do with bossa nova). There was “Spanish Harlem” and “Little Latin Lupe Lu” and plenty of non-Latin-themed songs with varying degrees of Latin rhythm. Jay and The Americans’ “Come a Little Bit Closer” evokes “La Bamba,” and in “Let’s Lock the Door,” which I prefer, I hear the Cuban clave and a bit of charanga in the instrumental breaks.
Posted on: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 20:18:34 +0000
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