The Frog

 The Constellations

The Frog

 Impel Records

Shelby, NC

mid-sixties

Over the course of three decades beginning in the late 1950s, David Lee, this unheralded songwriter, musician, producer, and entrepreneur released fourteen 45s and two LPs on his Impel, Washington Sound, and SCOP labels, run out of his Washington Sound record shop in Shelby, North Carolina.

The Constellations had 3 records on Impel

More on David Lee here

Please Don't Play On That Guitar

Calvin Cheek

Please Don't Play On That Guitar 

wr. Calvin Cheek, Chuck Huffman

Tally 103

From Bakersfield, California, with Bill Woods on fiddle.

I can't tell you much about Calvin Cheek.   He and Chester "Chuck" Huffman also wrote three songs listed in the BMI database (Sweet Lovin Ways, With Or Without You and Wood Man), so after all this wasn't perhaps his only record. 

 

Bo Diddley

Jimmy Elledge

Bo Diddley

RCA Victor 47-8042

1962

 

 

So What

Carmen Taylor

So What

King 5085

(1957)

King "bio" (but no bio). Carmencita Taylor, also known as Elena Madera in some spanish speaking countries according to my own research

Personnel for the King Records session  :

Hilton Jefferson, Leslie Johnakins (alto saxophone) Hal Singer (tenor saxophone) Dave McRae (baritone saxophone) Kelly Owens (piano) Billy Butler (guitar) Carl Pruitt (bass) Panama Francis (drums) Carmen Taylor (vocals)
 

NYC, September 9, 1957

Great Big Baby

Don Caron’s Orchestra

with Gini Patton vocalist

“Great Big Baby”

Academy 5558

1955

Male vocalist (Eddie Allyn?) with group backup. Obviously, despite what the label says, the vocalist is not Gini Patton who was a female singer born Virginia Pasternak.

Don Caron was a schoolteacher who also headed an orchestra that was popular in the Chicago area throughout the 1960s.  The orchestra was the house band for a local record label named I.R.C.   In 1962 the Caron orchestra got an instrumental hit on a reworking of an old traditional number, "The Work Song."  Released on IRC, the record lasted two months on the WLS survey chart.