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The Willows
My Kinda Guy / Hurtin' All Over - 7"
MGM - 1966
Michael Panontin
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Save for a few northern soul anoraks in Britain, the Willows are not talked about much anymore. Though their 'My Kinda Guy' climbed the charts in the summer of 1966, the Toronto trio are probably better remembered - if at all, that is - for having been the Girlfriends, the weekly backing group on CBC's Music Hop program in the mid-sixties. And of course the Girlfriends' biggest claim to fame was that one of their members was childhood singing sensation Rhonda Silver.
Silver was even more than what you would call precocious, having launched her singing career at about the same time that she started primary school. "[It was on] Uncle Jerry's Club, a TV competition out of Buffalo. I was six," she would later tell The Markham Economist and Sun newspaper. "They said, 'Just look at the red light on the camera.' I stared at it through the performance. Then, I thought the applause sign said 'apple sauce'. I lost out to a pair of sisters as singing clowns."
By the time she joined the Girlfriends at the age of fifteen, Silver already had a whole career behind her, with a string of singles on the Barry label and collabs with Boots Randolph and the Anita Kerr Singers. In September of 1965, the girls - Silver along with Diane Miller and Stephanie Taylor - were whisked off to MGM studios to make the records that grace the soul clubs across the ocean these days. First mention seems to be in the Jan. 15 (1966) edition of Billboard, where we learn that "the Girl Friends [sic], a Canadian trio, but now tentatively renamed the Willows, to avoid confusion with an American group.... are just back from cutting four sides in New York, with their first release skedded for Feb. 14".
The disc in question was the Willows' perky 'My Kinda Guy', which bore the distinguished production credits of Tom Wilson (Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel) and was arranged by the great Benny Golson. At least a couple of industry insiders appear to have had unbelievably high expectations. Ottawa Journal columnist Sandy Gardiner wrote, "If ['My Kinda Guy'] doesn't at least make #1 in Canada, then you should scream at unpatriotic deejays." Graham Wyllie over at Truro, NS's CKCL-AM went even further, threatening, "If it doesn't reach the charts at every Canadian station, then we might just as well be honest and draw American Citizenship papers."
'My Kinda Guy' did not make #1 in Canada, as the pundits had hoped, but it did manage an impressive #15 showing on the RPM charts for the weeks of June 13th and 20th. Only Montreal took the threats seriously enough to send it to the top position, with the song reaching the coveted slot at CJMS-AM on the 20th. Back home at Toronto's CHUM station, where CanCon was always a much tougher sell, 'My Kinda Guy' only made it to #17, a bit of disappointment for a local group, one would think.
The Willows' second single, 'Outside the City' (which was actually the b-side), came out shortly after 'My Kinda Guy' and managed to crack the RPM 100 list that same summer. MGM pressed up both records south of the border, but neither seems to have troubled any US charts. Miss Silver went on to a long and fruitful career in the music world, singing with Kenny Rogers, Gordon Lightfoot, Lou Rawls, B.B. King, Dusty Springfield and Lionel Hampton, to name just a few, as well as in TVLand, as the face of all those Oil of Olay commercials that implored women to "keep them guessing".
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