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The Vanguards


The Vanguards - Baby Doll / My Friend Mary Ann - 7

Baby Doll / My Friend Mary Ann - 7"
Regency - 1958


Michael Panontin
God bless all those people who still give doo wop records a spin or two these days. It was once the most highly collectible of genres with some singles, like the Hornets' 'I Can't Believe' on red vinyl, sometimes fetching into the five-figure range. These days, with the first generation of collectors now pushing into their eighties (or even worse, pushing up daisies), the values of those records have been in a free fall, and are now being surpassed by northern soul, proto-funk, garage and psych discs.

The Vanguards were a Toronto-based vocal group that put out a couple of forty-fives on the Regency label in the late fifties and truth be told have probably been languishing in oblivion ever since. That is, until an e-mail from a nephew of one of the members serendipitously landed in CM's inbox.

"My stepdad, Gerald Samuels, who is now 80 and lives in Mississauga, Ontario, was the singer in a group called the Vanguards based out of Toronto in the late 1950s and then later out of Montreal in the 1960s," writes Anthony Seaberg. "The group consisted of Roy Ellis, Percy Gibbons and Gerald Samuels along with original members Vernon Baird, Joey Waterman and other local Toronto musicians."

Both records - 'Baby Doll' b/w 'My Friend Mary Ann' and its follow-up 'Tears Fall' b/w 'I Love You Darling' - came out in 1958, with the former disc also confirmed on 78 rpm. The pining 'Baby Doll' doesn't seem to have tweaked any charts at the time, but that didn't stop Dot Records from giving it a go down in the States. The June, 21st, 1958 issue of Cash Box dutifully reported that "Opal Music has sold a master to Dot. Sides are 'My Friend Mary Ann' and 'Baby Doll' and were recorded by the Vanguards."

Of course, with a relatively unoriginal name like the Vanguards, it shouldn't have come as a surprise that there was already another group with the same name (Discogs in fact lists eighteen of them). So the guys chose the hipper-sounding Other Brothers and, as Seaberg informs us, "became a cabaret act and moved to Montreal working extensively, including at the famous El Morocco Club, with shows elsewhere including Val-d'Or, Rouyn-Noranda and Quebec City's Hotel Clarendon among others."

The Other Brothers recorded a Caribbean-themed album with Montreal singer Pierre Noles in 1962 called Everybody Dance the Ay Bo Le. A photo of the band hung for years in the window of the city's well-known Ben's Delicatessen and can now be found in the McCord Museum next to McGill University. And it seems the group's road to oblivion was quite a scenic one. "The group moved to Europe in 1967 and was based in the UK. They toured Turkey, Norway, Switzerland, Iran, Australia, Tahiti, Israel, Ireland and more, performing on the same bill as some very well-known artists, such as Eartha Kitt and Nat King Cole, and even played the Shah of Iran's mother's palace in Tehran."

(Dot copies of Baby Doll will set you back about $35 these days, while those Regency 78s go for almost double that. And with no documented sale of a Regency 45 on Popsike, I'm guessing one of those might fetch a few more bucks.)
         



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