The Shirelles - Will You Love Me Tomorrow

Some Bona-Fide Originals Are Found Here

As with some Bill Haley and Little Richard CDs, you have to be very careful when selecting a Shirelle's volume since there are a great many "re-makes" flooding the market. This isn't one of them. It has all original renditions as evidenced by the brief one-page liner notes which say "This compilation combines the majority of tracks on The Shirelles' only hit album, Baby It's You, with several bonus tracks previously unavailable on CD ..."

From Passaic, New Jersey, the foursome [Shirley Owens Alston, Beverly Lee, Doris Kenner, and Addie "Micki" Harris] put 26 songs into the Billboard Pop Top/Hot 100 between 1958 and 1967, twenty of which also made the R&B charts. And in this neat little package you get eight of them plus five of their B-sides, beginning with their first, I Met Him On A Sunday (Ronde-Ronde) which peaked at # 49 Pop Top 100 for the Decca label in the spring of 1958 b/w I Want You To Be My Boyfriend. Why it was shut out on the R&B charts remains a mystery,

The following year their releases were taken over by Scepter, and although Dedicated To The One I Love only reached # 89 Billboard Pop Hot 100, b/w Look A Here Baby in July 1959, it would chart much higher on its re-release in 1961 when it made # 2 R&B and # 3 pop Hot 100. That was, of course, largely due to the success of their first two Scepter hits in 1960, Tonight's The Night [# 14 R&B/# 39 Hot 100 b/w The Dance Is Over, and the smash Will You Love Me Tomorrow? [# 1 Hot 100/# 2 R&B b/w Boys]. The flipside, also here, was covered a bit later by the fledgling Beatles in the U.K.

Also here are Mama Said [# 2 R&B/4 Hot 100 in 1961 b/w Blue Holiday], Baby It's You [# 3 R&B/# 8 Hot 100 in 1962 b/w The Things I Want To Hear (Pretty Words), Soldier Boy [# 1 Hot 100/# 3 R&B in 1962 b/w Love Is A Swingin' Thing - which made the Hot 100 "bubble under" at # 109], and What Does A Girl Do? [# 53 Hot 100 in lte 1963]. Note that, from late in 1963 and all of 1964 Billboard had suspended the R&B charts, and only later did they arbitrarily assign the same position as the Pop rsults to the R&B charts for "historical" purposes. Also included here is Twenty-One, which was the B-side to the single Big John in 1961.

Although Addie did not live to see the group inducted into the R&R Hall Of Fame in 1996 [she passed away on June 10, 1982], Doris did have that pleasure before she too was taken from us on February 4, 2000.

As I say, you have to be very wary of many of their compilations, but in this instance you can rest assured that here are 18 original selections by one of the most important and influential girl groups of the early days of R&R. Recommended. September 6, 2007

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