(Pictured: a look inside my head, and maybe yours too.)
Certain songs seem to have been in my head forever. Maybe that’s because I grew up in a house where the radio was always on. When I hear those songs now, they come with associations positively ancient, from the beginning of time and possibly before. A lot of those songs date back to the late 50s and the early 60s, to what I have called “time without a calendar,” before I started listening to my own radio stations and could use the record charts to mark my passage through the years. A lot of them call up rainy Saturday afternoons, Mother bustling around the house doing the endless chores required while raising two and later three young boys, those young boys with Lincoln Logs or Tinkertoys spread out across the living room, Dad periodically coming in from whatever he was doing outside, and all of it soundtracked by our hometown radio station, or maybe by WGN from Chicago.
This post is about one of those songs.
Doris “Dotty” Babb was in showbiz early, having performed at Carnegie Hall in the late 1920s, when she was 13 years old. As a girl, she also performed on Broadway and radio. But showbiz was not going to be her life. She was attending business school when she met Art Todd, a fellow musician from her hometown, Elizabeth, New Jersey, and married him the same year, 1941. After Art got home from the Second World War, they relocated to California, where they worked in radio, and played hotels and casinos.
Art and Dotty Todd eventually got a record deal from RCA; in 1953, “Broken Wings” did big business in the UK but nothing at all in the States. In 1958, songwriter/producer Wayne Shanklin brought them “Chanson D’Amour,” and they cut a demo in the style of Les Paul and Mary Ford, who had recorded a string of successful duets going back to 1951. But no record label wanted it until a small label called Era decided to bite. (Even then, one of Era’s owners told the other that “Chanson D’Amour” was, in his words, a “piece of shit.”) Rather than recutting it, Era released the demo as it was.
“Chanson D’Amour” rose to #6 on Billboard‘s Top 100 in May 1958, and was a #1 hit at WOKY in Milwaukee and at WGR in Buffalo. Art believed that its popularity was partly driven by the resistance of some DJs to rock ‘n’ roll, and their preference for more traditional sounds. (In Buffalo, it ran the Top 10 alongside the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” “Twilight Time” by the Platters, Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” and David Seville’s novelty “Witch Doctor.”) “Chanson D’Amour” got its first big boost when it was featured on the TV show Your Hit Parade. Art and Dotty themselves appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and on American Bandstand as well; I have seen a clip of their Bandstand appearance, which featured Dick Clark introducing them from horseback for some reason, but it’s not at YouTube anymore.
Six decades later, it’s easy to hear the appeal of “Chanson D’Amour”: Art and Dotty’s close harmonies, the ever-so-slightly lascivious saxophone (which honks just enough to appeal to rock ‘n’ roll fans of 1958), and “rah-ta-ta-ta-da.”
For all their success in 1958, Art and Dotty Todd never returned to the big Billboard chart, although they continued to record and perform. They were regulars at casinos in Las Vegas and Reno, and in 1980 moved to Hawaii and opened a club there. Dotty Todd died in 2000 at age 87; Art died in 2007 at age 90. Wayne Shanklin, who had written Frankie Laine’s big 1951 hit “Jezebel,” went on to write “Primrose Lane,” a 1959 hit for Jerry Wallace (another song that comes to me with associations from the deepest past). He died in 1970.
In 1953, Art and Dotty’s “Broken Wings” was outdone in the UK by a version by the Stargazers, which went to #1. Their “Chanson D’Amour” was bested in the UK as well, but not until years later. In 1977, Manhattan Transfer took a version to #1. While it imitates Art and Dotty, it doesn’t capture whatever was the indefinable something that made the original insinuate itself into my head years before, when I was too young to know it.
The Hits Just Keep On Comin' 
Time for a story of my own ignorance.
it’s 1971. I’m 15 years old, pulling a weekend shift at my first radio station, KIBS in Bishop, California. I’m alone in the studio, but the front door is never locked and , in the middle of a summer Sunday afternoon, in walk a well-dressed, certainly by Bishop standards, middle-aged couple.
“Hi. I’m Art Todd, this is my wife Dotty, and we’re performing up at the Paradise Resort next week and we thought you might like to interview us.”
“Um….sure. What is it you do?”
“We’re singers.”
“Okay. What kind?”
“Popular music.”
“How popular?”
Dotty decides to try. “We’ve had a top ten record.”
“Really? When?”
“1958. It was called “Chanson D’Amour”.
The blank stare from yours truly prompts Art and Dotty to sing “Chanson D’Amour” acapella, and when they get to “rah-ta-ta-ta-da”, the lights come on. I invited them to have a seat and some airtime and they were gracious enough not to mention what a dope their host was.
This is awesome. Thanks for sharing it.
Not many opportunities to tell my Art & Dotty story, JB.
By the way, the place they played is dead and gone, but I found one photo online–this is what Art & Dotty were down to by 1971 (well, this and disc jockeys who were two when they had their big hit):
http://www.totalescape.com/destin/california-towns.php?tid=399#.XNOY8Y5KjIU
…and like you, I knew “Chanson” from what my parents listened to (in our case, on KMPC, Los Angeles).
There are worse places to end up.
Scott, they did a week and that was it. Sounds like this was the bottom. Paradise was (and Bishop is) a beautiful place, but you’re talking about a town of 3,000 that, in summertime in the early 70s, was a draw for fishermen and that’s about it. Having had family in Bishop, I’d been going there since birth , even when we lived in Los Angeles, and Paradise Lodge was truly “fancy” in the 50s and very early 60s. It was in decline by 1971.
JB’s story notes that Art and Dottie moved on to gigs in Reno, Vegas and ultimately their own club in Hawaii. Good for them. The day I met them was probably the bottom of the curve, 13 years after their lone hit. And I’m sure they thought so, too—trying to get this ignorant teenage disc jockey to figure out who they were.
Thanks, Mike.
Maybe the most famous use of “Chanson D’amour” was in the final episode of Britcom “Are You Being Served”, as the song a salesman used to launch a popstar career.
That’s always my first reference for “Chanson D’Amour” as well! Rat ta ta ta tat!
I still wasn’t sure what this song was until the Are You Being Served reference. Now I remember it.
I have never understood the appeal of Are You Being Served … but I love the fact that the audience of this blog includes people who can hear a song and say, “Oh, yeah, that’s from Are You Being Served.”
As with many songs of this era, I first became familiar with this song thanks to the ‘D’ reel on Al Ham’s reel-to-reel tape/cart format of the Music Of Your Life.
That’s a song that I had been looking for for decades until I heard it in a movie not long ago. If I hadn’t come across it then, I would have today! As a youngster in the late 60’s I knew it must have been a throwback to an earlier time. It must have still been getting a fair amount of airplay to make an impression on me, that and it is a beautiful song.
The movie was “Trance”.
Gotta say when I put this up, I was pretty sure it would be one of those posts that’s mostly for my own entertainment, and that nobody would comment on it. Thank you all.
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I should add that Wayne Shanklin also wrote the very bizarre “The Big Hurt,” most notably performed by Miss Toni Fisher but Del Shannon did a great version as well.
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