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Dr.See limited use conditions below.Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame.Only King and Thomas are alive today.ORIGINAL DRIFTERS since 1958.This site is maintained
by Original Drifters, Inc.Best Act of its Genre on Music
Scene today!The Drifters helped create soul music with gospel style vocals.McPhatter discovered the other members singing
at the Mount Lebanon Church in Harlem, New York.The Drifters were not only a popular for
their vocals but, for their choreography.The group's fortunes flagged, along with complaining about wages, caused
George Treadwell who owned the name to fire them all.In the meantime, The Drifters enjoyed their greatest hit making period
with Rudy Lewis on lead vocals.Through 1963, The Drifters had major pop and rhythm and
blues hits provided by Brill Building songwriters.Saturday Night At the Movies.The Drifters continued
to record into the early '70s.Around 1972, Johnny Moore with a new group of Drifters,
moved to England, toured the clubs and cabarets, and signed with British Bell, for whom
they had a series of British hits through 1975.Several different groupings of Drifters
perform today.His
popularity diminished he rejoined The Drifters for European Tours in the early '80s.Mountain Biking packages along a pristine section of the Wild Coast ......Visit our Drifters Adventure Centre .......Contact us for some exciting adventures.Charts
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Y!DelegateListener('yuimenuitem', 'hd', 'click', YAHOO.Rating affects your music played in LAUNCHcast and Music Videos.Save The Last Dance Fo...The Drifters, Bobby Day, Ben E.You have no recently viewed items or searches.After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.Look to the right column to find helpful suggestions for your shopping session.The Dominoes were playing a scheduled gig at the New York club Birdland, one of their first performances without McPhatter, when one of the audience members present asked after the singer backstage.Atlantic Records in the late '40s; as soon as he learned of McPhatter's having left the Dominoes, he contacted the singer and signed him to Atlantic.It was Ertegun who gave McPhatter the impetus, as part of his contract, to start a group of his own, which came to be called the Drifters.He went through several attempts at assembling a group that would be acceptable to Ertegun and producer Jerry Wexler, going through as many as a dozen friends and acquaintances, a handful of whom actually made it to formal recording sessions.In August, a second Drifters lineup was put together, with Gerhart Thrasher, Andrew Thrasher, two very experienced gospel singers on tenor and baritone, respectively, bass singer Willie Ferbee, and Walter Adams on the guitar.Jimmy Oliver, who would soon take that spot as his own, also proved to be an important songwriter for the Drifters, especially for tenor Gerhart Thrasher.Elvis Presley and dozens of lesser talents.This success didn't stop the regular lineup changes that would characterize the Drifters' history.By the time the Drifters were enjoying their breakthrough hit, a reconstituted lineup, with bass singer Bill Pinkney and guitarist Jimmy Oliver joining Gerhart Thrasher and Andrew Thrasher, cut their first session."Honey Love" in early 1954.Not for the last time, it seemed as though the Drifters were headed for big things together, but a key member had developed other ideas by the fall of 1954.Although he'd been assured of a considerable amount of musical control, McPhatter found that Ertegun and Wexler were, as the producers, always trying to push the group into directions of their own choosing.McPhatter didn't begrudge them their efforts at finding new sounds that might sell records to white as well as black audiences, but he didn't feel like participating.His goal was to cross over to pop audiences as a balladeer, and saw himself as having the potential to become another Nat "King" Cole, or perhaps a black answer to Frank Sinatra or Perry Como.Rather than see the group in which they'd invested 18 months of their time go out of existence, Ertegun and Wexler were still interested in recording the Drifters, but that group's internal circumstances were vastly different once McPhatter was gone.McPhatter had organized the Drifters under the auspices of his own business entity, Drifters Incorporated, so that he would have a share of their earnings, something that he'd been denied in the Dominoes; his own willingness to share those earnings with the other members has never been broached or questioned.George Treadwell, a former jazz musician who had masterminded the solo career of his first wife, Sarah Vaughan; when McPhatter left the group, rather than making a provision for the other members and his eventual successor to get his share, he sold out his interest in Drifters Incorporated to Treadwell.Drifters" if they left, no matter how successful the group became through their efforts.This made the Drifters, for those present after McPhatter's exit, little more inviting than McPhatter's own tenure with the Dominoes, and he later regretted making the decision, recognizing not only what he had cheated himself of out by not hanging on to his share of the ownership but also what he had done to his fellow musicians.David Baughn, who had sung with a very early version of the Drifters, came in as a temporary replacement, singing at one recording session and serving as lead vocalist for six months' worth of live engagements (which was how the group generated most of its income).Drifters, and Atlantic declined to release any of these sides at the time, possibly due to their potential to interfere with McPhatter's solo releases, which were selling well.Additionally, Baughn soon demonstrated an erratic personality, sufficiently unnerving to force Treadwell to recruit a second lead vocalist in Bobby Hendricks, who had previously sung with the Five Crowns and the Swallows.The lineup itself began to shift as Baughn quit, but the group soldiered on, drawing good crowds at their shows based on the quality of their earlier recordings.In 1955, however, they auditioned a young man who approached the group after a show in Cleveland.Johnny Moore had been a member of a group called the Hornets, who had done a little bit of recording without making any more than a local reputation for themselves.He sounded enough like McPhatter, however, with his pleasing high tenor, and was offered a spot in the Drifters the next day.The Drifters resumed recording in September of 1955, with Nesuhi Ertegun and songwriter Jerry Leiber producing and with Moore singing lead.Drifters were still absent from the top of the pop charts, where the real money and huge sales figures lay.Dion would enjoy a much bigger hit with the latter song in the early '60s, but it was an important recording for the Drifters, marking their introduction to the talents of songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who would later take over the job of producing the group.The Drifters' lineup was also stabilized for the first time in over a year.The original Drifters now entered their "silver age" behind Moore's cool high tenor, ably supported by the bass singing (and occasional lead spot) from Bill Pinkney and Bobby Hendricks' tenor.Late 1956 was also the point when the consequences of the Drifters' business organization caught up with the group.He approached Treadwell for a new arrangement, or at least more money for the group members, and he was fired.Drifter Bobby Hendricks became the core of a new Atlantic group called the Flyers, who released one single that failed to attract much attention.The new Drifters lineup was filled by bass singer Jimmy Ricks and then, more permanently, by Tom Evans, late of the Dominoes, and baritone Charlie Hughes.Johnny Moore's receiving his draft notice in early 1957.The group was (no joke intended) adrift once again, in terms of its sound and lineup.Bobby Hendricks was brought back in, and Jimmy Millender took over the baritone chores, but there wasn't a lot of good material that came from those sessions.Drifters at arm's length, while white teenagers were dominating the pop charts and they seemed, at least potentially, open to new records by anyone, so Atlantic decided to cater to them, hoping for a breakthrough.The remaining members, such as they were, were working as hard as ever and wanted more money and, when Treadwell refused their request, they all walked out (or were fired en masse).The Five Crowns, or the Crowns, as they were then known, had been a fixture in Harlem for most of the 1950s, predating the Drifters without ever making a mark as a recording act, and enjoying precious little reputation as performers.Treadwell approached their manager, Lover Patterson, explaining that he was dumping the existing Drifters and needed a new group to fulfill their performing obligations.Patterson agreed and the group followed suit, and all of the individual members' contracts, except for that of one of the group's two baritones, were sold to Treadwell.Treadwell from ending up in court.The new Drifters lineup consisted of Charlie Thomas on lead, baritone Benjamin Earl Nelson, later known as Ben E.King, Dock Green (who had held the Crowns together) (baritone), and Elsbeary Hobbs singing bass.They did as they were required under the agreement and, for ten months, worked in the shadow of the old group, playing live gigs characterized by the awkwardness of performing the old songs as though they were their own, to mostly black audiences who knew that these weren't the Drifters.The group still had a recording contract with Atlantic Records and, despite the fact that the old Drifters' recent releases had done little business, the label decided to try once more with the new lineup and get a record out."Money Honey" had been six years earlier.It not only didn't sound anything like the old Drifters, but it didn't sound like anything else that had ever been heard on a commercial recording before."There Goes My Baby," hung around long melodic lines, became the Drifters' trademark sound for the ten years that followed.This seemed to be a new lease on life to the group, and then more troubles arose from within, owing to the way the Drifters were organized as a business.Wexler held on to the document, and gave it back to the singer once the song was a hit so he could tear it up.At the same moment, Lover Patterson played his trump card, a separate contract that he'd signed with the singer, as a solo artist, dated before Treadwell's offer.It all could have ended up in court but luckily for the singer and fans of the Drifters, cooler heads prevailed.King, which was how he emerged in his own right.Drifters (which also included guitarist Billy Davis) are usually thought of as the "Ben E.King Drifters," but the reality was that King had left the group by the end of that same year.King's first successor was Johnny Williams, who exited suddenly in late 1960, but the Drifters quickly found a replacement in Rudy Lewis.Clara Ward Singers, Lewis was the singer on "Some Kind of Wonderful," "Up on the Roof" (a Top Five hit), "Please Stay," "What to Do," and "On Broadway" (a Top Ten hit), among numerous other classic tracks by the group.And it was during the recording of his own "Please Stay" by the group that Burt Bacharach first encountered a vocalist named Dionne Warwick, who was part of the backing trio for the Drifters.Between 1960 and 1964, the Drifters achieved a level of stability that was unprecedented in their history, and it was matched by their success.Stoller shifted their attention to their own record label, Red Bird, the Drifters got a new producer in Bert Berns, a songwriter with a feel for commercial soul music.Stoller no longer writing the way they had been, the group was offered a new song by composers Art Resnick and Kenny Young, called "Under the Boardwalk."It was scheduled for recording on May 21 of 1964.Drifters, achieved a special magnificence at that session singing "Under the Boardwalk," which became the group's last Top Ten hit in 1964, peaking at number four.He became the longest lasting of the Drifters' various lead singers, lasting into the 1970s and beyond their time as a serious recording act.The Drifters were never able to make the jump comfortably to this harder brand of soul music, and the loss of Berns as a producer after 1965 seemed to seal their fate.Their own sessions began to show a lack of urgency and organization, exemplified by the fact that one of the very best tracks of Moore's era, "In the Park," was left unfinished (without the group recorded behind him) and in the can for years.The death of George Treadwell in 1967 removed another layer of impetus behind the Drifters' continuation as a going concern.They continued recording for Atlantic with a succession of producers until 1972.Palmer were the stars of the Atlantic roster then, and scarcely anyone at the company except Ertegun and Wexler likely even remembered who the Drifters were or how they'd started.Johnny Moore was the only recognizable Drifter and he did most of the singing on the records as well.Founding member Bill Pinkney led a group sometimes called "the Original Drifters" while Charlie Thomas led another version and Johnny Moore kept the fully authorized group under the auspices of Treadwell's widow Faye.Roger Greenaway songwriting team.Pinkney and Thomas maintained contact with the Drifters' roots, and even Jimmy Ricks, who was only in the group for a few months, turned up at some point leading a combo using the name.King even returned to the lineup for a tour in the late '80s.In the 1990s, after decades of conflicting and contradictory claims, a new court ruling determined that Faye Treadwell owned the trademark of the Drifters' name.Drifters up until his death on July 4th, 2007.Driftin': The Drifters Box opened the floodgates of their history. |
