Origins
Oh Happy Day was one of the first pop hits whose momentum was driven by the high school teen set. Described as a "garage hit," before the song was recorded, Don Howard Kaplow sang it accompanied by his guitar before his classmates at Cleveland Heights High School, in Cleveland, Ohio. At a Saturday high school dance, the boys and girls called 13 times for Oh Happy Day. This convinced Koplow to put the song on wax. Once it was played on the air, teenage fans besieged the disc jockey, Phil McLean of radio station WERE with requests that kept him spinning the song all week. Calls began coming in from nearby cities, and it was decided the record should go to market. A contract was signed in early November 1952 and Oh Happy Day went on sale. Upon release by a brand new record company (Triple A), 21,000 copies quickly sold around Cleveland. Then the record was leased to another label (Essex) for national distribution. By February 1953, it was pushing the half-million mark.
Time Magazine reported in 1953 that Oh Happy Day had a "folklike origin: Donnie heard it sung by an Ohio State girlfriend, who had picked it up on the campus. Donnie worked it out on his guitar, changed it a bit, wrote some lyrics, sang it at parties and prudently got it copyrighted.." Six weeks later, while Oh Happy Day was still on the pop charts, the Washington Post reported that Nancy Binns Reed, a 28 year old housewife, had filed a lawsuit to prove that she wrote the song. Represented by Lee Eastman (father of Linda McCartney), a New York copyright and show business attorney, Mrs. Reed obtained affidavits from persons who had heard her singing the song when serving as a counselor at various camps and when she attended the University of California in the 1940s. She stated that many campers and high school and college friends had learned the song. The lawsuit resulted in an out of court cash settlement along with an agreement that Mrs. Reed and Mr. Kaplow share equal credit for the song's words and music.Music Views magazine reported in its June 1953 edition that Kaplow's girlfriend had graduated from a girl's camp, where Ms. Reed had served as a counselor.
Read more about this topic: Oh Happy Day (1952 Song)
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?””
—Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)