Within a year the trio was top-billed on all their 78 RPMs and several releases featuring The Art Van Damme Quintet sold well in '47 and '48 in the latter year they recorded "Buttons and Bows" (originating in the movie The Paleface starring Bob Hope and Jane Russell), which hit the top ten, no mean feat considering a competing version by Dinah Shore was the biggest hit of the entire year. All told, there were nine children in the Dinning family of Nashville by way of rural Oklahoma Lucille and identical twins Virginia and Eugenia, going by their nicknames Lou, Ginger and Jean, emerged on the Capitol label in 1945 as The Dinning Sisters, backing singer Skip Farrell. His original plan was to be a country singer, an outgrowth of the success his three older sisters achieved in the pop field some years earlier. Mark Dinning (birth name Max) couldn't have imagined he would help perpetrate such an outrageous trend that would live on long after rigor-mortis had set in. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers along with a song featuring a fatal finale-on-a-motorcycle, The Shangri-Las' chart-topper "Leader of the Pack." Movies no longer owned the market on gruesome death the lyrical body count in popular music was rising! End-of-life epics were still the rage three years later with lurid car crash smashes "Dead Man's Curve" by Jan and Dean and "Last Kiss" by J. Dozens of songs plumbed such depths over the next few years, from Ray Peterson's summer '60 racetrack mortality play "Tell Laura I Love Her" to Pat Boone's suicide-by-the-water weeper "Moody River" and The Everly Brothers' air disaster ballad "Ebony Eyes," both in 1961. Dinning has often been credited with (or blamed for?) inciting others to create their own dead-teen tunes. There was some controversy surrounding the song's message, but it did little to slow momentum in February, Dinning's "Angel" followed Preston into the number one spot and the "teen tragedy" craze was off and running. 'That fateful night the car was stalled upon the railroad track.I pulled you out and we were safe.but you went running back.' and so the song went, seemingly geared to a younger-than-usual listener, progressing at a morbid level those other recent hits hadn't approached. Two weeks later, Johnny Preston topped the chart with "Running Bear," recounting a story about American Indian sweethearts whose love led them to '.that happy hunting ground.' Then Mark Dinning's "Teen Angel" came along, with details just grisly enough to make adolescents wince. In 1960, fictional death songs started coming on strong Marty Robbins kicked off the decade with "El Paso," a number one hit that kills off the hero at the end.
Tommy Dee, Carol Kaye and the Teen-Aires' 1959 hit "Three Stars," legendizing the plane crash that took the lives of Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper, was a reaction to a real-life tragedy. The Grim Reaper's presence was felt from time to time in top sellers of later years ( "The Bells," a funereal 1953 hit by The Dominoes, is particularly mournful). These types of tragic narratives were nothing new the blues of the '20s and '30s frequently wallowed in morbidity, as did the occasional pop or country song ( Roy Acuff's 1942 recording of Dorsey Dixon's "Wreck on the Highway," for example, made an unsubtle statement about drinking, driving, blood and prayer).
"Happy Days?" Not necessarily! This common phrase, often used to describe the era of the 1950s and '60s, lacks the ring of truth if you take into account the peculiar abundancy of "death discs," one of the strangest of all musical trends.