The 50s "Rock N Roll" WHITE covers/aping thread/teen idol (Pat Boone, Rock N Roll Waltz, et al)

Since I seem to have a track record of starting music threads about genres ILX doesn't care about...

When the Rock N Roll umbrella marketing thing took hold in the 50s (especially the 56 Elvis signing to RCA), the established labels thought they could just cover tunes racing up the charts with whitebread artists and take over (sometimes keeping alive big band arrangements with a "rockin'" beat). Other attempts were just aping "rock" ideas for standard tin pan alley songwriting.

The obvious successful act of this is Pat Boone. Dick Clark hired a handful of nearly forgotten teen idols to bridge tin pan alley with Rock era fans. Rock N Roll Waltz was a big record to cover during this. This blur probably helped Bobby Darin, Les Paul & Mary Ford, Johnny Mathis, and the latter days of Louis Prima too. My favorite song in this vein is Eddie Fisher's Dungaree Doll from 1956.

Help me document this blurred line please.

1956 Kay Starr - Rock and Roll Waltz

1956 Gale Storm - Why Do Fools Fall In Love

And another:
1956 The Diamonds - Why Do Fools Fall In Love

1958/1959 The Kalin Twins - When

1956 The Crew Cuts - Angels in The Sky

1957 Tab Hunter- Young Love

1958 The Duprees - You belong to Me

THIS!
Bobby Rydell at Disneyland

Scott Woods, on his blog the other day:

Diamonds, “Little Darlin’” (1957) - Fast, white doo-wop from Toronto, and one of, by my count, five Can-con singles in the discography if you include "Ohio" (and up here, we do indeed include "Ohio"). Also, a record in many ways permanently strait-jacketed by its racial context, i.e., the fact that it was a much more successful version of a minor black hit by the Gladiolas, becoming a #2 smash (though the more interesting fact might be that it sat at #2 for eight weeks without making the final leap to the top). Me, I like both versions of the song a lot, but give the Diamonds the edge for sheer vocal chutzpah. In his singles book, Dave Marsh -- who loves the song despite itself -- calls it satire "so brutal that it transcends satire and achieves true rock and roll greatness. Every touch that's meant to be mocking and cruel works... As unmistakably exciting as it is insincere." I must be missing some of Marsh's context here: "mocking" and "satire" I can hear (personally I'd describe it as "over-exaggerated for effect"); "cruel" and "insincere"... sorry, does not compute. Just as good (and even weirder): the Diamonds' follow-up Top 10 hit, "The Stroll."

Oh, man, I never knew about this:

Wink Martindale's Rock N Roll Party

xp, yeah, I was actually wanting to comment on Little Darlin', because it's THE ONE that got lost in the shuffle. Whereas Pat Boone's covers have now been forgotten and the orignals are restored to the canon, Little Darlin' remains as it was then (whitebread cover version is the known version)

Also, this (albeit, a satire) remains in our collective memory:

The Girl Can't Help It - Rock Around The Rock Pile

I guess Johnny Burnette did a reverse of this with You're Sixteen, being a Rockabilly act looking backwards at orchestrated pop in 1960

remains as it was then (whitebread cover version is the known version)

Wasn't this originally a Huey "Piano" Smith and the Clowns song? (though I'm not sure whether they ever recorded it)

Dude was a squeaky clean teen idol, I think -- not that you can tell from the music, which is wild.

(Actually, iirc, I think it's that Huey etc. did the backing track; not a cover, per se'.)