“Take Good Care of My Baby” is a song written by a young Carole King and Gerry Goffin. While searching for material for Bobby Vee to record, Vee’s producer Snuff Garrett heard a demo of Carole King singing “Take Good Care of My Baby”. Garrett told publisher Don Kirshner that he wanted the song for Vee, but he believed the song needed an introductory verse. Garrett met with Carole King, and the introductory verse of Vee’s version was written.
Among the musicians on the record were Barney Kessel, Tommy Allsup, and Howard Roberts on guitar, Clifford Hills on bass, Robert Florence on piano, and Earl Palmer on drums, while Sid Sharp did the string arrangements. The Johnny Mann Singers sang backup.
Early in Vee’s career, a musician calling himself Elston Gunnn briefly toured with the band. This was Robert Allen Zimmerman, who later went on to fame as Bob Dylan. Dylan’s autobiography mentions Vee and provides complimentary details about their friendship, both professional and personal.
By 1959, Elvis Presley was in the army, Chuck Berry was in jail, Little Richard had got religion, and Buddy Holly had perished in a plane crash. In most versions of pop music history, the resulting vacuum was filled by “the Bobbys”, younger performers whose looks were more important than their singing. Foremost among these, but with better songs and musicianship than most, was Bobby Vee.
Vee was a literal replacement for Holly in February 1959. He and his brother, Bill, were set to attend a concert in Moorhead, Minnesota, by the Winter Dance Party package show when Bobby heard the news that its stars, his idol Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, had died in a plane crash. The brothers and their group, Bobby Vee (born Robert Thomas Velline) then 15 years old, and a hastily assembled band of Fargo schoolboys calling themselves The Shadows, rushed to offer their services, stopping only to buy angora sweaters for their stage outfits. They duly performed as The Shadows, appearing immediately after a spoken tribute to Buddy Holly from his bass player, the future country music star Waylon Jennings.
After their big break at the Winter Dance Party in 1959, a local music promoter was impressed enough to find the group further engagements in the region. Bobby Vee and The Shadows were soon signed to Liberty Records, where he came under the supervision of the producer Snuff Garrett, who would mastermind his sequence of hit singles. Next came the first of many songs directed squarely at a teenage audience. With its “bouncy bouncy” refrain chorused by the female backing vocalists, the infuriatingly catchy “Rubber Ball” was Vee’s first British hit, peaking at No 4 at the beginning of 1961.
With just a hint of late 1950’s rock n roll, he headed his music into the new popular genre of pop songs, silly little tunes that were aimed at the younger, female audience of record buyers. The next year, he followed that with “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes”.
By the end of the 60s, Vee’s style was out of fashion although he unsuccessfully tried to join the singer-songwriter trend in 1972 by releasing an album using his real name, in an attempt to claim authenticity.
In 1982, he moved his family from Los Angeles to St Cloud, Minnesota, where he and his wife, Karen, organised annual fundraising concerts to provide music and arts facilities for local children. He also recorded occasionally with his three sons and continued to perform his hits to fans in North America and Europe until a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s in 2011.
Karen died in 2015. Vee is survived by their children, Jeffrey, Thomas, Robert and Jennifer. On April 29, 2012, Vee announced publicly that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and consequently would withdraw from the music business. He had been in memory care for 13 months in a long-term care facility in Rogers, Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis, and eventually received hospice care in the weeks prior to his death. On October 24, 2016, Vee died from complications of the disease at the age of 73.
In 2011, he became the 235th inductee into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame, and In 2014 he was inducted into the Scandinavian-American Hall of Fame (due to his Norwegian and Finnish heritage). According to Billboard magazine, he had thirty-eight Hot 100 chart hits, ten of which reached the Top 20. He had six gold singles in his career.
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