Song:A Thousand Stars
Album:The Doo Wop Box II
Here is yet another classic from Rhino's 4CD Doo Wop Box II. The Rivileers 1953 song A Thousand Stars is probably perceived as a bigger hit than it was at the time. The group started in 1952 in the Jamaica Queens neighbourhood of New York City. The leader of The Rivileers was former member of The Embers Eugene Pearson. They went through different lineups but the best known lineup was Milton Edwards, Errol Lennard, Herb Crosby & Alphonso Delaney. They started out calling themselves The 5 Bells and a Chime and then The Harmoneers but they decided on The Revelers which turned into The Rivileers. Milton Edwards worked at a drug store and the owner knew a record salesman named Sol Rabinowitz. After unsuccessfully trying to sell the group to other labels, Rabinowitz started Baton Records in 1953. The Pearson song A Thousand Stars was released in Dec. 1953 and was a regional hit in New York & Los Angeles but it never was distributed nationally. Some of the group members quit and Pearson went into The Marines but The Rivileers split up for good in 1957. What gave The Rivileers and A Thousand Stars a second life was that teen pop group Kathy Young & The Innocents had a #3 hit with the song in 1960. Then when you listen to the original, you wonder why it wasn't a bigger hit because it's so much better. But that was the nature of a lot of doo wop songs that never got decent distribution and that's what makes The Doo Wop Box II so valuable. Eugene Pearson joined The Cleftones and later The Drifters and then became a cop on the New York Transit Authority and died in 2000. Here's video for A Thousand Stars by The Revileers.
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