The story of Melvin Walton starts about a quarter century before he started one of the nation’s first inter-racial music groups, in the Jim Crow era in Des Moines, Iowa, where he was born to a black father and a Jewish mother who believed she was mixed race until her 91st birthday.
But that telling can wait, Walton says. He has more pressing business to attend to.
“I don’t have one picture of my singing group… and I’ve got to,” said Walton, 77, in his North Cambridge apartment. “Someone’s got to have one… If we get a picture, I’ll pay $500.”
Walton’s old doo-wop singing group, the Five Shillings, is going to be honored on March 11, at the Doo-Wopp Hall of Fame of America gala concert and induction ceremony at Boston’s Symphony Hall. All the other groups have photos, Walton said, but so far the Five Shillings photographs have been lost to history.
Their music hasn’t faded. Though they only pressed one 45-speed record, the songs live on. One of Walton’s employees recently remixed one of the Five Shillings’ songs and added a backup piano track. Walton loved it.
The Shillings had an odd, haunting sound, and equally haunting lyrics. “I sit here and cry. Why, why, when I sit in this darkest room can I not visualize you before me,” Walton intoned on the 1958 cut of “Letter to an Angel,” which he said was inspired by the horrific scenes of Communist fighters being burned out of tunnels during the Korean War.
One of four children, Walton moved with his mother Gladys from Des Moines to Maine, and then to North Cambridge, where the family settled when he was about 11. To save money, Gladys walked to her work at two hospitals, in Arlington and Boston. On the way, people would yell the racial slur, “n—-r lover,” and Walton became a tough and scrappy fighter defending his mother’s honor, he said.
After a few years singing to the troops as part of the Air Force’s special services, Walton returned to Cambridge.
One evening in September 1957 after a few beers, Walton, his younger brother Dennis and their friend Teddy Whitley were snapping their fingers and singing songs in an Inman Square doorway. Just then, two white Irish young men from Cambridge, Jimmy Clancy and John Tierney came over and asked if they could join in.
“I’m thinking, ‘What do these white kids want to do with us?’” Walton recalled. “They put harmony in the group.”
The five-some started practicing and that New Years Eve they traveled to New York City, where Walton claims the group, once again singing in a doorway, was approached by the great composer Irving Berlin, who wanted them to be the background singers for Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Walton, the oldest of the group, passed on the opportunity thinking Berlin was trying to scam them, but they got a deal with Decca. The crooners wanted to be called the Velvetones, but there already was a group with that name, so the marketing geniuses at Decca settled on the Five Shillings, trying to play into the emerging British music scene.
The group played some gigs, and in August of 1958 Decca sent them demo records for the new EP, with “Letter to an Angel” on one side and the more upbeat “The Snake,” on the other.
According to Walton, Decca said it would promote the record that winter, but the two Irish mothers took the initiative themselves, sending the EP to radio stations and politicians around the state, souring relations with Decca.
Five Shillings recorded some more songs with Wren Records, but the record was never printed. Meanwhile, the multi-colored group faced animosity just because they weren’t all white.
Walton declined to publicly name the venue, but at a country club west of Boston where the group had played a kids show, they were turned away for an evening set. “You’re not coming in through my front door,” said a woman, apparently shocked to see the dark brown faces. In the end they weren’t even allowed to go through the kitchen.
“I remember when it was prejudiced,” said Walton, recalling the S&S Restaurant and Deli as one of the few places he and his mother were served.
Walton claims he used to pal around New York with Buddy Holly shortly before Holly died in an plane crash in 1959, but his singing group and his music career came to an end before long. Tierney married and dropped out of the group, and in close succession Whitley was killed in a car accident.
Even before he got together with the Five Shillings, Walton had started his own cleaning business, and had success in that field. He’s now semi-retired as an executive at Done Right Building Services.
Walton, who quit drinking about 30 years ago, also still has moves and a velvety voice to match. “I can jump up on the couch,” Walton said, demonstrating the same in his fourth-floor apartment. Walton’s not sure how many of the remaining Five Shillings he can wrangle onto the stage at Symphony Hall, but he’s bought scads of tickets for friends and family. If only he could buy that photo.
Any photo of the Five Shillings would look different from most of the other groups from that era. There would be three brown faces and two white. Walton’s sure that his group was either the first or at least the second racially mixed doo wop group.
“The Del-Vikings would be first, and then us,” Walton said.
Coincidentally, Walton’s mother used to do the work of hand-coloring black and white photos, until taking a job at the hospital.
She herself thought she was half-black until Walton’s daughters did some research, trying to track down her sister in Des Moines, and discovered the truth, that Gladys was born in 1904 to a German Jewish family.
People think about race differently these days. Now Walton is looking for a historical photograph from the time when seeing black and white men sharing a stage was a spectacle.
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