DESCRIPTION:
Recorded in 1956. Norman Smith and Mitch Jackson were teenagers singing spirituals and silky pop songs from the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots. Then they heard Sonny Til and the Orioles, the Baltimore group that started the vocal-harmony craze with a 1948 song, "Too Soon to Know." Til had taken the traditional four-part gospel harmony and added a lead tenor and a bluesy feel.

Smith, Jackson and three other guys copied the Orioles' R&B style in a group they called the Ford Brothers, after two of their members. "John Ford (now dead) was probably the greatest bass singer ever," says Karen Caplan, a researcher who works with Horner.

The Ford Brothers appeared each Sunday night on The Parisian Taylor Kiddie Hour radio show, broadcast live from the old Royal Theater at 16th and South Streets. Their biggest moment was playing Harlem's Apollo Theater one amateur night.

"All we'd want to do was sing," Smith says. "Two below zero, we're out on the corner, singing."

The Korean War broke up the group. After the war, the group got Alfred Singleton, dropped other guys, and became the Paragons. Around 1955, in honor of their native state, they took the name the Keystoners.

They made "The Magic Kiss" for a local record producer, Herman Gillespie. Epic Records bought the rights for national distribution, and the quartet - Smith, Jackson, Singleton and a bass singer named Goliath James - went to New York to rerecord the song. Their voices were stronger then: They say that Jackson, the high tenor, had to stand in another room while singing because he was too piercing for the studio microphone.

It was their moment. "In those days, all you wanted to do was make a record," Smith says. "You didn't care how much you got paid. You were a kid. You just wanted to have your voice on a record."

They earned a total of about $150. "You got $50 a side," Singleton says, ''and you got $25 for writing the song. We used that to buy uniforms."

By 1958, they decided to quit music. For reasons they never understood, their record suddenly quit getting airplay. Their follow-up record, "After I Propose," never got started.

"A lot of people were getting ripped off," Middle Room owner Moore says. ''The only guys who made any money were the guys with publishing rights. And most of the singers weren't sophisticated enough to know that. They were kids. The guy that owned the label would own the rights. It was the payola era. You didn't pay, you didn't get played."

For much more information from this 1987 article please see:
http://articles.philly.com/1987-03-08/entertainment/26220938_1_jerry-blavat-oldies-vocal-harmony