Blessed with a squeaky, high-pitched voice, Jamaican singer Millie Small was one of many pop sensations of 1964, because of her breakout hit single, “My Boy Lollipop,” which peaked at No. 2 in each the UK pop and US R&B charts. The file reportedly bought seven million copies worldwide, immediately remodeling {the teenager} into a global star. Three years later, the enduring observe appeared because the centerpiece of the singer’s first retrospective, The Greatest Of Millie Small.
The insanely catchy “My Boy Lollipop” represented a seismic second in pop music historical past, when Jamaican ska music – an uptempo precursor to reggae – entered the mainstream and appeared on the radar of the broader public consciousness. The file’s phenomenal success introduced the 16-year-old singer into the orbit of The Beatles, whose 1964 TV particular Round The Beatles she appeared on. Her superstar additionally put her on the enduring UK music present Prepared, Regular, Go! and propelled her into the forged of a British tv musical, The Rise & Fall Of Nellie Brown, which aired the identical yr. Such was her fame within the UK that she even reduce a ska file referred to as “The Bournvita Song,” selling a sizzling beverage for chocolate producer Cadbury’s.
However matching “My Boy Lolipop’s” success was one other matter. A follow-up single, “Sweet William” – forged from an identical stylistic ska-style mould – stalled at No. 30 within the UK chart whereas her debut album, Extra Millie (re-titled My Boy Lollipop for the US market) surprisingly didn’t make any impression on the British albums chart. Millie scored one last British hit in 1965 – “Bloodshot,” a high-energy pop quantity that scraped into the UK Prime 50 – earlier than fading into obscurity. In 1967, nevertheless, Island Data tried to revive her profession with the fourteen-track The Greatest Of Millie Small, which completely summed up the Jamaican singer’s ebullient singing fashion.
Born Millicent Dolly Might in Jamaica in 1947, Millie was the youngest of twelve youngsters, raised in a shack on a sugar plantation the place her father was a supervisor. A eager singer from an early age, on the age of 12, she received a radio station-sponsored expertise contest held in Montego Bay’s Palladium Theatre. As an adolescent, she got here to the eye of the famous Jamaican file producer Coxsone Dodd, who gave her the stage identify Millie Small. He signed her to his Kingston-based Studio One label, the place she first tasted success in 1961 reverse singer Owen Grey on the duet “Sugar Plum,” a well-liked Jamaican hit. One other duet, 1962’s “We’ll Meet,” the place she teamed up with Roy Panton, caught the ear of Chris Blackwell, a British music entrepreneur raised in Jamaica who had based Island Data in 1959, an unbiased label that he used as a conduit to convey Caribbean music to the UK.
On listening to Small’s distinctive voice, Blackwell was immediately captivated. “There was no one who sang like Millie, with such wonderful little-girl earnestness,” he wrote in his biography The Islander: My Life in Music and Past. He persuaded Dodd to let him handle the singer, then 15, and received permission from her mother and father to take her to England. Blackwell was satisfied he may rework her right into a star, stating: “Of all the singers in Jamaica, Millie was the one I thought had the greatest chance of success in the UK.”
Blackwell grew to become her authorized guardian and enrolled his younger cost at a London drama faculty, which he hoped would soften her tough edges and make her extra palatable for UK audiences, although he emphasised, “I wasn’t trying to whiten Millie … though her impish Kingston patois needed a bit of massaging.”
The primary single he made together with her, “Don’t You Know,” a driving slice of adlescent R&B launched by the Fontana label, was a flop, however then Blackwell discovered what he believed was the proper music for her, “My Boy Lollipop,” which was an outdated US R&B observe first recorded by teenage singer Barbie Gaye in 1956. Utilizing the eminent Jamaican guitarist Ernest Ranglin as his arranger, he gave the tune a ska makeover, a recent, new, and infectious sound that was tailored for large chart success.
The timeless observe was the undoubted point of interest of The Greatest Of Millie Small, which included Millie’s two different UK hit singles “Sweet William” and “Bloodshot Eyes.” Her brilliance as a ska pioneer was additionally mirrored within the catchy self-written “Oh Henry,” taken from Small’s debut album Extra Millie, and “Wings Of A Dove,” the B-side to the 1967 pop-meets-vaudeville-style single, “Chicken Feed,” which was additionally included.
The Greatest Of Millie Small additionally revealed that there was rather more to the so-called “Blue Beat Girl” than “My Boy Lollipop.” The non-album single “Killer Joe” put her in an R&B setting, whereas its B-side “Carry, Go, Bring Home” gave the impression of calypso-tinged beat pop. There was additionally an aching rendition of soul man Sam Cooke’s bluesy ballad “Bring It On Home To Me,” launched as a single B-side. Later, there’s the bluesy “Three Nights A Week” and “Walkin’ To New Orleans,” each plucked from the singer’s second, largely forgotten album, Millie Sings Fat Domino, a tribute to the New Orleans singer who was massively common in Jamaica. Small’s voice was framed on these two tracks by thick orchestral strings over chugging R&B backbeats.
Regardless of the recognition of “My Boy Lollipop” – which might be lined by everybody from Teresa Brewer to Dangerous Manners over time – The Greatest Of Millie Small didn’t promote sufficient copies to interrupt into the UK and US charts. At present, nevertheless, it affords a vivid reminder of the lady from Clarendon, Jamaica, who took the world by storm in 1964 and put ska music on the worldwide music map.
