In the Still of the Night: The Five Satins' 1956 Classic

The Story Behind the Song · The Five Satins, 1956

Dancing to a jukebox at a roadhouse near Charlottesville, Virginia — photographed in 1943, more than a decade before the Five Satins, but the room this record was made for

Dancing to a jukebox at a roadhouse near Charlottesville, Virginia — photographed in 1943, more than a decade before the Five Satins, but the room this record was made for · John Vachon, FSA/OWI Collection, Library of Congress

Fred Parris and the Five Satins

Fred Parris wrote it in 1955 while standing guard duty with the Army in Philadelphia, thinking about a girl who had left him. He was not yet twenty. Getting it recorded was the harder part: there was no money for a New York studio.

So on Sunday, February 19, 1956, the group set up in the basement of St. Bernadette's Catholic Church on Townsend Avenue in the Morris Cove section of New Haven, Connecticut. The tenor saxophone player, twenty-one-year-old Vinny Mazzetta, had been an altar boy at the parish and was the one who got permission to use the room. Four voices sang — Parris, Al Denby, Jim Freeman and Ed Martin — with Bobby Mapp on drums, Doug Murray on bass and a pianist whose identity the surviving musicians still disagree about. Marty Kugell of the local Standord label produced; Tom Sokira engineered. They cut two songs that afternoon. The one everybody remembers was the B-side.

Parris was shipped to Japan not long after, so he was overseas while the record climbed. It was not a runaway hit at the time. On Billboard's pop Best Sellers chart it appeared at No. 24 in the issue dated October 13, 1956 and was gone the following week; on the Top 100 it reached No. 29; on R&B Best Sellers it peaked at No. 4 in early October. The widely repeated "No. 3 R&B" figure does not appear in the issues from that autumn.

The afterlife is the real story. The record was released as "In the Still of the Nite" partly to keep it distinct from Cole Porter's entirely different song of the same name, written for the 1937 film Rosalie — Billboard for a while listed it as "I'll Remember (In the Still of the Night)." It returned to the national charts in 1960 and again in 1961. For more than a decade it finished first in WCBS-FM's Labor Day listener countdown of the top 500 oldies. It appeared in Dirty Dancing in 1987, though not on that year's soundtrack album — it was held over for More Dirty Dancing the following spring.

Fred Parris died on January 13, 2022, at eighty-five. The church basement where four young men and a borrowed saxophone player made the record was turned into a local music hall of fame in 1995.

On the record

  • Recorded Sunday, February 19, 1956, in the basement of St. Bernadette's Catholic Church, Townsend Avenue, New Haven, Connecticut.
  • Produced by Marty Kugell for Standord Records; picked up by Ember Records (Ember 1005) with "The Jones Girl" as the nominal A-side.
  • Pop peak No. 24 on Best Sellers in Stores, Billboard issue of October 13, 1956; No. 29 on the Top 100; No. 4 on R&B Best Sellers, issue of October 6, 1956.
  • Titled "In the Still of the Nite" on the label to distinguish it from Cole Porter's 1937 song of the same name.
  • Used in Dirty Dancing (1987); included not on that film's soundtrack album but on More Dirty Dancing (1988).

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Sources: Billboard, October 13, 1956 — pop Best Sellers and Top 100 (issue scan) · Billboard, October 6, 1956 — R&B Best Sellers (issue scan) · New Haven Register, March 3, 2014 — the musicians on the session · Sound Beat, Belfer Audio Archive, Syracuse University Libraries · AFI Catalog: Dirty Dancing (1987). Chart positions are cited to the specific Billboard chart and issue date, because the magazine ran several separate charts in these years and a record could sit at No. 1 on one and No. 8 on another.

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