Sh-Boom: The Chords' Original and the Crew-Cuts Cover (1954)

The Story Behind the Song · The Chords, 1954

The Chords in a press photo issued while they recorded for Cat Records

The Chords in a press photo issued while they recorded for Cat Records · Cat Records press photo, published without copyright notice, public domain

The Chords and the original Sh-Boom

The Chords recorded "Sh-Boom" in New York on March 15, 1954, and Atlantic's Cat subsidiary released it as the B-side of a cover of "Cross Over the Bridge." By June the label had stopped pressing the A-side altogether. The record had turned itself over.

Within weeks a Canadian quartet called the Crew-Cuts cut it for Mercury, and what followed is the episode people mean when they talk about 1950s cover versions. In the Billboard issue of August 14, 1954, the Crew-Cuts sat at No. 1 on the pop Best Sellers in Stores chart and No. 1 on Most Played by Jockeys. The Chords, on the same page, were No. 4 on R&B Best Sellers, No. 2 on the R&B juke-box chart, and No. 14 on the pop chart. The cover had taken the pop market.

But the same issue of Billboard contains something more interesting than the standard story. In a report on Chicago retailers and juke-box operators, the magazine noted that in neighbourhoods where rhythm and blues sold strongly, "altho the Crew Cuts have the top version of 'Sh-Boom' across the country, in these fringe spots they only rack up half as many spins as the Cat label version by the Chords." Two audiences, one song, and a trade paper counting the plays.

The mechanics were not quite what the retelling suggests, either. Atlantic did not merely lose the song to a bigger label — once the company saw how large "Sh-Boom" was becoming, it made deals for cover versions itself, on the reasoning that the song was too big for one small label to work alone. The Crew-Cuts were one of at least half a dozen acts who recorded it that year, along with a country version and a Stan Freberg parody.

"Sh-Boom" is sometimes described as the first rock and roll record. That label does not survive contact with the people who study this music most closely — one leading researcher of the era calls the claim absurd, on the grounds that no single record can carry it. What is true is plainer and more useful: in the summer of 1954, a song by five young men from the Bronx was simultaneously the best-selling pop record in America in one version and the second-most-played R&B juke-box record in another.

On the record

  • Recorded March 15, 1954; released on Cat 104, an Atlantic subsidiary, as the B-side of "Cross Over the Bridge."
  • The Chords: No. 4 R&B Best Sellers in Stores, No. 2 R&B Most Played in Juke Boxes, No. 14 pop Best Sellers — Billboard, August 14, 1954.
  • The Crew-Cuts (Mercury 70404): No. 1 pop Best Sellers in Stores and No. 1 Most Played by Jockeys in that same August 14, 1954 issue; still No. 1 on the juke-box chart in the October 9 issue.
  • Atlantic itself licensed cover versions of the song rather than trying to hold it alone.

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Sources: Billboard, August 14, 1954 — pop and R&B charts, and the Chicago retail report (issue scan) · Billboard, October 9, 1954 — Most Played in Juke Boxes (issue scan) · Marv Goldberg's R&B Notebooks: The Chords. 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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