{"id":6210,"date":"2026-08-08T10:48:55","date_gmt":"2026-08-08T14:48:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=6210"},"modified":"2026-08-08T10:50:31","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T14:50:31","slug":"little-darlin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/little-darlin\/","title":{"rendered":"Little Darlin&#8217; (Latin rock &#8216;n&#8217; roll)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Little Darlin&amp;apos;\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/HOeS8_KT_aU?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>One of the less-explored byways of rock &#8216;n&#8217; roll history is the influence of &#8220;Latin&#8221; or Caribbean rhythms, styles, and instrumentation. <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-6198 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/RockVSIcover-e1784990381494.jpg?resize=152%2C239&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"152\" height=\"239\" \/>I have a section on this in my new book, <a href=\"https:\/\/elijahwald.com\/rocknrollvsi.html\"><em>Rock &#8216;n&#8217; Roll: A Very Short Introduction<\/em><\/a>, including such relatively familiar touchstones as &#8220;La Bamba&#8221; (which I will post about at more length one of these days); &#8220;Louie Louie,&#8221; which took its trademark riff from &#8220;El Loco Cha Cha,&#8221; by the Cuban bandleader Ren\u00e9 Touzet; and the use of the Brazilian bai\u00e3o beat on &#8220;Stand By Me,&#8221; &#8220;Spanish Harlem,&#8221; and a bunch of hits by the Drifters.<\/p>\n<p>There are plenty of other examples, like the mambo-inflected bassline of Big Mama Thornton&#8217;s &#8220;Hound Dog,&#8221; played on the original by the Puerto Rican bass player Mario Delagarde and mimicked on the Elvis version. But the most explicitly Latin percussion on a rock &#8216;n&#8217; roll hit is rarely mentioned: the Gladiolas&#8217; &#8220;Little Darlin&#8217;,&#8221; composed by the group&#8217;s lead singer, <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-6213 \" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Maurice-Williams-e1785267690557.jpg?resize=182%2C249&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"182\" height=\"249\" \/>Maurice Williams (who went on to have a huge hit with &#8220;Stay&#8221; a few years later, with another group, the Zodiacs) and recorded in Nashville in 1956. It&#8217;s a classic doo-wop record, and opens with some kind of shaker, then claves, then some kind of conga drum &#8212; all kind of makeshift. (I asked my friend <a href=\"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/\">Wayne Marshall<\/a>, who has better ears for this stuff than I have, to identify the shaker, he couldn&#8217;t, and then pointed out that the conga wasn&#8217;t really a conga, and the claves probably aren&#8217;t really claves.) Who knows what instruments were handy in a Nashville studio in 1956? Whatever they were using, they provide creditable Latin percussion and a straight-ahead mambo beat.<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t know any of that when I first heard the song, which is another I&#8217;ve known forever. Typically for my age, race, and place, I first heard it done by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/book-of-love\/\">Sha Na Na<\/a>, who were my entry to the world of doo-wop, then picked up an oldies set that had what I thought of as the original version, by the Diamonds, and only years later heard the real original.\u00a0Sha Na Na were also imitating the Diamonds, a white Canadian doo-wop group, and, listening back, I realize my version of the spoken monologue in the middle of the song is still theirs, rather than the Gladiolas&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>To be fair, the Diamond&#8217;s treatment of the monologue is sillier, which in this case may be a plus &#8212; but I see from Wikipedia that some modern critics think the Diamonds&#8217; version is better overall, and no. Just no. I&#8217;ll grant that their pitch may be a bit more solid, but the <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-6214 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Little-Darlin-45-e1785267775860.jpg?resize=226%2C225&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"226\" height=\"225\" \/>Gladiolas&#8217; record is clearly superior. To my eternal shame, as a 13-year-old I similarly preferred the Crew-Cuts&#8217; version of &#8220;Sh-Boom&#8221; to the Chords&#8217; original. (That&#8217;s another case of clean-cut white Canadians covering a hit composed and performed by Black teenagers and outselling the original in a racist pop market. I write about all of this in my book.) But I grew up. Maurice Williams and his crew, all the way.<\/p>\n<p>I sang this occasionally for fun when I got together with other folks who knew doo-wop &#8212; that used to happen fairly often. I particularly remember a very early morning in Vancouver, BC, when a bunch of us who had drunk our way through the night on Jameson&#8217;s Irish Whiskey wandered to the back porch of someone&#8217;s third-floor apartment and sang a bunch of this stuff, and at dawn a neighboring couple came out on their porch to sit and listen to us.<\/p>\n<p>Since I don&#8217;t have a doo-wop group at the moment, I had to come up with an alternative and did what I always do for this kind of rhythm, which is fall back on what I learned from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/masanga\/\">Jean-Bosco Mwenda<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/lwa-kiyeke\/\">Edouard Masengo<\/a> in the\u00a0 Congo and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wazee-wa-kisa\/\">Herbert Misango<\/a> in Nairobi, reworked in various ways. It&#8217;s all pretty absurd, but fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the less-explored byways of rock &#8216;n&#8217; roll history is the influence of &#8220;Latin&#8221; or Caribbean rhythms, styles, and instrumentation. I have a section on this in my new book, Rock &#8216;n&#8217; Roll: A Very Short Introduction, including such relatively familiar touchstones as &#8220;La Bamba&#8221; (which I will post about at more length one &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/little-darlin\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Little Darlin&#8217; (Latin rock &#8216;n&#8217; roll)<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Little Darlin&#039; 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I've written about the Drifters before, in\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2027\/08\/Doc-Pomus-on-crutches-e1786563012737.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6196,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/great-balls-of-fire\/","url_meta":{"origin":6210,"position":1},"title":"Great Balls of Fire!","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 25, 2026","format":false,"excerpt":"I've got a new book out, a history of rock 'n' roll in Oxford's \"Very Short Introduction\" series, and it prompted me to revive a bunch of songsI've known since my early teens but rarely perform, since I rarely have a rock 'n' roll band or vocal group handy. 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