The Fleetwoods were an American singing group from Olympia, Washington, whose members were Gary Troxel, Gretchen Christopher, and Barbara Ellis. (More from Wikipedia)
Backing up a couple of decades, the Fleetwoods is one of the early rock and roll bands that I remember most fondly. Their studied low-key, doo-wop style allowed them to effortlessly fly sideways against the ever-changing musical landscape of the very late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Singing groups have been a fixture in rock and roll almost from the beginning, but from doo-wop to Motown most have been African-American. The Fleetwoods is one of the exceptions and is also unusual in having men and women in the group.
The bandmembers met up in high school in Olympia, Washington. Originally the two women, Gretchen Christopher and Barbara Ellis began singing together; and they asked Gary Troxel to accompany them on trumpet. Once Christopher and Ellis heard one of Troxel’s songs, he began singing with the group as well. The attraction of the Fleetwoods is the paradoxically delicate yet full-bodied vocals of the three bandmembers.
Surprisingly, two of their stellar ballads hit #1 on the charts in 1959 in quick succession: “Come Softly to Me” and “Mr. Blue”. Nor was that the end of it: The Fleetwoods had a total of eleven Top 100 hits, with “Tragedy” landing in the Top Ten in 1961. The band called it quits in 1963 but have continued to tour periodically over the years in various incarnations.
A Greatest Hits or Best of package is what most people buy when they look for a Fleetwoods album, and that is what I did in the beginning also. The danger is that the hits often show only one side of a band; in this case, most people would assume that all of the music by the Fleetwoods features Gary Troxel on lead and the women singing back up. Not so – an album that I picked up recently, Good Night My Love (1963) shows that Gretchen Christopher and Barbara Ellis also perform flawlessly on lead vocals.
(November 2013)
