Lynchburg native was a Drifter nearly all his life
Hall of Fame R&B group’s hits included ‘Under the Boardwalk’
Charlie Thomas, who recorded memorable songs such as “There Goes My Baby” and “Under the Boardwalk” with the Drifters, the silken-voiced R&B group that had a long string of hits from 1959-64 and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Fame, died Jan. 31 at his home in Bowie, Maryland. He was 85.
Singer Peter Lemongello Jr., a close friend, said the cause was liver cancer.
Thomas, a tenor, was a Drifter for more than 60 years, from the version of the group that had its first hits in the late 1950s to the version he led and toured with until the pandemic struck.
“He was aging, but he was active almost every weekend,” Lemongello, a former lead singer of the Crests, who performed on bills with Thomas, said in a phone interview.
“Unfortunately, he went from being active to being at home and he started going downhill.”
Thomas became a Drifter by chance. He was singing with the Crowns, an R&B group, at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1958 when they came to the attention of George Treadwell, the manager of the original Drifters, who were on the bill.
One of the Drifters got drunk and cursed out the owner of the Apollo and the show’s promoter, music historian Marv Goldberg wrote. Treadwell, who owned the name, then fired all its members and replaced them with members of the Crowns, including Thomas and Ben Nelson, who would later be known as Ben E. King, and rechristened them the Drifters.
Asked how it felt to suddenly become a Drifter, Thomas told Goldberg: “As a kid, I used to play hooky to see the Drifters at the Apollo. It felt good!”
The new Drifters fulfilled the former group’s road obligations and began recording the next year for Atlantic Records, produced by the songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.
King had written “There Goes My Baby” for Thomas to sing. But Thomas froze at the studio microphone, and King took over. The song rose to No. 2 in 1959.
The hits continued for several years, as the Drifters became one of the most successful groups of the era.
They followed “There Goes My Baby” with “This Magic Moment,” “Up on the Roof,” “Under the Boardwalk,” “On Broadway” and “Saturday Night at the Movies.” “Save the Last Dance for Me” was their only song to reach No. 1.
Charles Nowlin Thomas was born April 7, 1937, in Lynchburg. His father Willis was a minister and his mother Lucinda was a homemaker whose singing voice Charlie admired.
“My dad was a holy roller preacher down in Virginia,” Thomas said in 2013. “At my father’s church, I used to take the tambourine and do collection, and my mother used to sing in the choir. That’s where I really got my training from singing.”
He moved to Harlem with his mother and a sister when he was 10 and eventually got a job pushing a hand truck in the garment district.
He sang on street corners and came to the attention of Lover Patterson, the Crowns’ manager, who hired him in 1958. The group recorded “Kiss and Make Up” for songwriters Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman’s short-lived R &B label before Treadwell turned them into the Drifters.
The lead singers on most of the group’s hits were King and, after he left for a solo career in 1960, Rudy Lewis and Johnny Moore, who had been in the group’s first incarnation and rejoined it in 1964. But Thomas sang lead on “Sweets for My Sweet,” which reached No. 16 on the Hot 100 in 1961, and “When My Little Girl Is Smiling,” which peaked at No. 28 the next year.
Thomas also took over the lead on the ballad “I Don’t Want to Go On Without You” a day after Lewis’ death in a hotel room in 1964.
The Drifters broke up in the late 1960s but didn’t disappear. Some members headed to England, where they performed as the Drifters and were managed by Treadwell’s widow, Faye, who vigorously defended her legal right to the name.
Bill Pinkney, a member of the mid-1950s lineup fired by George Treadwell, went on to form a group called the Original Drifters. He died in 2007, but the group continues to perform under that name.
Thomas later joined them briefly before starting Charlie Thomas’ Drifters, which performed until 2020. Still other groups have claimed the Drifters name over the years as well.