San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Creator of Five Satins’ doo-wop classic
Fred Parris, who was a lovestruck 19-year-old missing his fiancee while serving in the Army when he wrote one of pop music’s most enduring songs, the wistful doo-wop ballad commonly known as “In The Still of The Night,” and recorded it with his group the Five Satins in 1956, died Jan. 13 in New Haven, Conn. He was 85.
His current group, Fred Parris and the Five Satins, posted news of his death on its Facebook page, saying only that he died after a short illness.
Over the years Parris varied the story of his signature song a bit, but this was the gist of it: He had met the “girl of my dreams,” as he put it, at the Savin Rock amusement park in West Haven, Conn. in 1954, and by the next year they were engaged. On the train ride back to his Army base in Philadelphia after a particularly nice visit with her, he reminisced about their first night together and began thinking about lyrics and tunes.
“When I arrived at camp, I went straight to the day room,” he told Smithsonian magazine in 2004. “There was a piano there, and I started playing the chord in my head and the words in my heart.”
But soon he had to report for his shift. That’s when the song really came together.
“Before I realized it,” he said, “it was time to go to guard duty. It was a cold, black night, and the stars were twinkling.”
The result was a song that was originally titled “(I’ll Remember) In The Still of The Nite,” to distinguish it from Cole Porter’s “In The Still of The Night,” said Ralph Newman, an R&B historian who filled in some of the details of Parris’ life. In February 1956, again on leave from the Army, Parris and three pals, backed by some local musicians, recorded the song on a relatively primitive two-track system in an echoey, frigid basement room at St. Bernadette’s Church in New Haven.
Somehow they captured acoustical magic.
“Because we did it at the church,” Parris said in a 2013 interview with the Florida radio show “Doo Wop Revival,” “I think the song was blessed. And so was I.”
Although it was originally only a minor hit, “In The Still of The Night” (as the title is now commonly rendered) achieved doo-wop immortality, thanks to cover versions by Boyz II Men, the Beach Boys and others; its use in “Dirty Dancing,” “The Irishman” and other movies; and its tuneful timelessness. Newman, a former editor of the R&B history magazine Bim Bam Boom and a former executive with Broadcast Music Inc., traced the record’s slow ascent in an email:
“After this icon of vocal group harmony was recorded and first released by the local Standord record label in New Haven, the master was leased to the larger Ember label, which in 1956 landed it on Alan Freed’s nightly radio show on WINS in New York. There it became, for years, the No. 1 listener-requested song of the period, with which Freed often closed the show with a long list of dedications, and went on to become the perennial No. 1 song on oldies stations around the country.”
Parris kept writing, performing and recording for more than a half-century with an everchanging lineup, mostly under the Five Satins name. When the oldies boom hit, the song came to define the doo-wop era. Critic Greil Marcus included it in his 2014 book, “The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs.”
“Though he continued to record new songs well into the
Fred Parris sings “In the Still of the Night” with the Five Satins at St. Bernadette Church in New Haven, Conn., in 2017.
1980s,” Marcus wrote, “Parris and different versions of The Five Satins never played a show, whether in clubs around New Haven, for rock ’n’ roll revival concerts in New York, on PBS doo-wop fundraisers, without ‘In The Still of The Nite’ being the reason the audience was there at all.”
Frederick Lee Parris was born March 26, 1936, in Milford, Conn., to Ferdinand and Edna Parris, Newman said. Parris grew up in the New Haven area and attended Hillhouse High School. He was a decent baseball player; an entry on the Five Satins in Jay Warner’s “The Billboard Book of American Singing Groups: A History, 1940-1990” says he once had a tryout with the Boston Braves.
Parris, when telling the story of “In The Still of The Night,” usually didn’t identify the young woman who inspired the song, although in the Smithsonian article, he said her name was Marla. In any case, there was no marriage; shortly after he wrote the song, he told the Hartford Courant in 1982, “she went to California to visit her mother.”
“She never came back,” he said.
Parris was married several times, most recently to Emma Parris, who survives him. Other survivors include three children, Shawn Parris, Rene Parris Alexandre and Freddy Parris; and eight grandchildren.