The songwriter who struck gold with ‘Itsy Bitsy’
Paul Vance 1929–2022
In 1960, songwriter Paul Vance pleaded with his 2-year-old daughter to come out of the changing room at a beach near their home on New York’s Long Island. She was shy about her new two-piece swimsuit, and when she summoned the courage to run into the water, her bottom came undone and floated away. With his partner, Lee Pockriss, Vance banged out a lighthearted, slightly suggestive song, recorded by teen Brian Hyland, about an anxious wearer of “an itsy bitsy, teenie weenie, yellow polka-dot bikini.” It reached No. 1, boosted bikini sales, and inspired several hit covers. Songs by Vance and Pockriss went on to sell more than 50 million copies. “Everybody knows my songs, but they don’t know me,” Vance said in 2015. “If you told them the songs I wrote, they’d say, ‘Get outta here!’ I look like a regular truck driver.”
Vance was born Joseph Florio in Brooklyn, the son of Italian immigrants, said The Washington Post. “I was supposed to have become a Mafioso,” he once said. A professional boxer in his youth, Vance served in the Army and ran an auto salvage business “before he connected with a music-publishing company.” He made up the showbiz name Paul Vance, said The Telegraph (U.K.) and with Pockriss wrote a hit in 1957, “Catch a Falling Star,” for Perry Como. The “lilting” and “childlike” song became the very first record to go gold, with more than a million copies sold. Vance was suddenly a full-time songwriter.
He and Pockriss wrote for Johnny Mathis (“What Will Mary Say”) and Frank Sinatra (“Then Suddenly Love”), and had nearly a dozen songs on the charts when “Itsy Bitsy” was released, said The Times (U.K.). His last big hit came in 1975 with “Run Joey Run,” sung by David Geddes. But he continued earning a fortune in royalties from “Itsy Bitsy,” which hit the charts again in 1990, sung by British broadcaster Timmy Mallett, and was also used in films and a yogurt commercial. In 2006, newspapers nationwide reported Vance’s demise, after a Florida man who falsely claimed to have written “Itsy Bitsy” died. Vance urgently notified publishing companies that he was very much alive. “Believe me,” he said, “if they think you’re dead, they ain’t going to send the money.”