Joe Tex & His X Class Mates (Jackson, Mississippi)

Personnel :

Joe Tex (All the Voices)

Discography :

1959 - Charlie Brown Got Expelled / Blessed Are These Tears (Ace 559)

Biography :

Tex recorded for King Records between 1955 and 1957 with little success.  In 1958, he signed with Ace and continued to have relative failures, but he was starting to build a unique stage reputation, opening for artists such as Jackie Wilson, James Brown, and Little Richard.  Said change involved another chameleon-like shedding of a musical skin. Instead of aping Little Richard. Joe would start off 1959 by pretending to be the Coasters. The quartet had just come off two consecutive R&B smashes, songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's most vivid rock'n'roll playlets, 'Yakety Yak' and 'Charlie Brown'.

Joe's idea was to bring the world a further chapter of bad boy Brown's scholastic life and to marry it to a close relative of 'Yakety Yak's melody. He even double-tracked himself in an effort to sound more like a group, and Ace released "Charlie Brown Got Expelled" (Ace 559) as by "Joe Tex & his X-Class Mates" to ram the message home. But the message fell on deaf ears in the spring of 1959. In 1960, he left Ace and recorded for Detroit's Anna Records label...

Songs :

  
Charlie Brown Got Expelled                  Blessed Are These Tears 

...