Before Dick Clark was summoned to appear before a House committee looking into payola in 1960, the committee spent several days building a case against Clark. As many as 80 Clark associates had been interviewed by investigators looking for questionable connections to the popular American Bandstand host.
One of the witnesses appearing before the committee was a middle-aged songwriter from Chillicothe, Ohio, named Orville Lunsford. Lunsford told the story of how he wrote a song called The All-American Boy, had a friend record it and leased it to Fraternity Records in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Then, Lunsford claimed, he received a call from Fraternity president Harry Carlson saying Dick Clark was willing to push the song on Bandstand, if the company had 50,000 copies pressed by Clark's Mallard Pressing Co. in Philadelphia. Carlson disputed the story, but Lunsford claimed the records were pressed in January 1959.
“Almost immediately,” Lunsford said, “I heard my song played every other day on Clark’s show, American Bandstand, and on the other Dick Clark show also. The record became a big hit in the nation for a while.”[1]
But Lunsford's story was only partially true. Dick Clark did, indeed, push the song to near the top of the charts, but the story of The All-American Boy is one of the strangest of the rock & roll era.
First, Lunsford didn't write the song. Second, Bill Parsons (who was listed as the singer) didn't sing the song. It was actually Bobby Bare who wrote and recorded the song that became a hit, thanks to American Bandstand.
It wasn't a conspiracy that led to the confusion, just a laughable SNAFU right from the start.
Lunsford, Parsons and Bare were acquaintances in southern Ohio when Parsons returned from U.S. Army service in Germany. Determined to establish a musical career, Parsons started playing local night clubs at $10 a night. By 1958, he had worked up an arrangement of the old fiddle tune, Rubber Dolly, that he figured would make a good rockabilly record.
He booked time at the King Records studio in Cincinnati to cut a demo and his buddy, Bare, who was just a couple of days from entering the U.S. Army himself, tagged along. When Parsons was satisfied with his efforts, Bare asked to use up the final 15 minutes of the session to lay down a track of a talking blues he'd written, The All-American Boy.
The next day, Parsons and Lunsford took the song to Carlson at Fraternity. Carlson paid the pair $500 in advance royalties so he could release Rubber Dolly and The All-American Boy on a record. In the contract, Parsons and Lunsford claimed they had written the songs, Parsons sang them and they owned all rights to them.
By the time the Clark connection was established, Bare was a private in the army at Fort Ord, Calif. When Clark asked Parsons to lip-sync the song on American Bandstand, Parsons called his buddy in a panic.
Bare reassured Parsons that he could do as good a job lip-syncing to the song as Bare could and told him to just enjoy the ride and buy a car or something with the royalties. Parsons followed through with the masquerade for awhile, but was outed when he couldn't produce The All-American Boy "sound" in follow up sessions.
Dale Stevens, columnist of The Cincinnati Post & Times Star, figured it all out when Bare released a similar-sounding follow-up, I’m Hanging Up My Rifle, on Fraternity. Although Stevens learned that Lunsford, Bare and Parsons were good friends, none of them would confess to the ruse.
Carlson said he didn't figure it out until Lunsford complained that he'd been cheated out of songwriting royalties.
At the time The All-American Boy was riding the charts, most people assumed it was about Elvis Presley, who was in the army at the time. But Bare insists the song was about his anxiety over putting his own promising musical career on hold to serve his country.
Bare went on to have a solid career in the country-rock genre, but at RCA, not Fraternity.
Check out the similarity yourself. First, The All-American Boy:
Now, I’m Hanging Up My Rifle:
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand -- Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. Go here to learn the story behind the writing of Bandstandland or here to listen to the Pennsylvania Cable Network's interview with author Larry Lehmer.
Larry Lehmer's book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.
[1] Associated Press, April 28, 1960.
