He can't remember what Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers sounded like that day - the girls' shrieks all but drowned them out - but he recalls the excitement. "He had such presence, he'd just take over a stage and wipe an audience out."ĭoo-wop historian Philip Groia, author of "They All Sang on the Corner," attended one of Alan Freed's legendary rock 'n' roll shows at the Brooklyn Paramount in the spring of 1956. "Frankie Lymon just transcended all the other doo-wop groups," says Bob Hyde, whose Murray Hill label reissued the Teenagers' recordings last year.
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People sometimes compare him with the young Michael Jackson, who also knew how to combine innocence and knowingness. He had the looks he had the voice he had the moves. Lymon was only 12 when he hooked up with the foursome that became the Teenagers, but there was an aura about him that the city's doo-wop entrepreneurs recognized. With black rhythm and blues releases beginning to win white audiences, music had become a ticket to glory. Lymon was one of hundreds of kids in Harlem who had taken to street-corner harmonizing in the 1950s, rehearsing in apartment house hallways and echoey subway stations. "He had the type of personality," says Elizabeth Waters Lymon, Wife No.
He was a charmer, they all agree on that much. And that song, which he wrote or helped to write and which will bear his boyish vocal signature forever. He lived for 26 years, was a star for one and a half of them, and left behind a miserable financial and legal mess and three wounded women. Not to mention that two other members of the Teenagers have filed suit claiming they cowrote "Why Do Fools Fall in Love". There may be further delays, though, while that executive faces federal extortion charges. They're awaiting the decision now, the quiet schoolteacher from Georgia, the brassy singer from California and the struggling part-time bill collector from Philadelphia, all nursing their separate memories of life with a former teen idol.ĭepending on how the judge rules, the decision may reactivate a federal suit to wrest Lymon's royalties and publishing rights from the record industry executive who claims to own them.
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Instead, he has posthumously provoked a trial that will determine which of the three women he is said to have married - without ever scrupling to divorce any of them - is really his widow and heir. Lymon didn't even leave a grieving widow to serve as keeper of his flame.
He left no fortune when he died of a heroin overdose 20 years ago, he was broke and troubled, trying again for a comeback he never achieved.
The only child he is known to have fathered died hours after her birth. He recorded other songs, alone and with his group the Teenagers, but none has inspired the same affection. It is Frankie Lymon's only real legacy, that two minutes and 15 seconds of doo-wop. Why do birds sing so gay? Why does the rain fall from up above? And the true imponderable, "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?"
NEW YORK - It's been 32 years, but the song still shimmers and bops: first that calliope-like bass ("ehhh toom ah-ta toom ah-ta toom ah doe doe"), then a wash of "ooh-wahs," followed by the swooping soprano of 13-year-old Frankie Lymon, asking his immortal musical questions:
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