The Drifters Legends Clubhouse LLc

As in all stories, the historical backdrop lends a certain charm and mystic to the subject matter in focus. This certainly is no different in the rise in culture, its people, music and fashion of the times. Harlem New York the 1920s 30s Central and West Harlem was the focus of the "Harlem Renaissance", an outpouring of artistic work without precedent in the American black community. Though Harlem musicians and writers are particularly well remembered, the community has also hosted numerous actors and theater companies, including the New Heritage Repertory Theater, National Black Theater, Lafayette Players, Harlem Suitcase Theater, The Negro Playwrights, American Negro Theater, and the Rose McClendon Players. The Apollo Theater opened on 125th Street on January 26, 1934, in a former burlesque house. The Savoy Ballroom, on Lenox Avenue, was a renowned venue for swing dancing, and was immortalized in a popular song of the era, "Stompin' At The Savoy". In the 1920s and 1930s, between Lenox and Seventh Avenues in central Harlem, over 125 entertainment places operated, including speakeasies, cellars, lounges, cafes, taverns, supper clubs, rib joints, theaters, dance halls, and bars and grills. 133rd Street, known as "Swing Street", became known for its cabarets, speakeasies and jazz scene during the Prohibition era, and was dubbed "Jungle Alley" because of "inter-racial mingling" on the street. Some jazz venues, including most famously the Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington played, and Connie's Inn, were restricted to whites only. Others were integrated, including the Renaissance Ballroom and the Savoy Ballroom. Rock and roll dominated popular music in the latter half of the 1950s. The musical style originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and quickly spread to much of the rest of the world. Its immediate origins lay in a mixing together of various black musical genres of the time, including rhythm and blues and gospel music; with country and western and Pop. In 1951, Cleveland, Ohio disc jockey Alan Freed began playing rhythm and blues music for a multi-racial audience, and is credited with first using the phrase "rock and roll" to describe the music. Artists such as Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Big Joe Turner, and Gene Vincent released the initial rhythm and blues-influenced early rock and roll hits. On the other side of the spectrum, R&B-influenced acts like The Crows, The Penguins, The El Dorados and The Turbans all scored major hits, and groups like The Platters, with songs including "The Great Pretender" (1955), and The Coasters with humorous songs like "Yakety Yak" (1958), ranked among the most successful rock and roll acts of the period.                                   This is the enviroment that a young man named Clyde McPhatter entered after migrating to New York City from North Carolina. Clyde Lensey (or Lensley) McPhatter was born in Durham, North 
Carolina on November 15 1932. His family was heavily-rooted in the church, with his father a minister and his mother an organist. When his family moved north to New York's Harlem in the late 40s, Clyde began singing with a gospel group: the Mount Lebanon Singers (from the Mount Lebanon Church on 132 Street). The rest of the group, at the time Clyde joined, consisted of: Charlie White (second tenor), William "Chick" Anderson (tenor), Wilmer "Lover" Baldwin (tenor and guitar), David Baldwin (baritone), and James "Wrinkle" Johnson (bass). (David and Wilmer were brothers of author James Baldwin.) This association along with others that Clyde would encounter through music battles with other groups of the period would set the frame work that would later become The Drifters. It was through such musical encounters that he met Bill Pinkney and the Thrasher Brothers Gerhart and Andrew.    Butch Leake