When George Grant started singing, more than 60 years ago, popular music was not yet a young person's game. He helped change that, and the change has shaped popular music ever since.
Most popular music fans today, or in the 1950s for that matter, never heard of George Grant, who died Thursday at the age of 78.
In the early to mid-1950s, George Grant (top right in picture above, from Classic Urban Harmony) sang lead with a Philadelphia rhythm and blues vocal group called the Castelles - or, originally, the Royal Castelles.
They scored a modest regional hit on the rhythm and blues charts in late 1953 with their first record, a jump tune called "Sweetness" backed with a wonderful ballad called "My Girl Awaits Me."
They went on to record another half dozen records, none particularly big sellers though all cherished today by rhythm and blues collectors.
Those included "If You Were The Only Girl in the World," "Over a Cup of Coffee" and "Marcella." Grant also cut a solo recording of "It's Christmas Time," which still gets dusted off by a few adventurous radio shows each year at holiday time.
The Castelles had the same problem experienced by a thousand other artists in the chaotic record business of the early 1950s. It was relatively easy to find a label to record your song and very hard to find a label that could promote it into a hit.
The Castelles recorded for Philadelphia's Grand Records, which was run by Herb Slotkin out of his real business, Treegoob's Furniture and Appliance Store on Lancaster Avenue.
Like a lot of home furnishings stores at the time, Treegoob's sold records. Slotkin and his associate Jerry Ragovoy figured they might as well start a label and sell their own records, too. Why not? That was the birth of Grand.
Writer Marv Goldberg, in his R&B Notebook biography on the Castelles, reports that the group walked into Treegoob's carrying a copy of "My Girl Awaits Me," which they had recorded for 25 cents at an arcade booth. Slotkin and Ragovoy liked it, and the Castelles became their first artist.
A&R wasn't the most sophisticated process back then.
The Castelles had formed two years earlier, Grant told Goldberg, when most of the singers were barely teenagers. After a couple of early personnel changes, the group included Octavius Anthony, Billy Taylor, Ron Everett and guitarist Frank Vance.
As they built a reputation, they played dances, roller rinks and various local events. When Jersey Joe Walcott won the heavyweight championship, they sang at one of the celebrations as his opening act.
As with most artists, their initial repertoire was the popular songs of the day, from harmony groups like the Orioles, Spaniels, Flamingos and Four Freshmen.
The difference is that all those groups were grownups, men working as full-time professional singers. They sang in nightclubs and theaters, where for decades the audience had been grownups enjoying an evening out. They sang adult songs in adult styles.
The Castelles were teenagers, high school kids. George Grant in particular had a voice that was high and pristine, almost ethereal. It wasn't the kind of kid sound that Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers would popularize a couple of years later, but it was different even from the familiar high tenors of singers like Maithe Marshall and Joe Van Loan of the Ravens.
Grant wasn't the first teenage vocal group singer. Two years earlier, in 1951, Bobby Robinson had recorded the teenage Ray Wooten singing lead with the Mellomoods. But in 1953, as in all previous known years of popular music, the assumption was that singers and listeners would mostly be grownups.
Music, like the radio on which much of it was heard, was a center of home entertainment in the pre-television days. Radio and records were significant home entertainment investments, made by the family breadwinners.
Then, within five years, all that changed. Cheaper radios and record players meant teenagers could have their own. They also had more time and more money, making them an exploding growth market. Grownups still mattered, but suddenly, so did teenagers.
George Grant and the Castelles came along in the middle of that shift. The songs they sang, and later the songs they wrote, were grownup songs. The heartbreak wasn't teenage and the imagery was some of the most intriguing in rhythm and blues ballads.
"I'm like a bird in a sandstorm," they sang in "Marcella." "Girl, I'll keep trying just to make headway."
"Over a cup of coffee," they sang in "Over a Cup of Coffee," "I sit and I cry for you / Because you have done me wrong / I have tears in my coffee, too."
Nor did the songs have a teen sound. Both the ballads and the uptempo numbers have a traditional measured R&B structure - which served their intended audience then, enchants R&B vocal group collectors today and pretty much ruled them out as early teen idols.
Still, Grant remains one of the first young R&B vocal group singers. He's also considered a foundation of the 1950s Philadelphia sound, a high lead over smooth harmony backing.
Mainly, he was just a lovely singer. That isn't a bad achievement, and it's a wonderful thing to leave behind.