The Penguins

The Penguins were an early "doo-wop" group that was formed by several classmates at Los Angeles' Fremont High School in the early 1950s (one of its members, Curtis Williams, had previously been a member of The Hollywood Flames). They took their name from the character "Willie the Penguin" on the package of "Kool" cigarettes, a brand that one of the members smoked. They recorded a song called "Hey Senorita" that was released by Dootone Records in 1954. It got some airplay, but one day a DJ flipped the record over and played the "B" side, and audience reaction to the song was swift: it shot to #1 on the Billboard charts and stayed there for three weeks. The song was what turned out to be a "doo-wop" classic: "Earth Angel". The airwaves were very strictly segregated at the time, and most white-owned radio stations would not play records by black artists; if a record became a hit on the "black" stations, record companies would hire a white group to re-record it so it could get played on the white stations. A white group called The Crew Cuts--which had re-recorded "Sh-Boom", a hit for the black group The Chords in 1954 and had a big hit with it--re-recorded "Earth Angel" and it got heavy airplay on the white stations, eventually rising to #3 on the pop charts. After the success of "Earth Angel", the group left Dootone Records for the much larger Mercury Records, but their records at Mercury didn't do much on the charts. The group went through a string of personnel changes, and although one of their songs, "Pledge of Love", hit #15 on the R&B charts, they never again had a record that hit nationally, and the group broke up in 1962. Different versions of the group formed and re-formed over the next several years, and in 1999 the current version appeared on the "oldies" special Doo Wop 50 (1999).