The Jive Five

The Jive Five was a 1950s R&B group from the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, NY. The group was started by Eugene Pitt, whose father was a gospel singer and taught his children how to sing harmony; they sang as a group in churches in the early 1950s. However, when be became a teenager Eugene switched from gospel to the burgeoning "doo-wop" street sound, and by the mid-'50s he had joined a New York group called The Genies, which had a national hit with "Who's That Knockin'?". In 1959 he started his own group, The Jive Five, with some neighborhood friends. Nothing much happened, career-wise, for the group until they auditioned for the owners of a local recording studio, Beltone Studios, who had decided to start their own record label and called it Beltone Records. They had a hit with Bobby Lewis' "Tossin' and Turnin'" in 1961, and were ready for another one. One of the songs the group sang at the audition was a number that Pitt had co-written, called "My True Story", and Beltone released it as a single. It caught on and rose to the #1 spot on the R&B charts and cracked the Top 10 on the pop charts. The group had several follow-up songs, but none was a hit until they released "What Time Is It?" in 1962. A series of personnel changes and the financial problems of Beltone Records didn't help the group's career, and Beltone finally closed up shop in 1964. The group signed with United Artists Records in 1965, but its hit-making days were over.