“My One and Only Jimmy Boy” (The Girlfriends)

This week we’re taking a tour back in time to focus on the Girl Group sound of the 1960s. Our first classic Girl Group song of the week is a little-known tune called “My One and Only Jimmy Boy” by the Girlfriends. This one only hit #49 on the Billboard Hot 100 but it should have been a lot bigger.

“My One and Only Jimmy Boy” was written and produced by David Gates, the guy who a few years later put together a group called Bread, so named after all the money he hoped to make. Before he got all soft rockish with Bread, Mr. Gates earned his bones in the Phil Spector Wall of Sound factory. He learned a lot from Mr. Spector and applied it all in this Wall of Soundalike West Coast Girl Girl group recording. Gates knew enough to stack lots of instruments on top of one another, use copious amounts of real-world echo and reverb, and employ the best studio musicians around, the Wrecking Crew, including legendarily ubiquitous drummer Hal Blaine. (This is one of my favorite Hal Blaine performances, full of Hal’s driving Ludwig Supraphonic snare and a barrage of rapid eighth-note triplet fills—plus Hal’s signature quarter-note triplets in the out chorus.)

Gates scored funds from Jan Berry (of Jan and Dean fame) to finance the recording, which was released on Colpix Records in late 1963. Unfortunately, President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November of that year cast a pall on the record-buying public and helped keep “My One and Only Jimmy Boy” from the success it deserved.

“My One and Only Jimmy Boy” was the only recording by the group called the Girlfriends. In reality, the Girlfriends were two members of the Blossoms, Gloria Jones and Nanette Williams, augmented with another singer, Carolyn Willis, who was formerly with the Ikettes. (The other two members of the Blossoms, Fanita James and Darlene Love, were recruited by Phil Spector to sing with his new group, Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans.)

After the release of “My One and Only Jimmy Boy,” lead Girlfriend Carolyn Willis went on to work as a session singer for Lou Rawls and O.C. Smith and later joined the all-girl trio Honey Cone, who had a string of hits in the 1970s (“Want Ads,” “Stick Up,” “One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show,” etc.). In the 1990s she joined a reformed version of fellow Girl Group the Shirelles with former Girlfriend Gloria Jones.

The Girl Group sound was big in the late 1950s through the mid 1960s, when the Beatles and the British Invasion rendered it obsolete. It was a mix of R&B and doo-wop, with a little rock and roll layered on top. There were white Girl Groups and black Girl Groups, with the black groups being a little more soulful than the white ones. There were two distinct camps in the sound—East Coast Girl Groups fueled by Brill Building songwriters (the Shirelles, the Cookies, the Chiffons, the Dixie Cups) and West Coast Girl Groups that were an offshoot of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound (the Blossoms, the Crystals, the Ronettes). The Girlfriends were an obvious West Coast Wall of Soundish variant.

By the way, some people slot the Supremes, the Marvelettes, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, and other Motown acts into the Girl Group bucket, but I see their sound as something distinctly different. Yes, the Supremes were a “girl group” but they were part of the Motown sound, not the Girl Group sound, at least in my opinion.

We’ll talk more about the Girl Group sound over the next several days. Know, however, that I’ll be choosing from some of the more obscure Girl Group tracks—songs, like “My One and Only Jimmy Boy” that deserve a second listen and might even be better than some of the more well-known hits.

One last thing. If you want to learn more about the Girl Group sound, I recommend you check out the documentary, Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound, embedded below.. It’s a terrific backgrounder on the whole ‘Girl ’60s Girl Group phenomenon.

For your listening pleasure, I recommend Rhino’s legendary boxed set, Girl Group Sounds Lost and Found: One Kiss Can Lead to Another. This one is unfortunately out of print but still available for streaming; it includes a lot of rare Girl Group tracks, including “My One and Only Jimmy Boy.”