Ruby Baby / Donna The Prima Donna
Ace CDTOP 1548
★★★★
Most rock critics dismiss the early Sixties as a fallow period between the disappearance of rock’n’roll and the emergence of the Beatles. The charts were dominated by what Jerry Lee Lewis disparagingly called “The Bobbies” – Bobby Vee, Bobby Vinton, Bobby Rydell – and other relatively clean-cut, young vocalists who were as acceptable to parents as they were to teenagers.
At first glance, Dion DiMucci appeared to be part of that teen idol category. He’d emerged from the white doo-wop group Dion & the Belmonts with hits such as “The Wanderer” and “Runaround Sue”.
But there was a difference. As he’s quoted in the notes to this re-release of two of his 1963 albums, Dion rebelled. “I don’t like the way they sing. I don’t want to sing like that.”
So despite being shoe-horned into covering standards such as “You Made Me Love You” and “My Mammy” in a sort of Bobby Darin-style on the first album here, he brought a Bronx toughness and a love of black music into tracks such as “Ruby Baby” (originally cut by the Drifters) and the partly self-penned “Gonna Make It Alone”.
By the time of the second LP featured, he’d cast aside the supper-club trimmings with covers of black doo-wop hits such as “This Little Girl of Mine” and “Why Can’t We Be Sweethearts”, the streetwise “Donna the Prima Donna” and bluesier cuts such as “Sweet, Sweet Baby”.
He’d go on to delve into blues and folk and suffer a troubled time with drugs and alcohol before emerging as one of the more original voices of the era. These two albums stand testament to a singer who always stood out from the crowd.
