The Nitecaps - By My Girl 1955 UT

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The Nitecaps (Detroit, MI)

Personnel:
Al Hamilton (Al Kent) (Lead)
Eugene Ronald Hamilton (Ronnie Savoy)
Robert Hamilton (Rob Reeco)
Freddie Pride

Biography:
Ronnie Savoy had been living in New York since `57', singing lead with a group called the Nitecaps, Freddy Pride, Billy Kopeland, Thomas Davis, and Ronnie Savoy. The group had pretty much dissolved by 1960. After the group broke up due to personality differences. The Nitecaps was one of the three groups that metamorphosed from the original group the Comets, that started on the unabashed streets of Detroit's North End side at 2128 Meade Street, not far from the 6 Mile Projects, north, and Hamtramck to the south slightly infringing borders of Highland Park, where Bobby Reeco Hamilton, Eugene G.G. Capers, Johnny Braxton, Billy Kopeland, and Ronnie Savoy started a group called the Comets with Bobby as their Maestro.

The Comets had three lead tenors with very different and original styles. A group primed for cross-over music where any and all rhythm and blues forms had to go in order to reach the Pop Charts. The Promise lands. Ronnie Savoy's mint tone clear tenor voice was his strong point, but the postscript to his singing style was illuminated in his enunciation, every word noteworthy of the emphasis he bestowed on each particular syllable and phrase. For example, the execution of “Just a Kiss And A Vow” by the Nitecaps, every line so distinctly understood, his influence clearly a throw-back to the days of Nat King Cole and Bill Kenny of the Ink Spot's. But the ambiguities of the music business took its toll, and soon Eugene G.G. Capers along with Johnny Braxton departed for jobs in the automotive factories, replacing them with Freddy Pride [baretone] and Thomas Davis [bass], then to form the Versatiles.

Bobby Hamilton had dropped the named the Versatiles along with guitarist Arnold Christian, added Billy Kopeland and called the new group, the Nitecaps. The Nitecaps group were in the limelights for years. There parvenu excursions took them throughout the country performing nightly where they were a stable diet of entertainment at the fabulous Cotton Club in New York appearing with the one and only master Cab Callaway and sharing the top billing at the Baby Grand Night Club in Harlem with the combustible Nipsy Russell. The Nitecaps music proceeded doo-wop, ran concurrent with blues ballads for a while and found a comfortable and esteemed place on the popular music scene, churning out record after record until they rubbed shoulders of high accolades with the Mills Brothers, and the Ink Spots, the Trinaire Brothers and the likes. But it was bass singer Thomas `Bull Yellar' Davis that evolved the group with special renditions from r&b to different popular music styles comprised under the umbrella of old standards.

Two months after signing on the dotted line with Al Green as their personal manager the Nitecaps recorded their very first song “A Kiss And A Vow ” with Groove Records, a subsidiary of RCA Records introduced in 1954. The Nitecaps were the first rhythm and blues group in the country to appear on national syndicated television for the Robert Montgomery variety show in New York City`55'. They tried to sound more pop-orientated and 'modern' especially with the jump tunes from their first November 1955 session for Groove. “A Kiss And A Vow“resembles The Orioles' ballad style, most likely because of Ronnie’s tenor voice that had the same high soulful feeling as Clyde MacPhatter’s.

"With Snap, Crackle And Pop“and “Your’re Gonna Be Sorry“ from their second session, they gave us two distinctive jump tunes of the same musical quality. The vocal background on “Snap, Crackle And Pop“can hear the group singing the sort of nonsense syllables 'doo-Wop', which later gave this music its name. “Bamboo Rock And Roll“ from their third single fits exactly into the Ling Ting Tong theme popular two years before, “while You May Not Know“ is a ballad par excellence.
The sound of the third and last session did not change much towards songs popular at the fall of 1956, “In Each Corner Of My Heart“ delights much the same way as some Dominoes’ releases, with a heavy bass break and a high tenor. On the fourth song from this session they backed Varetta Dillard. From all the four fantastic releases on Groove, only two “A Kiss And A Vow“ and “Bamboo Rock And Roll“ entered a fen local charts. Nevertheless, the Nitecaps must have been popular for some time, because Otis Williams (of Detroit’s Temptations) remembered having seen them live.