The La De Das - Hey Baby (1967)

Bruce Channel - Hey! Baby (1961)

(Margaret Cobb - Bruce Channel)
 USA
Original version
#1 USA #2 UK #5 Melbourne #6 Brisbane #1 Perth

Some later versions have omitted the exclamation mark in Hey! Baby but Jose Feliciano, for one, kept it. (Bien vu, Philippe !)

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Single on Fort Worth, Texas, label Le Cam and released nationally on Smash, a subsidiary of Mercury. Hey! Baby was produced by label owner Major Bill Smith and musical director Marvin Montgomery who is on the piano. Le Cam would have another national hit with Hey Paula by Jill & Ray (renamed Paul & Paula on Philips), released at the end of 1962.

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Texan singer-songwriter Bruce Channel was born in Jacksonville TX (1940, Wendell Bruce McMeans) but grew up in Grapevine, a small city in the area now known as the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. Channel was his mother’s maiden name, rhyming with flannel, but it was decided that Bruce’s version should be pronounced as in the French Chanel.

Hey! Baby was his only US Top 40 hit but he also charted in Britain with Keep On (1968, #12 UK, #73 Australia), written by Wayne Carson (Thompson): ♫ YouTube. He eventually quit touring and had a successful career as a songwriter in Nashville.

In 1958, when young Channel became a regular on the Louisiana Hayride radio show, he had already been in bands during his high school years. He wrote both sides of his first record, Run, Romance, Run / Don’t Leave Me (1959) on Fort Worth label Teen Ager. It was produced by country banjo star Marvin “Smokey” Montgomery who would later co-produce and play piano on Hey! Baby (1961).

Channel had met Montgomery through Margaret Cobb, the co-writer of Hey! Baby, who was from Irving, Texas, about 15 miles from Channel in Grapevine.

Channel had been working in a day job with Cobb’s brother who suggested that he contact his sister because she was a singer who “knew how to write songs”. The pair ended up writing many Channel–Cobb songs, of which Hey! Baby was one of several that would later be recorded by Channel.

Margaret Cobb, with Marvin Montgomery, became Channel’s joint manager, and she organised his fan club. She was also a music publisher, running Marett Music in Irving with Montgomery. Marett Music was associated with Trojan Records, a local label formed in 1963 by Irving singer Don Martin.

Bruce Channel has estimated that Margaret Cobb was 10-15 years his senior so … born c.1925-1930?

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News clipping (above): ‘Daily News Texan’, Irving TX, 29 September 1963.

The harmonica on Hey Baby is by another Texan, Delbert McClinton, Lubbock-born but Fort Worth raised. McClinton gave John Lennon some harmonica tips during a tour of Britain in mid-1962, before Beatlemania. Legend has it that this influenced Lennon’s harmonica style, especially as heard on The Beatles’ first hit single, Love Me Do (1962). The story has grown until it has McClinton teaching Lennon harmonica, but McClinton himself has graciously toned down the story, and the truth is more complicated anyway: see this discussion at Wikipedia.

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References, further reading: 1. Richie Unterberger’s Bruce Channel biography at All Music. 2. Bruce Channel at This Is My Story. 3. Interview with Bruce Channel at ClassicBands.com (NB The reference to “Margaret Montgomery” as Channel’s joint manager is clearly a misprint for “Marvin Montgomery”). 4. Marvin Montgomery tribute at Texas State Historical Society. 6. McClinton quoted on Lennon (example from 1978) .

Highly recommended: Bruce Channel’s own account of Hey! Baby and his career in Dave Nicolson (ed.), Back on the road again: 14 hitmakers of the fifties & sixties tell their own amazing stories [digitised at internet Archive, free registration required].