Dance With Me – The El Torros 45 rpm! 1957

Dance With Me – The El Torros (Duke) 1957 One weekend, Ted Mack came to town to audition acts for his Original Amateur Hour television show: the El Corados sang a Van Bracken composition, Dance With Me. The bad news was that Mack was too impressed, turning them down because they sounded too professional! The good news is that Mack mispronounced El Corados as El Toros, and they decided to keep it that way. Soon after this, the quartet became a quintet with the addition of tenor Fred Green (who had formerly been with the Mellards on Ballad). One night, in 1957, the El Toros were doing a show at the Club Riviera, when Bobby Bland and Junior Parker were in the audience. (They were in town as part of a package tour from Duke/Peacock Records — the Buffalo Booking Agency’s Blues Consolidated Show.) Bland and Parker were impressed, and invited the guys back to their hotel to hold an impromptu acapella audition. When this went well, Bland called up Don Robey, owner of Duke/Peacock, and told him of their discovery; Robey immediately asked for a demo tape. The recording studio that they used for the demo was Van’s basement: he had a beat-up tape recorder down there! They sang Dance With Me, Yellow Hand, and a couple of other original tunes. The tape was sent off to Robey, and the group waited impatiently for his decision. When it came, it wasn’t one that they expected. He told them that the sound was too primitive: clean up the equipment and try again! They worked on the recorder …
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