Dave's Song of the Day
Suspicion – Terry Stafford
Monday song of the day: The success of today’s song caused RCA Records to release the Elvis Presley original as a single.
Songwriters Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman wrote a song for Elvis Presley about a man who doubted his girlfriend’s fidelity. Elvis recorded the song
Suspicion in March 1962 and it was released on his
Potluck album in June 1962. It was just an album cut and not a single, so the song didn’t attract a lot of attention at the time.
In May 1962, a singer named Terry Stafford was recording some demos, and one of the songs that Stafford decided to record was
Suspicion. He had apparently heard an early copy of the Elvis album before it was released and liked the song. Stafford’s voice was similar to Presley’s, so it was a good fit for him. Afterwards, his manager shopped the record around to several record labels and radio stations in the Los Angeles area. Eventually one of the disc jockeys took the demo to a new record label that had its headquarters next door to his radio station.
Crusader Records president John Fisher liked the song and decided to sign Stafford. Instead of re-recording the song, Fisher instead remastered the existing demo and released that. Terry Stafford’s
Suspicion was released in February 1964 and was only the second record put out by Crusader. It first hit in San Bernardino, then expanded into the larger Los Angeles market, and eventually became a nationwide hit, rising to #3 on the
Billboard Hot 100. During the record’s rise up the charts, The Beatles held all five of the top positions on the Hot 100 for the week of April 4th, 1964, with Stafford’s record at #6. The next week when
Suspicion finally reached its highest position on the chart, it displaced one of the Beatles’ records to break their hold on the top 5 slots.
With
Suspicion beginning to be a hit for Stafford, RCA records decided to release the Elvis Presley original as a single. It was released as the B-side of
Kiss Me Quick on April 16th, 1964, and thus was not a hit in itself.
Kiss Me Quick eventually rose to #34 on the Hot 100, and while the
Suspicion B-side did get some radio airplay, it failed to crack the Hot 100.
In Europe, however, the Elvis version of
Suspicion was the A-side of a single, backed with
It Hurts Me. There the Terry Stafford record had not yet hit, so the two versions of
Suspicion were in direct competition. In Europe, the Elvis record was preferred, reaching the top 10 in several European countries while Terry Stafford’s cover did not do nearly as well.
Terry Stafford, 1964
View: https://youtu.be/_DrDq_2ZKQI
Elvis Presley, 1962 (but not released as a single until 1964)
View: https://youtu.be/spEvNvRbpOI
Tomorrow: Or just say no to individuality