Little Joe & The Thrillers

Genuine one-hit wonders. One can only imagine how thrilling The Thrillers must have been. Perhaps Michael Jackson named his big album after them. Perhaps.

What does Carlos Santana have to do with this group?

I was looking, one afternoon, back around 2002, for The Swing Of Delight by Carlos Santana. I don’t remember why, or what about it I was exactly looking for. But what I found was a copy for downloading on a Russian web site called allofmp3.com. (Don’t look for it; it’s been taken offline by the vulture music publishers who claim that they were being cheated out of their royalties.) Apart from a few select titles, these were not free downloads. But they were very very cheap.

There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of titles. They added new stuff everyday. The downloading worked like a charm. You'd buy $5.00 or $10.00 or $20.00 of credit, and download until you'd used up your money.

When they went offline, I imagine that people got caught having credit they couldn't use. Fortunately I wasn't one of them; they owe me about 25 cents, but the lawyer I wanted to hire wanted 30 cents to do the case, so I demurred.

Over a number of years I acquired a number of interesting titles from the site. I found The Doo Wop Box there; in fact I found 2 Doo Wop Boxes, each with different titles. And so that’s where my Little Joe & The Thrillers “collection” comes from.

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Little Joe & The Thrillers:

• Peanuts – Little Joe (presumably) sings, in the most amazing falsetto, a love song to a girl named “Peanuts.” I know she’s a girl because he sings “girl. This is somewhere between doo wop and jump blues. From the fall of 1957. A hit again in 1963 (somewhat) for The Four Seasons. And there is a completely different song called Peanuts by a group whose name escapes me, and it doesn’t show up on Allmusic.com, except in a cover by Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass. And no, I’ve never known a girl named Peanuts. Allergy sufferers beware…