Magazine. “But there’s only one first time.” The inspiration struck with a sudden, driving force. “When I arrived at camp, I went straight to the day room. There was a piano there and I started playing the chord in my head and the words in my heart,” Parris recalled. “Before I realized it, it was time to go to guard duty. It was a cold, black night, and the stars were twinkling. The setting was very apropos for my feelings and emotions.”
‘The Song Was Blessed’
The raw emotion Parris felt in the Philadelphia night was eventually captured in a recording session that has since become legendary. In 1956, the Five Satins gathered in the ice-cold basement of St. Bernadette’s Church in New Haven, Connecticut. Using just a couple of tape recorders, they laid down the hypnotic harmonies that would become acoustical magic.
Parris always believed the location played a role in the track’s enduring soul. “Because we did it at the church,” he told the radio show Doo Wop Revival in 2013, “I think the song was blessed. And so was I… it lasted a long, long time.”
Ironically, while the song achieved immortality, the relationship that inspired it did not. Marla eventually traveled to California to visit her mother and, as Parris simply put it, “She never came back.”
A Legacy That Transcends the Charts
