Biography
Bessie Banks earned lasting notice among rock aficionados chiefly through her 1964 cut of “Go Now,” although her recording activity stretched well past that decade. Born Bessie White in North Carolina and brought up in Brooklyn, she developed an early passion for singing; by the middle 1950s the alluring quality of her voice drew interest from several vocal ensembles and industry figures. She spent a brief period with the quartet Three Guys and a Doll, which later reorganized as the Four Fellows once she had departed; during her tenure she met the group’s bass and baritone singer Larry Banks, its informal director, and the two soon married. Performing under the name Toni Banks, she appeared on stage and wax in the mid-1950s, among other sides cutting the single “You’re Still in My Heart,” supported by the Four Fellows. Resuming the name Bessie Banks, she entered the studio again in the early 1960s, beginning with the 1963 Spokane Records release “Do It Now” backed by “(You Should Have Been A) Doctor,” a master subsequently acquired by Wand Records in 1964. That same year Larry and Bessie mounted a fresh campaign built around a new composition Larry had crafted expressly to launch her career on a national scale, the song “Go Now.” Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller oversaw the session, which first surfaced on their Tiger label before migrating to the newly established Blue Cat imprint, the rhythm-and-blues subsidiary of Red Bird. The disc achieved modest sales and also reached British shops, yet its commercial prospects were eclipsed by another recording. A band from Birmingham, the Moody Blues, delivered its own rendition propelled by Denny Laine’s anguished lead, Mike Pinder’s cascading piano figures, and rich vocal harmonies; arriving amid the British beat-group surge and the ensuing American invasion, the performance proved difficult to resist. Consequently the Moody Blues secured their initial international breakthrough while most listeners lost sight of Bessie Banks. In the years that followed she placed singles with Verve Records and Volt Records, remaining active on disc as late as 1976 with “Baby You Sure Know How to Get to Me.” She later shared a coupling of “Go Now” with Linda Jones and cultivated an English audience through the single “The Best Is Yet to Come.” Larry Banks died in the early 1990s, yet Bessie, still based in New York, continued to perform on occasion through the close of the decade.
Singles