Billy Bland

Billy Bland scored his solitary chart success in 1960 when “Let the Little Girl Dance” climbed to number seven, delivering a pop-R&B-early soul hybrid whose Latinate rhythm echoed the approach Jackie Wilson had used on “Lonely Teardrop.” Although several follow-up singles pursued comparable terrain, Bland—who must be distinguished from the unrelated Bobby Bland—proved a far more versatile singer, turning his hand to straight R&B, Bo Diddley-inflected rock & roll, urban blues, and the dance-craze rock that surfaced in the early 1960s. Between the mid-1950s and 1963 he cut numerous sides for Old Town; the breadth of styles, however, never translated into consistent quality. A reliable journeyman in any idiom, he never again located material with the pop appeal of “Let the Little Girl Dance,” even though he composed most of his own catalogue after that breakthrough.

Bland began performing soon after relocating to New York in the late 1940s. His earliest recordings were made in the mid-1950s for Imperial in New Orleans while he belonged to the Bees, whose version of Dave Bartholomew’s risqué “My Ding-a-Ling”—later a hit for Chuck Berry—appeared under the title “Toy Bell” and is now included on the anthology Crescent City Soul: The Sound of New Orleans 1947-1974. He launched his solo career in 1955, initiating a long association with the New York-based Old Town label. “Let the Little Girl Dance” arose almost inadvertently when Bland coached Titus Turner through the number during a session; Henry Glover captured the demonstration on tape without Bland’s knowledge, and the resulting track, featuring guitarist Mickey Baker, became the hit.

Attempts to modify the pop-R&B formula or to follow prevailing rock trends yielded no further commercial traction, and Bland’s final Old Town release appeared in 1963. By the late 1980s he was operating a soul-food restaurant in Harlem.