Bruce Channel

Bruce Channel scored a lone chart-topping success in 1962 with the enduring single "Hey Baby," a track that counts among many releases confirming rock's continued growth through fresh and appealing directions at a time when the style was frequently dismissed as played out. From the opening bars of plainspoken harmonica supplied by Delbert McClinton, the mid-tempo shuffle pulled rock, blues, country, and Cajun rhythms into an easy whole, buoyed by Channel's unhurried, drawling delivery and a hook that lodged immediately. The performance's natural ease proved impossible to duplicate, and Channel never returned to the Top 40 despite repeated tries.

The Texas singer had written "Hey Baby" around 1959 with Margaret Cobb and had already been playing the song in clubs for roughly two years before cutting it during a run of demos for Fort Worth producer Major Bill Smith. Issued first on Smith's local label, it was licensed for wider release by Smash. Channel continued to supply most of his own songs, sometimes again with Cobb, on a string of agreeable follow-ups whose riffs stayed too close to the original hit.

McClinton contributed his recognizable harmonica lines to several of those later recordings and added a footnote to rock history in 1962 while touring Britain with Channel's band. On one bill they were supported by a still-unknown Liverpool group, the Beatles, who had not yet made their first record. John Lennon took note of McClinton's technique and applied what he learned to the Beatles' debut single, "Love Me Do," with the same influence audible on numerous early Beatles harmonica parts from 1962 and 1963.

Channel returned to the British Top 20 in 1968 with "Keep On," a song written by Wayne Carson Thompson, best known for the Box Tops' "The Letter." No comparable hits followed on either side of the Atlantic, and by the late '70s he had settled in Nashville as a songwriter.