Dale & Grace

Dale & Grace launched their brief yet notable run when "I'm Leaving It Up to You" climbed to the pinnacle of the U.S. charts in fall 1963. That single, a rendering of an earlier Don & Dewey number, marked the duo's debut release on Louisiana's Montel label and is sometimes regarded as the first swamp pop recording to reach the top position on American charts. The ballad also fared respectably across the Atlantic yet failed to crack the U.K. Top 40. Their follow-up, "Stop and Think It Over," delivered another success by climbing into the U.S. Top Ten later the same year. While the pair's first album reached the U.S. Top 100, their subsequent single "The Loneliest Night" fell short of the commercial heights attained by either of those earlier releases or the LP itself.

Dale Houston, a Mississippi native raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, absorbed the region's swamp pop and Cajun influences during his formative years. Grace Broussard came from Prairieville, Louisiana, and traced her roots to Cajun heritage; her brother Van Broussard helped pioneer swamp pop through stints in a duo with his sister, as part of Van & Titus, as a solo performer, and later at the helm of the Bayou Boogie Band. Each had pursued separate careers before teaming up as Dale & Grace in the early 1960s. Prior to their initial split in 1964, they issued further sides on Hanna-Barbera and Guyden. Roughly three decades afterward they reunited briefly. After the second parting, Houston issued the solo album A Lot of Good Miles Left in Me on the local Lanor label. In 1974 Donny & Marie Osmond revived Dale & Grace's inaugural hit "I'm Leaving It Up to You," granting Don & Dewey's composition a third cycle and sending it into the Top Ten on both sides of the Atlantic.