Maurice Williams (April 26, 1938 - August 6, 2024) was one of the most extraordinarily durable figures in the history of classic R&B and rock & roll, despite the fact that, as a performer, he only ever racked up one major national hit on the pop charts. That song, "Stay," became one of the classic singles in the history of rock.
Maurice Williams was born in Lancaster, South Carolina and showed himself musically inclined from a very early age -- he started learning the piano from his older sister in the late '40s, practicing daily so that by the time he was ten years old he was having friends from elementary school over for informal jam sessions at his house. Williams had sung in church, but his interest lay more in popular music, and in 1953, he and his friends were ready to form a group that they called the Royal Charms.
 |
| The Gladiolas |
In addition to Williams and Gainey, the Royal Charms were made up of Willie Jones (baritone), William Massey (tenor, baritone, trumpet), and Norman Wade (bass). In the winter of 1956, while still in high school, Williams and his band traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, to record for the Excello label. At the time they were going by the name the Royal Charms, but the founder of Excello Records, Ernie Young, convinced them to change their name to the Gladiolas (at the time, there were at least two other bands using the same name). The song "Little Darlin'" was a No. 11 hit on the Billboard R&B chart in 1957, but only reached number 41 on Billboard's Top 100. However, when it was covered by the Canadian group the Diamonds, it moved up to No. 2.
Williams finished high school and while on the road with the band, their station wagon broke down in Bluefield, West Virginia. The band came across a British-built Ford car known as the Zodiac and changed their name based on this. Shortly thereafter, Henry Gaston replaced Earl Gainey. In the spring of 1959, Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs performed at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina. Around that time, the group split and reformed. The members were Williams, Gaston, Wiley Bennett, and Charles Thomas. Later, Little Willie Morrow and Albert Hill were added.
One month later, in the early summer of 1959, the band recorded in a Quonset Hut on Shakespeare Road in Columbia. The recording engineer, Homer Fesperman, recorded several tracks that the band had hoped would include a hit. One of the last tracks that they recorded that day was "Stay", a song that Williams had written in 1953. Williams sang lead and Henry Gaston sang the counter-verse falsetto. After taking the demo of "Stay" to Al Silver at Herald Records in New York City, the song was pressed and released in early 1960.
Throughout the '70s and '80s, Williams led various incarnations of the Zodiacs on oldies tours, primarily on the beach music circuit on the U.S. East Coast. He kept up a schedule of 200 shows a year from his base in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he ran his own record label and played the piano in the New Emanuel Church of Christ. In the wake of Dirty Dancing, which yielded sales of another eight million copies of "Stay," he re-emerged as a recording artist on the Ripete label, based in Columbia, South Carolina, which specializes in beach music. Ripete has since released the impossible-to-find 1965 live album on CD, and an excellent career anthology of Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs.
Williams was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2010. He also made several performances for the PBS "Doo Wop 50" show series in 2001. He continued to record, tour, and release music until his death on August 6, 2024, at the age of 86. Other band members including Henry Gaston died in Charlotte, North Carolina, on August 24, 2015, at the age of 79 and Earl Gainey died on February 4, 2025, at the age of 87.
(Edited from Wikipedia, AllMusic & The Guardian)
