Clyde Otis, The Diamonds' "The Stroll," and the mysterious Nancy Lee (1957)

What if you wrote a #1 hit all by yourself but a music industry bigwig put his teen daughter's name on the song as your co-writer? And then she was featured in all the publicity for the song instead of you? That's exactly what happened to Clyde Otis in 1957 with "The Stroll." 

Song publishing was a big source of revenue in the music industry in the 1950s, so it inevitably became a bargaining chip for people in positions of power. Songwriters were often asked to give up a portion of their royalties and share the credit for their work in exchange for getting their song published, and practically no songwriter was immune to being exploited in this way. Both struggling and established songwriters fell prey to these arrangements, and one particularly egregious example involved Otis and "The Stroll."

Although Otis wrote the song, which was later recorded by the Canadian vocal group The Diamonds, the story actually begins with The Diamonds. 

Dick Clark, the host of TV's American Bandstand, tipped off The Diamonds to the fact that teenagers were doing a dance called “The Stroll” to “C.C. Rider,” sung by turban-wearing R&B shouter Chuck Willis. An opportunity existed, Clark said, for someone to create a song specifically for the dance, which was a laid-back line dance that Billboard described as a "rock and roll version of the minuet."

The Diamonds thought this was a great idea and asked songwriter Clyde Otis to write such a song. Otis had written his first Top 20 hit in 1956 for Nat King Cole ("That's All There Is to That") and then wrote a bunch more hits for Brook Benton in addition to becoming one of the first African-American A&R men at a major label, in this case Mercury Records, which was also The Diamonds' label.

By any measure, Otis knocked it out of the park with "The Stroll." It's a memorable song with a hypnotic rhythm that perfectly accompanies the dance it was designed for. Even though The Diamonds were Canadian and a little square, the record ended up having great crossover appeal for rock, pop, and R&B listeners. And the saxophone part was not just icing on the cake—it transformed a gentle stroll into something that sounded raunchy and dangerous.

The song seemed like an inevitable hit, and The Diamonds, Mercury Records, and the song's publishing company were all delighted. But in an odd twist, Clyde Otis—the guy who actually wrote the song—didn't receive as much glory (or money) for it as he should have, because he ended up sharing the composing credit with teenager Nancy Lee as part of a promotional scheme that was probably completely unnecessary.

Nancy Lee was the daughter of Jack Lee, an executive at Meridian Music, the company that published Otis's new song, and someone—possibly Jack Lee himself—had an out-of-the-box marketing idea: What if they claimed that his teen daughter had co-written the song? Wouldn't that be a great hook for radio and magazine stories? Music reporters and disk jockeys would be clamoring to learn more about this delightful teen upstart! And, of course, the record would sell well as a result.

You can look at this promotional campaign in a few different ways. Nancy's sudden appearance as the co-writer of "The Stroll" was either a) a fraudulent attempt to create interest in the song by claiming that it was written by a high schooler when it wasn't, b) a crass attempt to attach an executive's kid to a sure-fire hit so she could enjoy 15 minutes of fame, or c) an offensive attempt to whitewash the involvement of a black songwriter in a song that was recorded by a white vocal group. Elements of all these might have come into play.

Nancy Lee's alleged involvement in writing the song fueled the marketing campaign, and she appeared in a number of promotional photos with The Diamonds. Some of these photos were used for the sheet music of "The Stroll," and others accompanied magazine articles that profiled the teen.

What did Clyde Otis think about this arrangement with Nancy Lee? I don't know, but I doubt that he, as the sole songwriter, was overjoyed at being omitted from photos that supposedly depicted the writer of "The Stroll." A 1958 issue of Radio Mirror went so far as to refer to the song as Nancy's composition without even mentioning Otis. It's hard to imagine that all this exclusion was unrelated to Otis's skin color. 

In DISCoveries magazine in 2004, Andy Merey asked The Diamonds' Dave Somerville about Nancy Lee:

Who was Nancy Lee?: Curiously, on the original "Stroll" 45, Clyde Otis shares songwriter credits with the mysterious Nancy Lee. Upon examining the original legal songwriter document for "The Stroll", signed on November 17, 1957 by Meridian Music Corporation and the other parties involved, it reveals that Nancy Lee was seventeen at the time, too young to sign the contract on her own, so her mother co-signed as legal guardian.

 

It seems strange and unlikely that an established songwriter of the stature of Clyde Otis would team up with an underage, seventeen-year old schoolgirl in the big city of New York and collaborate with her in composing "The Stroll". I asked David Somerville about Nancy Lee and how did she come about co-writing "The Stroll". He said, "You wanna know something? She didn't write a damn thing. The song belonged to Clyde Otis. She was the daughter of one of the executives at the publishing company."

 

The songwriter share was divided up as follows: 66 2/3% for Clyde Otis who solely wrote the song, and 33 1/3% for Nancy Lee, er, Meridian Music Corporation. But such shenanigans shouldn't really come as a surprise, for they ran rampant within record companies and music publishing firms during the 1950s.

 

In the case of Nancy Lee, the misfeasance was unabashedly blatant. The sheet music for "The Stroll" featured a photo of Nancy Lee, identified as co-writer, flanked by The Diamonds in Stroll position. The British version featured a similar picture but with Nancy Lee in Stroll action as she is being observed by The Diamonds. But this was an imaginative and cute idea just the same. Most sheet music at the time simply featured a picture of the song artists; seldom were there any action shots.

So, adding injury to insult, Otis was not only excluded from the song's promotional campaign but also had to give up a third of the song's publishing royalties in order to maintain the publisher's ruse that Nancy Lee co-wrote the song. Yet Nancy couldn't even receive the money herself, because she was a minor, so a third of Otis's royalties went to Nancy's mom.

Here's a philosophical question: In exchange for giving up a third of his royalties and some name recognition, did Clyde Otis get any bang for his buck out of this Nancy Lee stunt? 

I don't think so. The song was probably on track to succeed no matter what, given the A-list artists and major label behind it and the endorsement of Dick Clark, who played a big role as a hit maker by featuring up-and-coming records and artists on his show. Whether or not the Nancy Lee marketing campaign made a difference, "The Stroll" became a smash hit on the pop and R&B charts (#1 in Cash Box!), and teens across the nation lined up to do the Stroll to this and other records in a similar vein, such as The Revels “Midnight Stroll” and Chuck Willis’s “Betty And Dupree.” 

Clyde Otis himself further capitalized on the craze by recording an EP of pop standards “in Stroll tempo” in 1958 (although his name was hard to find on the record). And Willis, for his part in all of it, became known as the King of the Stroll. Nancy Lee does not appear to have continued her music career beyond appearing in some photo shoots with The Diamonds.