Fast Hit

The play on TV's Studio One was about a disk jockey involved in a murder. As he played peekaboo with a psychopathic killer and tangled with the police, turntables all over the place kept spinning a record called Let Me Go, Lover--the murderer's favorite song, of course. On the record, an unknown singer named Joan Weber sang a maudlin waltz in a husky, quivering voice:

Oh, let me go, let me go, let me go,

lover,

Let me be, set me free from your spell. You made me weep, cut me deep,

can't sleep, lover, I was cursed from the first day I fell.

Perhaps because snatches of the record were played six times during the show, perhaps entranced by so much masochism, or perhaps simply befuddled by the impact of so many inner rhymes--but for one reason or another--the great public was hooked. It quickly bought up the 20,000 copies then in the stores, got on the phone to find more. That was a fortnight ago, and the demand soon became frantic. Columbia Records' factories went on round-the-clock shifts to fill orders for more than 500,000 copies. Other labels rushed into the groove with versions of the song by Patti Page (Mercury), Sunny Gale (Victor), Teresa Brewer (Coral) and Peggy Lee (Decca), but it looked as if Newcomer Weber could hold her lead with the hottest new hit since Stan Freberg's 1953 St. George and the Dragonet. Only a few months ago, 18-year-old Songstress Weber was happily singing weekend dates with her husband's dance band in and around her home town of

Paulsboro, N.J. (pop. 7,842). Then she got a chance to audition for a New York manager. Next thing she knew, she was facing a Columbia microphone and taking directions from Hitmaker Mitch Miller. Last week she was back home, concentrating on a more personal matter: the birth of a daughter. A Columbia pressagent, boggling over a property that could produce a hit and a junior miss practically simultaneously, notified the press by telegram. BELIEVE NO OTHER RECORD COMPANY, it read, CAN MAKE THIS CLAIM.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.