down in bermuda....by the denning sisters

DOWN IN BERMUDA....BY THE DENNING SISTERS MOVIE
DOWN IN BERMUDA....BY THE DENNING SISTERS SERIES

Mark Dinning wasn’t the only family member to obtain musical fame. “All of a sudden, one day it hit me: ‘Hey, that guy on this album is that guy that came here that day and played.” “With dad being an RCA dealer, we always had an RCA stereo around with lots of records,” Clark said. We didn’t know he was the guy who sang ‘Teen Angel.’ He was just a guy who came to visit us and was just fun to be around.”Ī year or two later, Clark found one of Dinning’s albums. At that time, five or six years old is how old I was, and it didn’t matter to him if I was just a little snot-nosed kid. “He was just my best buddy for that afternoon. “He could throw it way up in the air,” Clark said. Clark had a parachute leftover from his Fourth of July fireworks, and he and Mark spent the afternoon tossing it around. Clark recalled spending an afternoon playing with Mark. She spent summers at the Clark family’s home, and when her stays were over, her family came to visit and take her home. Clark’s family had a close friendship with Dinning’s mother, Bertha. Few may remember Dinning from his time in Oklahoma, but Amorita resident Verne Clark is one.Ĭlark, who grew up in the small Alfalfa County town about 23 miles west of Manchester, met Dinning as a child in the early 1960s. He had recently performed a show, and his wife believed he suffered a heart attack, the AP reported. She played the song for her brother Mark at a family dinner, and he recorded it that night.” Dinning continued to record, but he never again found the success he did with “Teen Angel.” Complicating matters, his alcohol addiction kept him from performances and contributed to his fading from public view, sources say.ĭinning died in 1986 at the age of 52 at his home in Jefferson, Missouri. ‘Being a songwriter, I said, ‘That’s a title,’’ Dinning said in The Billboard Book of No. “The piece suggested that good teenagers should be called teen angels. “ Dinning was inspired to write the song – which was recorded by her brother Mark – after reading a magazine article about juvenile delinquents,” Rolling stone wrote in an obituary about Jean Dinning after her 2011 death.

DOWN IN BERMUDA....BY THE DENNING SISTERS MOVIE

It sold more than a million copies, and it was later featured in the “American Graffiti” movie soundtrack as well. banned the tune t that didn’t stop it from being a hit. According to The Daily Doo Wop musical history website, some radio stations in the U.S. The morbid nature of the song drew scorn. The song is performed from the boy’s perspective as he asks, almost prayerfully, “Teen angel, can you hear me?” The girl ran back to the car to retrieve the boy’s high school ring, and she was struck and killed by a train. The song tells the story of a young couple whose car stalled at a railroad crossing. 1 spot on the Billboard Top 100 for weeks, according to The Los Angeles Times. That song was “Teen Angel,” which held the No. He didn’t have much success until 1959, when a heartbreaking song his sister Eugenia “Jean” Dinning wrote put him at the top of the charts. In 1957, he signed a deal with record producer Wesley Rose under the stage name Mark Dinning.

“His sisters, however, encouraged him to use his talents and he later signed with MGM after three years in the Army.” “Dinning at first turned down a chance at a singing career, preferring to remain on the farm,” the Associated Press reported after his death in 1986.

He and his family moved to Nashville, Tennessee, the home of country music, sometime during his youth. Unclear is how long Dinning, the youngest of nine children, lived in Oklahoma. Mark Dinning was born in Manchester, about 57 miles northwest of Blackwell, on August 17, 1933. The Dinning family got its start in northern Oklahoma and made its mark on the entertainment world. But people who danced the night away in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s saw those names on the covers of popular musical albums and the silver screen. To people under the age of 60 or so, those names may not ring a bell.

DOWN IN BERMUDA....BY THE DENNING SISTERS SERIES

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in The Journal-Tribune’s series “Famous and Forgotten: The Untold Stories of Entertainers from Northern Oklahoma.” The series highlights entertainers of the past who had connections to the region.įrom the same family in a tiny Grant County town came a one-hit wonder pop singer and a competitive vocal trio: Mark Dinning and the Dinning Sisters.

Down in bermuda....by the denning sisters