Lancaster's Maurice Williams is still singing about the girl who got away 50 years later
The clock struck 10 p.m. in the living room of the little house on Pleasant Hill Street.
Across the street sat First Washington Baptist Church, where whippet-thin 15-year-old Maurice Williams learned the music that wanted to burst forth from his soul.
In that living room, on that hot summer night in 1955, the girl with the skirt and the braids and the smile that would rock the world five years later told Maurice she had to go home.
Handsome Maurice begged. Handsome Maurice pleaded.
"I was in love with that girl," Maurice recalls. "Head over heels."
His mind whirled, and the words spun on that Saturday night so hot. It would take just 1 minute and 37 seconds to say them all.
Stay, ahhh
Just a little bit longer
Please, please, please, please, please
Tell me that you're going to
Now your daddy don't mind
And your mommy don't mind
If we have another dance, yeah
Just one more time
Oh, won't you stay
Just a little bit longer
Please let me hear you say
That you will
Won't you place your
Sweet lips to mine
Won't you say you love me
All the time
Oh yeah, just a little bit longer
Please, please, please, please, please
Tell me you're going to
Come on, come on, come on, stay
Come on, come on, come on, stay, oh la de da
Come on, come on, come on, stay, my, my, my, my
Come on, come on, come on, stay
But the girl, also 15 at the time, said no.
Her daddy had said 10 o'clock, and her mother said so, too. She told Maurice 10 o'clock curfew meant10 and not a minute later in "New Town," Lancaster's black neighborhood. Her brother waited outside in the car, an old Ford.
She vanished, without a kiss for Maurice, down the steps. She got into that Ford, and she was gone.
But the words stayed.
Maurice, a star student in both books and music, furiously wrote down the next morning the words he had said and crooned to that beautiful girl - quickly, before he forgot them.
"Like a flood" the words came, Maurice said.
He couldn't wait to tell Earl Gainey, his buddy from around the block over on Ferguson Street.
And he couldn't wait to tell Willie Jones, William Massey, Norman Wade, and Mac Badskins, - the other guys in their gospel group, the Junior Harmonizers.
On that tattered sheet of paper, in Lancaster in 1955, "Stay" was conceived.
But the song that would forever change music - and the life of young Maurice Williams from New Town in Lancaster - almost didn't happen.
"I thought I had nothing," Williams recalls. "I crumpled up the paper and threw it in the trash can."
Doo-wop in New Town
Maurice Williams was a brilliant kid who could have done anything, but wanted to do nothing but music.
He could have studied music at all-black Allen University in Columba after finishing Barr Street High School for black students in Lancaster - but the road beckoned.
"All I wanted to do was sing," said Williams.
By 1957, after graduating from Barr Street, the Junior Harmonizers had become the Royal Charms, then the Gladiolas. Their style was doo-wop, the songs sung by black groups and loved by white audiences that epitomized the late 1950s.
Williams wrote a song about that same girl who would not stay that night in 1955, saying she was the only one. He called it "Little Darlin.'" The group had to get to Nashville to record the song.
"We were broke," Williams said.
Donations poured in from Lancaster's black community as word spread that this group had a chance to make the big time. Poured in, in those days, meant a dollar at a time, a nickel here, a dime there.
"We had $37 and some change, and off we went," said Gainey.
The group recorded "Little Darlin,'" and it became a hit on the rhythm and blues charts in 1957, reaching No. 11.
Later that year, it would be covered by the Diamonds, a white group from Canada, and rise to No. 2 on the charts. The song was covered by countless others later.
Back home - in still-segregated Lancaster and other places around the Carolinas - Williams and the Gladiolas were gaining even more notice. Their audiences for road shows, on the college circuit, were all-white.
They were the first black group to get on WLCN radio in Lancaster.
"People just loved us, and back home, we were heroes," said Williams.
Heroes, dance sensations at white clubs and white colleges as they toured - and yet they couldn't get a hamburger at a lunch counter in Lancaster or Rock Hill or Charlotte after a gig.
On one of those long tours on the road, at a stop in Bluefield, W.V., the Gladiolas saw a German car called a Zodiac.
Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs were born.
New name, new members
By 1959, Gainey had been drafted into the Army, and the others from Lancaster left the group.
Williams had to re-form the group with men from other places around the Carolinas after he moved to Charlotte to play music. Williams sought out a singer in those days who was thrilling audiences around Charlotte with his high reach - Henry "Shane" Gaston.
The Zodiacs played the college circuit, including a gig at the University of South Carolina. Afterward, they went to a recording studio in Columbia to work on a single.
On the supposed "A" side of the 45-rpm vinyl disc was a song called "Do You Believe." The group practiced the song for hours until it was just right. But they still needed a song for the "B" side.
In his mind, Maurice went back to 1955, to that hot night and the beautiful girl - and how her 9-year-old sister had heard him play it on the piano, and loved it.
"If a little girl loves it," Williams told other Zodiacs, "teens and young people will love it and buy records."
The Zodiacs, for the first time, played "Stay."
"We recorded it, if I recall, on the first try," Gaston remembered. "Wasn't but about two minutes."
Actually, one minute and 37 seconds.
Williams closed his eyes and remembered the girl. He sang lead vocals - " Ahhh, just a little bit longer..." - through the second stanza about Daddy and Mommy not minding.
Then from somewhere - a place mere mortals cannot reach - Shane Gaston roared in with the high-pitched falsetto that remains one of the most copied, but never duplicated, lyrics in history.
"Oh, won't you stay
Just a little bit longer
Please let me hear you say
That you will."
The rest of the song came in, an earthquake, with the Zodiac doo-woppers in the background crooning and Williams leading the way and at the end, Gaston somehow pushing those falsetto pipes to sing so high - " c'mon c'mon and stay" over and over, as the song ends.
America's hair stood on end.
'Biggest in the country'
The song hit the charts like a rocket, shot up the charts. More and more 45s were pressed and sold, pressed and sold.
"Everywhere we went on tour, people were playing it," said Gaston. "Washington, Detroit, New York."
The song sold a half-million copies and more - a gold record.
Finally, on Nov. 21, 1960 - 50 years ago today - "Stay" reached No. 1 on the Billboard magazine pop charts.
"My manager called me and said, 'We have the No. 1 record in the country!'" Williams recalls. "Us. The Zodiacs. Started in Lancaster, little Lancaster. And we were the biggest in the country."
"Stay" was, and remains, the shortest No. 1 record in history.
On an Army base in Kentucky, the song was played over and over by GIs, white and black, but mainly white.
Earl Gainey heard it so many times and smiled. He said silently to himself because back then and even now at age 73, Gainey does not talk often of his part in this incredible history.
"We were No. 1," said Gainey. "It was like all of us had made it, whether I was in the Army or not."
A week later, some guy from Mississippi knocked "Stay" off its perch. A white kid who sang like the black guys he adored and tried to copy, a guy who some said would never amount to much, with a funny name.
Elvis Presley, with a song called, "Are You Lonesome Tonight."
The next 50 years
Back home in South Carolina, radio stations played the song, and the white young people packed clubs to hear the Zodiacs - but the band received little fanfare.
There was no big story in the newspapers, which didn't write a lot of good things about blacks back then.
"Sometimes, your home area is the last one to notice you," said Gaston. "Finally, TV wanted us on their shows."
The Zodiacs toured for the next decade, becoming beach music staples for a generation of white Southerners - even as music played by blacks and loved by whites showed the ridiculousness of segregation.
The Zodiacs had several other recordings and popular songs - but never another No. 1 hit.
By 1970, Gaston says, he had tired of the road and settled down in Charlotte to raise a family. He worked in the transportation arm of the Charlotte Observer's trucking company until retiring in 1983.
He is now 75 and does not get out much.
He rarely sings, he says, "but I still have the pipes."
Gainey came home to Lancaster after the Army and has sung gospel music ever since.
"Stay" was covered by such sensations as The Hollies and The Four Seasons. Jackson Browne had a huge hit with "Stay" in 1977 - stretching it out to 3 1/2 minutes.
Then, in 1987, the Zodiacs' version of "Stay" was featured on the soundtrack of "Dirty Dancing," the mega-hit movie about 1960s whites at a resort.
All over again, "Stay" became a pop culture phenomenon.
"Stay" - the song written by a love-sick 15-year-old black kid in rural Lancaster - had reached a new generation of white kids. In its "Dirty Dancing" incarnation alone, it has sold more than 8 million copies worldwide.
"Stay" made Maurice Williams a star by age 20.
At age 70, he still is.
So, who was she?
Williams has stayed with the Zodiacs his whole life. He has never stopped performing - singing all over the world with the latest incarnation of the band.
He has played giant arenas and for royalty and has been honored by places large and small.
And yet, every year just before Christmas, he plays for free at Rock Hill's White Oak Manor nursing home.
Williams still lives in Charlotte, as does Gaston. The guys talk almost every week, get together often.
At shows, Williams is always asked to sing "Stay." The crowds beg. He never says no.
"It is my signature song," he said. "Oh man, I still love it."
Williams keeps a "music room" in his house, its walls covered with awards. No award means more than a plaque with the "Stay" Gold record on it, that shows it was No. 1 on Nov. 21, 1960.
And that girl, the "Little Darlin'" Maurice Williams begged to "Stay" in 1955?
Maurice Williams has never told anyone who she was.
Today, he still won't.
"She lives in Augusta, Georgia," he says with a laugh. "She's a grandmother many times over, and some things are better that nobody knows but me and her."
The girl did not "Stay," but the song did.
Andrew Dys 803-329-4065 adys@heraldonline.com
This story was originally published November 21, 2010 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Lancaster's Maurice Williams is still singing about the girl who got away 50 years later."