From: Dik de Heer  
Date: Mon Dec 29, 2003 7:33am
Subject: Born To Be With You : Virgil Johnson
 
VIRGIL JOHNSON (THE VELVETS)

Born 29 December 1935, Cameron, Texas

Virgil Johnson was the lead singer of the Velvets, a vocal quintet
from Odessa, West Texas. They are best remembered for their
1961 hit "Tonight (Could Be The Night)", which peaked at # 26 on
the Billboard pop charts. On that song the Velvets can be heard
chanting "doo-wop" behind lead singer Johnson, one of the first
uses of the phrase in a song. Still, the Velvets were not really a
doo-wop group. Their sound was highly polished and the backing
usually included strings.

Virgil Johnson was a teacher at Blackshear Junior High School in
Odessa, where he taught English to eighth grade pupils. It was at
this school that he heard two students, Mark Prince and Clarence
Rigby, singing as a duo. He recruited two more students, adding
Robert Thursby's first tenor and William Solomon's baritone to 
Rigsby's tenor and Mark Prince's bass. The quintet began to
perform at school sock-hops and campus functions, with Johnson
as lead singer. In 1960 they impressed Roy Orbison, who heard
them whilst visiting Odessa, and recommended the group to Fred
Foster, the owner of Monument Records and the producer of Roy's
big hit at that time, "Only the Lonely". Foster signed the group and
came up with the name The Velvets. In fact, he decided it should be
the Velvets featuring Virgil Johnson because there was another group
called the Velvets, years before. They had a song out called "I" on
Bobby Robinson's Red Robin label.

The group's first session was held in late 1960, at Nashville's RCA
studios and produced four tunes, which would be issued on their
first two singles: "That Lucky Old Sun"/"Time And Again" and
"Tonight (Could Be The Night)"/"Spring Fever". The two B-sides
were from the pen of Roy Orbison, while "Tonight" was written by
Virgil Johnson. The accompaniment came from some of Nashville's
finest session players, including Boots Randolph and Floyd Cramer.
After the success of "Tonight", the group's next release was "Lana"/
"Laugh", both written by Roy Orbison and Joe Melson. "We should 
never have put those two songs out together", says Johnson. "Part of
the country was playing one side and another part of the country was
playing the other side". "Laugh" stalled at # 90, but "Lana" (soon also
recorded by Orbison himself) was # 1 in Japan. Monument continued
putting out Velvets' singles, nine in all, until 1966. Some of them were
quite good, but there were no further chart entries and the group called 
it a day and went back to a Texas they had never really left.
Johnson kept on teaching, and in 1993, he retired from his job as
principal of Lubbock's Dunbar-Struggs Junior High School, a post he 
had held for 25 years. In Lubbock he also was a deejay on Radio KSEL.
Clarence Rigsby died in a car crash in 1978.

Johnson is adamant on the reasons for the group's relatively short chart
life. "You got to realise, in the early sixties there were two music markets
in the US. You had a black market and you had a white market. We were
extremely popular with whites, but we were never extremely popular with
blacks. We were black and we didn't sound like it. People didn't know we
were a black group. We couldn't tour and that really hurt us."

CD: The Complete Velvets (Ace 625). Released in 1996. 30 Monument
tracks, 13 previously unissued. (The Velvets did not record for any other
labels.) Liner notes by Bill Millar, on which this bio is based.