Ben E. King would have been 88 on Monday. He was born Benjamin Earl Nelson on September 28, 1938, in Henderson, North Carolina, and he died on April 30, 2015, at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey at 76, following a brief illness, according to Wikipedia. In between, he sang one of the most performed songs of the 20th century, and he did it in a voice that never seemed to strain.
King’s career began almost by accident. He joined a Harlem doo-wop group called the Five Crowns in 1958, and that same year the Drifters’ manager, George Treadwell, fired his entire lineup and hired the Five Crowns to carry the name. King sang lead on “There Goes My Baby” in 1959 and “Save the Last Dance for Me” in 1960, then left in May 1960 to go solo after recording only 13 songs with the group. “Spanish Harlem” came in 1961, and later that year came “Stand by Me,” which he wrote with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. It reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one on the R&B chart.
The song refused to fade. In 1986, Rob Reiner’s film ‘Stand by Me’ put it back on the radio, and it climbed to number nine, according to Wikipedia’s entry on the song, with a new video that paired King alongside River Phoenix and Wil Wheaton. In 1999, BMI named it the fourth most-performed song of the century, with roughly seven million performances. The Library of Congress added King’s original recording to the National Recording Registry in 2015, the year he died. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Drifters in 1988 and into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2012. On Monday, somewhere, a wedding band will play the opening bass line, and the room will know every word.