Do you, like me, find it annoying when you go into a restaurant for a quiet meal and find out there is some tribute act coming on who think they can sing like Frank Sinatra, Freddie Mercury or even Amy Winehouse? Why do they bother? It’s quite rare that they actually sound like who they are supposed to be. At least when the contestants who appeared on Stars In Their Eyes, they often did have more than a passing resemblance to their idol. Elvis Presley is arguably the most imitated celebrity, but it’s been going on for years. Many have made an entire career out of ‘being’ the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, so much so that two of them actually made the UK chart in the 1960s. One was Terry Stafford who charted with Suspicion 12 years before Elvis even though Elvis recorded it first and the other was Ral Donner who made number 25 in 1961 with You Don’t Know What You’ve Got (Until You Lose It). Noodlehendon asked of the latter, “What ever happened to him?” Well, let’s find out.
The first thing to say is that he hasn’t done anything recently and that’s because he died in April 1984 and the young age of 41. He was born Ralph Stuart Emanuel Donner on 10 February 1943 in Chicago, Illinois. Ral was a talent in his own right who happened to sound like a post-rock ‘n’ roll Elvis, so he capitalised on it. He had a great start because he had three older siblings and both his parents loved music and encouraged their children to listen if not necessarily follow it. At the age of 13, a young Ralph fell in love with the new rock ‘n’ roll sound that began sweeping America and particularly Elvis’ debut hit, Heartbreak Hotel in 1956.
At school, Ral formed a band called The Rockin’ Five, began playing at the high school hop and then decided to record a cover of a Little Richard track called Miss Ann. They even backed Sammy Davis Jnr on a local television show in Chicago. He set off on a journey to Memphis with the hope of getting an audition with Sam Phillips’ at Sun records, but sadly, didn’t, but the journey wasn’t wasted because he met a couple of songwriters called Fred Burch and Gerald Nelson who, together, had written some songs for a couple of Elvis’ films as well as his UK number 38 hit The Love Machine. Burch, in addition, had written songs for Perry Como, Brenda Lee, and Patsy Cline. The pair were impressed with Ral and offered to produce for him and then wrote his first hit That’s Alright With Me and its B-side Tell Me Why which was only released in America.
In 1960, Donner travelled to Chicago to record some demo tracks. He cut eight in total, four of them were Elvis songs and it included The Girl of My Best Friend which was on Elvis’ album Elvis Is Back. In an interview with Goldmine magazine in 1979, Ral explain what happened next, “My brother-in-law, who was like my manager, got a line on a studio in Florida with a guy who had something to do with Stay by Maurice Williams in some capacity. I played for him our demonstration copies of Beachcomber, the tune Conway Twitty did, and The Girl Of My Best Friend which we all did as The Gents in Chicago. The guy flipped over The Girl Of My Best Friend and suggested we recut it, since it was number one by Elvis in England, and RCA hadn’t released it over here. I told him, ‘You can’t do an Elvis tune, nobody else has done it,’ but he talked us into it. The guy who helped produce the sides, Jan Hutchins, took the masters to New York and tried to get them leased. Columbia said even if the tunes didn’t make it they would be interested in me. As it turned out, Jan landed them with Gone Records, owned by George Goldner. The next thing I know is we’re on the charts with The Girl Of My Best Friend.
His second hit was You Don’t Know What You’ve Got (Until You Lose It) which was written by Paul Hampton and Dorian Burton originally for the girl group, The Angels who are best remembered for the hit My Boyfriend’s Back. Donner said, “That tune was also taken as a mistake, I think it was submitted for a girl group, the Angels, but as we were going through demos it popped up. It said something like ‘meant for girl group’. We all started laughing, but we liked the tune. Artie put it out anyway and it went to No. 4 in the nation.”
Donner had befriended another American singer, Linda Scott, who is best remembered for the hit I’ve Told Every Little Star, he said, “Linda Scott and I were pretty close, we had what you would call afternoon dates. Take in mind we were very young and chaperones were always around. We spent as much time as we could, we would have to send the chaperones off to a movie or something to be able to go anywhere or be by ourselves. But time as it was, with traveling and such, we really didn’t call it going steady. As Paul Anka said…I guess it was only ‘Puppy Love’.”
In 1963, he was gone from Gone over royalty disputes and signed with Frank Sinatra’s Reprise label but after four singles and no success he left there too. He continued to record and released several singles on various label right through until 1980, but in the States, seven was his sum total of hits which is six more than he had in the UK. He remained an Elvis fan throughout his short life and in 1981, he was invited to narrate the documentary, This Is Elvis.
Did Ral ever get to meet his idol? “My brother-in-law and my promotion man were on Sunset Strip at a restaurant,” he explained in Goldmine, “There were some girls in the booth next to us, I guess they overheard us talking about music. They asked me who I was, and they remembered my name from the contest, they said they were friends of Elvis. I really didn’t believe them. They said they would call Joe Esposito and set it up for us to meet Elvis, so I just played along with them. They came back from the phone and said, ‘It’s all set, Elvis wants to meet you’. At this point I didn’t know what they were leading up to, I didn’t know whether they were gonna roll us or what. So it was Ernie Farrell and myself, my brother-in-law got cold feet so he didn’t go. They took us up to Bellaire and we were greeted by Joe, and he told us Elvis would be down in a few minutes. We waited about 10 minutes and he came down the stairs with Connie Stevens at his side, she was his date for the night. I couldn’t believe he was walking towards me, he looked great, we introduced ourselves and started talking about music. We got onto the conversation of The Girl Of My Best Friend and said when he first heard it, he was in the back of his Caddy when it came on the radio, he said he jumped up, ‘You guys up there, shut up, turn the radio up full blast’. He said he knew it wasn’t his, but he thought the rendition was great and sincere, we mostly talked about music the rest of the night. ”
Ral Donner died of lung cancer on 6th April 1984, in Chicago.