The Three D’s

The Three D’s

Gather round everybody, For you’re about to hear, The show that’s gonna make you, smile from ear to ear, It’s Arnie Ginsburg, On The Night Train Show. He plays the old, the new, the swinging and the blue, he plays all the records, especially for you it’s Arnie Ginsburg, on the Night Train Show, so come on Arnie, let’s go, go, go….

If you lived in The Boston area from 1958 through the mid sixties and you listened to top 40 radio, you would hear The Three D’s perform this every night as it was Arnie Ginsburg’s theme song on WMEX for over ten years.

In the early fifties in high school together in Boston, Arty Doyle and Johnny Dalton both had sung in the choir at church. They decided to form a duo and while performing at a variety show, they met Dean Paley who sang and played guitar. They really hit it off and just started harmonizing together. A friend who was there listening said, “You should call yourselves The Three D’s as you all have D’s in your name,” and that’s how they came to be.

At that time in music history the airwaves were mostly dominated by male and female crooners such as Jerry Vale, Al Martino, Doris Day, Patti Page, etc. However if you searched the radio dial you could find that station with not much of a signal playing doo-wop. Doo-wop was kinda like the punk music of the time. This was the kind of music The Three D’s wanted to make.

Arnie introduced them to a New York record label called Paris Records and after one local release on Pilgrim Records, they signed a long term contract with Paris. Their first release was “Little Billy Boy” and it met with great regional and national success. The group performed on American Bandstand five times and toured extensively with such stars as Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Frankie Avalon, Fabian, Connie Francis and just about every other star at the time except Elvis Presley.

They released numerous records from 1956 through 1959, when they started their own record label Square Records. In 1959 they released a Halloween song they called “Graveyard Cha Cha” Note that this song was written and recorded three years before “Monster Mash” which many people since have compared it to. “Cha Cha” was NEVER played on the radio and no one ever noticed it until 2013 when someone put it up on YouTube and in the 7 years since, it has garnered over one million views!!!!

The group stopped performing and joined the private sector around 1962 as music totally changed with the influx and success of The Beatles and the British Invasion as it was called. Arty once told me he went to see a Rolling Stones show and walked out knowing the Three D’s had had their time.

(by Lennie Petze)
Published On: November 18, 2020