Well, that’s where you come back to unraveling those threads to see their ties to the era surrounding them. So where do they fit in exactly? How do we put them into the proper perspective when using traditional methods of evaluation… popularity, influence, impact… none of which jump out at you, at least compared to many of their peers at the time? Lastly, they tended to record ballads and downhearted songs and that’s often an approach that is less easily accessible to casual listeners. Meanwhile Allen Bunn’s interest in the blues and his country-blues guitar playing could, at times, give them a sound that was unlike any other group, and indeed one of their hits was a cover of a blues song, but as a result those records don’t always fit neatly into the broader image of rock vocal groups and may cause them to be passed over. Beginning as a gospel group and recording in that style under a variety of names last fall, they didn’t really retain an overly spiritual feel on their records once they were doing secular material, unlike say The Dominoes at this same time. The Larks are sort of the “lost” great vocal group of the very early 1950’s, largely obscure because a) they had few hits and none that remained widely known years later by casual fans, b) their individual and collective skills were more subtle than those who were able transcend a group’s fortunes in people’s memory, and c) they had a rather unusual output when it came to material. Whether they followed this thread further or pulled back and picked up a different one would help determine their standing as rock ‘n’ roll progressed.
This record is one of the final new developments in a particular thread started a few years earlier, slightly updated but already coming to the end of the line as newer threads were emerging. Music history is connected by these threads, thousands of them at any one point along the way, and unraveling them to see how they tie together is how you come to understand the reach and scope of countless artists and styles through the years. Artists are of their time, representative of what’s going on in the present, yet drawing from what came in the recent past, while some are indicative of what will transpire in the future.
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