Maurice Williams, doo-wop singer with the Zodiacs whose No 1 hit Stay was in Dirty Dancing – obituary
Maurice Williams, who has died aged 86, was a singer and songwriter who founded Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, leading lights in doo-wop; in 1960 they went to No 1 in the US with Stay, which went on to be covered by the likes of the Hollies, Jackson Browne, the Four Seasons and Cyndi Lauper, as well as featuring in the film Dirty Dancing.
Williams said the song, the shortest-ever US chart-topper at 1 minute and 36 seconds, took him half an hour to write: “This young lady I was going with, she was over to my house, and this particular night, her brother was supposed to pick her up at 10,” he recalled. “So he came, and I said, ‘Well, you can stay a little longer.’ And she said, ‘No, I gotta go.’”
But he initially dismissed the song – until, he recalled, “I was over at my girlfriend’s house playing the tape of songs I had written when her little sister said: ‘Please do the song with the high voice in it.’ I knew she meant Stay. She was about 12 years old, and I said to myself, ‘She’s the age of record-buying,’ and the rest is history. I thank God for her.”
Maurice Williams was born on April 26 1938 in Lancaster, South Carolina, into a musical family; he sang in church and his sister gave him piano lessons.
He formed a gospel group – initially called the Junior Harmonizers, then as they became more interested in doo-wop and rock’n’roll, the Royal Charms – with his schoolmate Earl Gainey, alongside William Massey, Willie Jones and Norman Wade. They secured an audition in Nashville with a swamp blues label, Excello Records, who took them on and changed their name to the Gladiolas.
They had a hit in 1957 with Williams’s calypso-inflected song Little Darlin’, which reached No 11 on the Billboard R&B chart. Then when they were on tour their station wagon broke down in Bluefield, West Virginia, and as they were waiting for it to be repaired they saw a British-built Ford Zodiac, which inspired another change of name.
Williams formed a new line-up – Henry Gaston, Wiley Bennett and Charles Thomas, Little Willie Morrow and Albert Hill – and recorded some new demos in Columbia, South Carolina, at a studio housed in the equivalent of a Nissen hut. One of the last songs they put down was Stay, with its killer falsetto line, “Oh, won’t you stay, just a little bit longer?” sung by Gaston. When they took it to Herald Records in New York it went to No 1 – though it stayed on top for only a week, displaced by Elvis Presley’s Are You Lonesome Tonight?
Stay later gave the Hollies their first Top 10 entry, in 1963, while across the pond that year the Four Seasons took it into the US Top 20. Jackson Browne revived it in 1978, and the following year sang it with Bruce Springsteen at the No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York. In 1987 the song featured in the romantic drama, Dirty Dancing, starring Patrick Swayze as an eminently desirable dance teacher.
Meanwhile, a month after its release in 1957, Little Darlin’ had been covered – as was very much the way of things at that time – by a white band, the Diamonds, who took it to No 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Sixteen years later, their version was included in George Lucas’s paean to the rock’n’roll years, American Graffiti.
Across the decades, Maurice Williams continued to record and tour – as many as 200 dates a year – with various iterations of the Zodiacs, and was a long-standing member of the New Emmanuel Congregational United Church of Christ in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he sang in the choir and was a trustee.
Maurice Williams is survived by Emily, his wife of 63 years.
Maurice Williams, born April 26 1938, died August 5 2024
