BILL DEAL & THE RHONDELS

Bill Deal & The Rhondels were a trumpet-heavy white band who specialized in R&B covers. They had three top forty hits, all in 1969.

Bill Deal was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, on July 8, 1944. His father, who owned a restaurant, played guitar while two of his brothers played drums and trombone respectively. Bill started taking piano lessons at age four and, as an eight-year-old, finished in second place on The Ted Mack Amateur Hour. He later switched to the organ and picked up on the Rhythm & Blues music that white teenagers had begun to discover.

By his teens, Deal played R&B well enough to land professional gigs, including session work with acts like Jimmy Soul (“If You Wanna Be Happy”). In 1959, he met drummer Ammon Tharp. They attended different high schools and each played in a band. They happened to be booked in the same hotel and started talking about R&B. This led to a musical partnership that lasted 40+ years.

By 1960, Deal had put together the first incarnation of the Rhondels. He sang lead and played the organ, while Tharp was on drums. The group also had three trumpet players. They played gigs on the weekends during the school year and as Deal started college. During the summers, however, the Rhondels had no trouble finding full-time work in the Virginia Beach area, where they got to share a stage with R&B legends like Fats Domino and Bo Diddley. The band’s popularity grew through the middle 1960s as young Southern beach-goers filled seaside resorts on the Atlantic seaboard and wanted live dance music.

It was a Maurice Williams cover that gave the Rhondels the first of their three top forty hits. “May I” had done little when Williams wrote and recorded his 1965 original, but it later caught on with the Beach Music scene down south. When audiences began to request it, the Rhondels learned the song and played it live. However, their version was somewhat faster than the Williams original. And the crowds loved it!

The Rhondels financed a recording session and pressed up a few hundred copies of “May I,” which they offered both to local radio stations and record stores. Once their song hit the airwaves, the band was swamped with orders for additional copies. This led to a deal with Jerry Ross, a New York-based producer who was starting his own label, Heritage Records. After Ross put the single out at the end of 1968, it climbed to #39 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The Rhondels did even better with their next two singles, remakes of songs first done by the Tams. “I’ve Been Hurt” reached #35 and was a massive hit in Latin America to boot. The follow-up, “What Kind of Fool (Do You Think I Am),” had gone top ten when the Tams did it in 1963. As with “May I,” the Rhondels sped up the tempo considerably. It became their biggest hit, peaking at #23.

In 1970, Heritage Records closed its doors. The Rhondels signed with Buddah, for whom they made two singles. After 18 months of gigs that took them much farther and wider than they had bargained for, Deal and Tharp decided to cut back the band’s touring. From now on, they would limit themselves to gigs in Virginia and the Carolinas. They also stopped making records. In the ensuing years, the group had an ever-changing line-up with Deal and Tharp as its mainstays.

On March 4, 1979, band member Freddy Owens was shot to death at a Holiday Inn in Richmonnd, Virginia, where the Rhondels had a gig. He had tried to stop Jeremiah Carr, who had just raped Owens’ wife, from fleeing the scene. Carr fired two shots, fatally wounding Owens. Bill Deal never truly got over the incident and disbanded the Rhondels in 1983. He opened a nightclub of his own and even sold real estate for a time, but was never entirely out of the music business. Eventually, he and Tharp started playing together again.

Bill Deal, 59, died on December 10, 2003. The Rhondels, however, continue to this day.

Charted singles:

“May I” (1969) Pop #39
“I’ve Been Hurt” (1969) Pop #35
“What Kind of Fool (Do You Think I Am)” (1969) Pop #23
“Swingin’ Tight” (1969) Pop #85
“Nothing Succeeds Like Success” (1970) Pop #62
“It’s Too Late” (1972) Pop #108