Initially posted on: MissBackInTheDayUSA
Rosalie “Rosie” Méndez Hamlin was born in Klamath Falls, Oregon, on July 21, 1945, to a Mexican mom and an Anglo-American father. She spent a part of her childhood between Anchorage, Alaska and California, earlier than her household moved to Nationwide Metropolis, California. She began singing with a band at 13.
She wrote the lyrics for “Angel Child” as a poem for “my very first boyfriend” when she was 14 years previous, nonetheless attending Mission Bay Excessive Faculty in San Diego, California. When she was 15, she and a few buddies rented the one recording studio they may discover inside 100 miles of San Diego situated in San Marcos, California, to document the track. The studio was owned by an airplane mechanic who had taken a part of his hangar to make it.
The ensuing document had a really simplistic sound, and, the truth is, was finally barely broken from extreme enjoying, so the group was unable to discover a document label to distribute it. Lastly, after taking the grasp to a division retailer, they satisfied a supervisor to play it within the listening sales space of the shop’s music division.
The track acquired constructive reactions from teenage listeners, and a scout from Highland Information provided the group a recording contract, below the situation that the corporate take possession of the grasp recording, and that David Ponce be named because the creator of the track, as he was the eldest member of the group.
“Angel Child” made its radio debut in December 1960, earlier than the group had even acquired their contract. When the contract lastly got here, Hamlin discovered that she was ineligible to gather document royalties from the track as a result of she was not listed because the songwriter. This led to the group’s break-up, and though Hamlin secured the copyright to her music in 1961, a long time of battles over royalties adopted.
In 1961, “Angel Child” was additionally launched in Canada on the Zirkon label and in Australia and England on London Information. The British launch barely edited the intro.
