Death Of An Angel - Donald Woods and the Vel-Aires

I've spoken before of my fascination with Splatter Platter records; a pop evolution of the murder ballad that grew in prominence during the 1950s. These 'death discs' focused upon dangerous adolescence: teenagers caught up in a frenzy of rock'n'roll, drugs, hair, and (very often) cars. These songs would lament the death of a young person taken before their time- usually involving some sort of grizzly vehicular death.

The Splatter Platter du jour, and today's Best Song Ever, is 'Death Of An Angel' by Donald Woods and the Vel-Aires. Woods got his start as a doowop singer in Vernon Greene's group the Medallions (chiefly famous for their sexed up automobile hit 'Buick 59'). Woods then absconded with a few of the members of The Medallions to form Donald Woods and the Vel-Aires (sometimes also known as the Bel-Aires). If 'Buick 59' was doowop with a cheeky sleaze, 'Death Of An Angel' is doowop gone goth.

It opens like a beaten and broken 'I Put a Spell on You' before settling into it's jazzy funeral march rhythm. You can hear dust and cobwebs coating the sax lines, spare heartbeat drums pushing along a chorus of gently crooning pall-bearers. Donald Woods voice is the essence of late night smoke and mourning distilled into a soulful performance that never crosses to far into either histrionics or understatement.

As was common with teenage tragedy numbers, the song also contains a fair amount of theatre and drama. The background tears and wailing are both unnerving and funny. However it was this same gallows humor that so frightened audiences at the time of it's release. The song, with it's implicit overtones of death, broken hearts an suicide, was immediately banned from wider airplay. This was compounded by a conspiracy theory blossoming out of the record's B-Side, 'The Man From Utopia,' involving an alien that killed the protagonists girlfriend in the A-Side. The truth of the matter is debatable, but the vinyl was already soaked with too much blood once the rumor started and the record was immediately destined for obscurity.