One of the less-explored byways of rock ‘n’ roll history is the influence of “Latin” or Caribbean rhythms, styles, and instrumentation. I have a section on this in my new book, Rock ‘n’ Roll: A Very Short Introduction, including such relatively familiar touchstones as “La Bamba” (which I will post about at more length one of these days); “Louie Louie,” which took its trademark riff from “El Loco Cha Cha,” by the Cuban bandleader René Touzet; and the use of the Brazilian baião beat on “Stand By Me,” “Spanish Harlem,” and a bunch of hits by the Drifters.

There are plenty of other examples, like the mambo-inflected bassline of Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog,” played on the original by the Puerto Rican bass player Mario Delagarde and mimicked on the Elvis version. But the most explicitly Latin percussion on a rock ‘n’ roll hit is rarely mentioned: the Gladiolas’ “Little Darlin’,” composed by the group’s lead singer, Maurice Williams (who went on to have a huge hit with “Stay” a few years later, with another group, the Zodiacs) and recorded in Nashville in 1956. It’s a classic doo-wop record, and opens with some kind of shaker, then claves, then some kind of conga drum — all kind of makeshift. (I asked my friend Wayne Marshall, who has better ears for this stuff than I have, to identify the shaker, he couldn’t, and then pointed out that the conga wasn’t really a conga, and the claves probably aren’t really claves.) Who knows what instruments were handy in a Nashville studio in 1956? Whatever they were using, they provide creditable Latin percussion and a straight-ahead mambo beat.

I didn’t know any of that when I first heard the song, which is another I’ve known forever. Typically for my age, race, and place, I first heard it done by Sha Na Na, who were my entry to the world of doo-wop, then picked up an oldies set that had what I thought of as the original version, by the Diamonds, and only years later heard the real original. Sha Na Na were also imitating the Diamonds, a white Canadian doo-wop group, and, listening back, I realize my version of the spoken monologue in the middle of the song is still theirs, rather than the Gladiolas’.

To be fair, the Diamond’s treatment of the monologue is sillier, which in this case may be a plus — but I see from Wikipedia that some modern critics think the Diamonds’ version is better overall, and no. Just no. I’ll grant that their pitch may be a bit more solid, but the Gladiolas’ record is clearly superior. To my eternal shame, as a 13-year-old I similarly preferred the Crew-Cuts’ version of “Sh-Boom” to the Chords’ original. (That’s another case of clean-cut white Canadians covering a hit composed and performed by Black teenagers and outselling the original in a racist pop market. I write about all of this in my book.) But I grew up. Maurice Williams and his crew, all the way.

I sang this occasionally for fun when I got together with other folks who knew doo-wop — that used to happen fairly often. I particularly remember a very early morning in Vancouver, BC, when a bunch of us who had drunk our way through the night on Jameson’s Irish Whiskey wandered to the back porch of someone’s third-floor apartment and sang a bunch of this stuff, and at dawn a neighboring couple came out on their porch to sit and listen to us.

Since I don’t have a doo-wop group at the moment, I had to come up with an alternative and did what I always do for this kind of rhythm, which is fall back on what I learned from Jean-Bosco Mwenda and Edouard Masengo in the  Congo and Herbert Misango in Nairobi, reworked in various ways. It’s all pretty absurd, but fun.